On Touch and Care
The tone of your voice as touch
The touch of these lights
Your movements as touch
The way you walk as touch
The sound of your slippers as touch
Your wandering in the night as touch
Your screaming in the night as touch
Your seeing eyes as touch
Your resting arm on the armchair touch
Your resting yielding body as touch
Your smile as touch
Your way of being as touch
The very presence of someone as touch
All the gestures of care in this place as touch.
In 2019, we were invited by Magic Me to be part of a project linking arts organisations with residential care homes in Essex. For some time, we had been wanting to make a project on touch, and we’d been talking about the significance of touch for older people, many of whom have to deal on a daily basis with loneliness and isolation. So when Magic Me approached us with a ready-made opportunity to develop this idea, we jumped at the chance. After initial meetings and conversations between us, Magic Me and Excel Care - the care providers who were the main partner on the project - we were paired with Sherrell House, a large home in Chigwell. We invited three dance artists - Akshay Sharma, Petra Söör and Kip Johnson - to be Associate Artists on the project, and asked them to develop the theme of touch through their own practice. The project will last for 4 years; and the first year, which we completed just before the COVID-19 lockdown began in the UK, was a period of reflection, learning and creative development.
This post is based on a Zoom conversation between Akshay, Petra and Kip; David Harradine and Sam Butler (Fevered Sleep’s artistic directors); and Louisa Borg-Costanzi Potts (Fevered Sleep’s programme producer, who has been closely involved in the project at Sherrell House). It’s not a straightforward description of the project. Instead, it evokes some of the feelings, encounters and ideas that have surfaced in this first year. The conversation took place on 29th April 2020, during lockdown - a time when touch has become a source of anxiety, care homes have become an epicentre of the Coronavirus crisis in the UK, and intergenerational encounters have been greatly reduced because of social distancing.
Akshay, David, Petra (top row), Sam, Louisa and Kip (bottom row) in conversation
Louisa: Entering into Sherrell House, there’s a feeling of crossing into a different type of reality, where you’re walking into multiple ways of existing in the world and multiple homes all in one home. So there’s a sense of anticipation and the unknown and yet everything is so familiar every time. We do the same each time: we sign in, make a cup of tea, eat biscuits before we walk through. Always the feeling of expectation; living up to an expectation of what we’re there to do, or feeling like you’re having to bring a particular presence in order to be the fullness of yourself in that space. Because you could get lost in all of that, perhaps.
Akshay: Touch is being in connection with. A reciprocity of attention.
Kip: Touch is a way of attending to and being attended to by another person that confirms where you are and where I am. It’s a way of communicating that isn’t through words but through more subtle qualities.
Louisa: Touch is a form of understanding, or communicating with yourself and with others. Expressing a feeling or something that has emerged between people.
Petra: Touch is an exchange that is never one-directional, but not necessarily the same for whomever experiences this exchange. The presence of human touch and exchange is limited where I am right now (in a remote part of northern Sweden). I become hypersensitive to sensations that I perceive as touch in many ways; that I start to think that we’re never not touched. That there's never a void of touch. That this constant exchange that we participate in is a series of relations that shape and shift us and the environment that we live in. And there are relationships of touch and reciprocities, definitely, there. And communication through touch; the possibility for communication.
Kip: When I walk into Sherrell House, there’s a kind of tenderness in the main space with everyone, and for me, a tentativeness as well, as though I am absorbing a lot of different states of people, of how they are, and that can feel like a lot to absorb. But I think there’s an overarching thing of just wanting to be there with an intention of care and attentiveness. And nervousness as well. I can’t deny that.
This project is tenderness, joy, felt-ness, presences, spaces, meetings, here-ness, caring, responsibility, sharing, legacy, emotional, sensitivity, transformation.
Petra: I’m in a big room. The room is full of people and it’s a little bit blurry but the people in the room are sitting down and I don’t really know if I see or if I feel but what is most present is their eyes, and their ways of sitting, and whether their eyes are open or closed or moving or seeing me as I’m entering this room . And I think there’s a lot of things in the room but there’s this sense of open space and a kind of a very delicate, very intimate presence from all these people in the room but at the same time there’s something very charged, and strong.
Akshay: I don’t know what’s going to happen when I go there; I don’t know what’s going to happen but I think that’s the case with everything, with every day. Something about the non-knowing of it and I think that’s really important. What wonders might come out of that, whether it’s in different interactions, different meetings and what surprises there might be. And at the same time there’s this huge difference between what Sherrell House is and the outside and there's this desire to bridge that and connect that.
Kip: I remember a corridor. It’s a corridor and the floor’s red, like a worn red. And there's all kinds of hand rails running along the corridor and there's two women, and I think one of them’s in slippers and they’re walking past me on my left and they’re walking quite close to each other, almost touching but not. And I’m looking through a doorway into a room and the light is shining sideways on someone’s face who’s in bed and I can’t quite see their eyes and I don't know if they're asleep or whether they’re watching telly. And I’m looking through into that room and I can see the person whose face is turned away and I can see photos on a wall, framed photos, of other people.
