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Notes
1 I will refer to ‘audience members’ and ‘spectators’ as ‘attendants’. This latter term both removes an emphasis on one sense and accurately describes the manner in which those not performing nonetheless actively participate in making the performance; we attend to one another's needs, for example (and most performers ‘need’ a public to witness their work at one moment or another). This second sense of the word touches on the French word for ‘attend’ – assister – a word that, back in English, nicely indicates the help offered by attendants. Although my reasons do not necessarily match his own, Iwas inspired to use this term after Di Benedetto (Citation2007: 126).
2 In the second part of Secret Service, attendants were ‘asked to take off as much clothing as they like’ before allowing themselves to be chained to a scaffold from which position they were subjected to physical prompts ranging from breath blown onto skin to light whipping (Boenisch Citation2003: 39). Boenisch indicates that, having left only his underwear on, this too was removed before the piece ended.
3 The dancers chosen included a college student, professional dancers and non-dance performers, all from the Chicago area.
4 I wonder, too, how the attendants who took my glasses or kept falling into my arms felt the question of control.
5 In addition, no sense exists on its own: ‘[T]here is encroachment, infringement’ between them (Merleau-Ponty Citation1968: 134).
6 For Lévinas, the formative experience of being arrived through a face-to-face encounter with another. In this model, the other's face expresses all that cannot be known and has not been experienced by the self, introducing an irreducible alterity. Grappling with this encounter with an incomprehensible Other and the nature of our obligations to it formed the ongoing theme for much of Lévinas's work. For the beginning of this trajectory see Lévinas (Citation1998: 187–220).
7 Abrams uses ‘intimacy’ in the traditional sense of exclusive proximity to a core subject.
8 Such a determination remains, for Lévinas, a function of ‘justice’, the post-social grasp of the Other's relation to others (Lévinas Citation1985: 99).
9 Abrams also writes about touch as characterized by Lévinas in his treatment of the ‘caress’, a form of contact that opens a promise without detail: ‘the anticipation of the pure future [avenir], without content’ (Lévinas quoted in Abrams Citation2003: 14). No matter how temptingly it resembles MerleauPonty's understanding of touch, Lévinas's caress remains both outside history and inside the obligation instilled in our encounter with the Other (Lévinas Citation1987: 118–19). Although we have different understandings of where and how the caress operates, my thoughts here are indebted to Kelly Oliver's work; see Oliver (Citation2001: 205–6).