Petra: When I go in there, it feels like a kind of threshold space of coming from the open sky of the hill, the brow of the hill where Sherrell House lies, and then entering this other space with a lot of other qualities, and there's been a recurring sense of anticipation, of going into the unknowing of the day and just knowing that there’ll be those really touching meetings. Also, I have this feeling that’s present every time of coming together - that I don’t go alone there, but we go together, of companionship in that arriving.
Louisa: I think it was Maureen in her blue sweater, who took my hand, very tightly - she gripped me, and led me around the top floor telling me about her life as if she was living it right now, as if we were best friends aged 30, together, and every moment of the journey, every moment on the floor where we are, when we passed a bench, explaining that her father had built that bench, and her seeing a place, a space in time, and transporting me, I suppose, to that reality, that moment in time, telling me a story, telling me her lived moment right there, walking down her street, questioning why everybody had left their doors open, that surely they’d be burgled, that they were stupid, for being so lax with security. I was touched by being pulled into an alternative reality that was clearly existing at the same time as my lived reality, and baffled and surprised by the creativity and potential of that existence, in those moments with Maureen, and we walked around and around for an hour, I believe. I was very touched to be allowed into that reality, that was not my own. To have experienced that with her.
This project is weight, moving, complex, privileged, perplexing, surprising, soft focus, peripheral focus, time, attending, being-with, love.
Akshay: We are outside and some of the residents - very few - are out in the garden. I can see some are talking to each other; little moments of discussions. They are standing next to some bushes; small moments of touch.
Petra: There are two armchairs and there's a woman sitting, as though she’s been sitting there some time in her night shirt. And this really luminous thing that happens sometimes when Erol (one of the care home staff) meets people or when people see him that they kind of light up and “hello I’ve been waiting for you, how nice to see you” and there's this moment of exchange that’s really tender. And he introduces us, and I think they hold hands, or he rests his hands on hers, and she says something like, “Oh are you leaving already, or are you coming back”. And he says something in reply, that we’re leaving, and this little moment happens outside her bedroom and we drift on, but this super tender moment with this person sitting there outside her bedroom, sitting there before going to bed, in her nightshirt, there’s something really just delicate and also super immense about that. That’s where she lives.
Akshay: I’ve forgotten her name. I was really touched by her desire to join in, in whatever was going around, and especially her desire to dance and move and enjoy the music even if she had arthritis and she would do that for 5 seconds and she would sit down and then come back again and she would say, “It hurts my knees” and then she would sit down, and then she would do it anyway, and then she would sit down. Petra, it’s our friend, I’ve forgotten her name (Petra: Nina?) Nina, yes!
Kip: There's something about the staff there and their innate, implicit care and supporting of other people. It’s just there and it’s just a very natural way for a lot of them; just to care. And I was touched by being around people that dedicate their jobs and their life to that; that was really… that touched me. And something about how they opened up when we could get them for small amounts of time. You just got little glimpses into this really beautiful essence that they had that was all derived from care.
Touch is getting someone a slice of cake at a party
Touch is a beginning
Touch is meeting someone’s eyes
Touch is hearing someone scream “I want to go home”
Touch is holding someone’s hand as you walk around the floor
Touch is helping someone in the morning
Touch is the building
Touch is the bright lights
Touch is the plastic sticky cushions on the chairs
Touch is everyone sitting in a circle
Touch is the words the carers use to calm people down when they feel confused
Touch is drinking the warmth of a cup of tea
Touch is the sound of daytime telly
Touch is the hand of a daughter on the shoulder of her mother
Touch is somebody cutting your hair; brushing your hair
Touch is the constant question, “what’s your name? And why are you here?”
Touch is the tapping of hands on table
Touch is having friends
Touch is placing a hand on my chest to soften it
Touch is soft and caring, but also sometimes hard and medicalised
Touch is someone painting your nails, and touch is someone cutting your nails
Touch is sometimes the only language that people have
Touch is someone vigorously shaking your arms during an exercise
Touch is taking a chip from someone’s plate
Touch is someone telling you a story that is actually a reality that they are in currently, which is so different to your own
Touch is shoes coming off and staying off
Touch is not knowing where to look
Touch is staring at the outside of the building and thinking, “I can’t go back in there”, and then going back in
Touch is space full of different kinds of sounds and noises
Touch is the strong colours on the walls
Touch is the kisses that Erol always gives, to anyone who visits
Touch is the side of an oak tree on the second floor, through the window
Touch is either open doors or closed doors, with a dial that you can’t open
Touch is sometimes an overwhelming smell as you move through the corridors
Touch is one of the carers calling one of the residents handsome
Touch is many, many, many different rooms, with people inside them
Touch is different paces of movement down the corridors
Touch is personal memories and histories on the walls in the room
Touch is the many qualities of people in just their own ways of being.