Touch (Sk)Interrupted?

Abstract

This article focuses on Dante or Die Theatre's socially distanced performance installation Skin Hunger (2021), an intimate one-on-one experience which explores the fundamental role that touch plays in our lives. The desire for contact is enduring in the social and sensorial imagination, particularly now during what Richard Kearney has termed the ‘pandemic eclipse of the tactile’. Elsewhere I have asked whether our tactile starvation will manifest in an increase of productions that satiate our need for touch? Or whether our anxieties over contact will predominate and result in an increased ‘sanitization’ of productions, a reduction in (sk)interactivity, and the proliferation of narratives which draw on our phobic responses? With this line of questioning in mind, this article will document my experience of Skin Hunger, as a ‘socially distanced spectator’, within this new framework of the socially distanced performance installation. It will consider the (skin)aesthetics used – the performers, for example, are swathed in plastic – to enable safe, intimate encounters between performers and the audience. It will also focus on the ways in which the absence of touch might increase the power of ‘the promise of touch [as] an explicit dramaturgical tool’ (Shearing 2015: 72). With reference to the health and safety documentation prepared by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, in consultation with representatives of the performing arts sector, this article will ultimately suggest how 'statecraft,' or the visible COVID safety measures in place, might become a form of 'stagecraft' in relation to the development of new (skin)aesthetics and, more broadly, the enhancement of touch – or, rather, the absence and anticipation of touch – as a dramaturgical tool.

REFLECTIONS FROM A SOCIALLY DISTANCED SPECTATOR

From the original production of Skin Hunger by Dante or Die at Stone Nest, London, June 2021. Image © Justin Jones

As I enter the former chapel to see Dante or Die’s socially distanced performance installation Skin Hunger, I’m directed to the hand sanitizer and handed shoulder-length plastic gloves to put on. I’m already wearing a mask. It’s mid- June 2021 and it’s my first time back watching a live performance since March 2020. I wait in the entrance with two others, but we’re all at least two feet apart. I’m positioned at the start of the route marked with coloured tape—I’m blue—that I’ll be following through the performance space.

There are videos playing on screens around us in which people reflect on the impact of the loss of touch during the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s an actor on screen talking about the role of touch in the Alexander technique; I make a note to look into this. Someone else talks about feelings of isolation. As the performance begins, we’re told to follow our marked tape routes until we reach the first square, marked in tape, in our colour. As I enter the performance space it’s quite dark—a disused church—and it’s draped in transparent plastic sheeting that hangs from the ceiling. The plastic sheets create these small performance cells, or pods, and lighting illuminates them and reflects off the material. There are three of these pods and there’s an actor standing inside each one. As I enter the space, the actors are cleaning. One actor squirted some anti-bacterial spray and then drew a little smiley face on the plastic before (as part of?) the performance. The first pod that I came to, the monologue (Tim Crouch’s The Sessions) seemed to be about a failed relationship. He asks for forgiveness and promises to change. The actor (Terry O'Donovan) reaches out (see fig. p. 7) and asks for consent to hold hands. He asks, 'Is this OK?' He invites me to hug him through the plastic, wrapping my plastic arms around a stranger, in a plastic-y embrace. As we move apart the actor mirrors my gestures.

In the second performance (Sonia Hughes's Touch t he Flesh), the performer (Oseloka Obi) plays his own character and the role of his father who has dementia. It tells the story of their relationship, misrecognition and remembering. I have to hand back a wet slipper-I'm told it's soaked with the father's urine-through the plastic. We fist bump through the sheet, and we trace contact-finger to finger-across it. The story includes the performer directing the audience member to re-create the father's death scene. This involves me playing the role of the child as the father is dying. While holding hands through the plastic, I am invited to repeat, 'You can go now' and 'I love you.'

In the third monologue (Ann Akinjirin's Our Hands), the story focuses on the character's (Rachel-Leah Hosker) self-consciousness about her hands. They weren't soft enough. I am cast in the role of her ex-partner. She speaks about the way our hands fit and how she never felt that they weren't soft enough in this, in our, relationship. She knew the relationship was over when she could feel her own hands in mine. The monologue ends with her holding out her hands asking whether she would ever feel touch again. I want to reach out and tell her that she would. But I don't. I'm not sure how much I'm supposed to say. It's a hot day. And I wonder whether the actors can feel the heat of my hands, as our hands entwine, my fingers sticking inside the moist plastic.

SKIN HUNGER

The above are my reflections on my experience as, what I have termed, the 'socially distanced spectator' a t Dante or Die's Skin Hunger. Dante or Die is an award winning independent thea tre company who make site-specific works. Daphna Attias and Terry O'Donovan are the co-artistic directors of the company and Sophie Ignatieff is the producer. Skin Hunger is a n intimate one -to-one experience that explores the fundamental role that touch plays in our lives. It was performed at Stone Ne st, which is an arts organization and performance venue (a former Welsh chapel) located in London's West End. Skin Hunger presents a series of three monologues: Ann Akinjirin's Our Hands, Tim Crouch's The Sessions (which was actually intended to be a dialogue between an actor and an audience member meeting for the first time following the pandemic) and Sonia Hughes's Touch the Flesh. Each monologue is performed simultaneously, as a one-to-one performance experience, the audience member then follows their tape around to the next work. As co -artistic director of Dante or Die, and as the director of Skin Hunger, Attias explains in the introduction to the text, which includes the monologues, how the work was inspired by the 'hug tunnels' used in Brazilian care homes during the pandemic. These plastic tunnels, which inform the design of the socially distanced performance installation, enabled family members to hug their loved ones safely. Attias explains that they asked the writers 'to explore how touch could be part of the story unfolding' (Dante or Die 2021: 10); Attias and O'Donovan were particularly interested in the pandemic phenomenon of 'skin hunger' (ibid.).

Indeed, the desire for touch, or 'skin hunger', is enduring in the general public's social and sensorial imagination - particularly during what Richard Kearney has termed the 'pandemic eclipse of the tactile' (2021: 3). The idea of a tactile eclipse refers to the restrictions on touch and proximity during the COVID -19 pandemic and periods of social distancing and lockdown. It also spoke to an a ttendant climate ofloneliness, and to questions of when we would be able to touch again, which provide the affective backdrop to Skin Hunger. Elsewhere, I have asked whether experiences of tactile starvation will manifest in an increase of future productions that satiate our need for touch, or whether anxieties over contact and contagion will predominate a nd result in an increased sanitization of produc tions, a reduc tion in (sk) interactivity, and the proliferation of narratives that draw on our phobic responses (Verla nder 2021). Works such as Fevered Sleep's dance film 8 Tender Solitudes (2021), for example, have explored the loss oftouch during the pandemic. On their website, Fevered Sleep describe the project and ask: 'When we've lived like this for so long, can touch ever be the same?' (Fevered Sleep 2022). With these lines of questioning in mind, this article documents my reflections on Dante or Die's Skin Hunger and the implications it has for our experiences of social touch.

The socially distanced performance installation is a new type of performance framework and one that models both increased 'sanitization' measures, in response to COVID legislation, as well as offering COVID-safe opportunities for contact, or to remedy the experience of 'skin hunger', which informs the work's title. It's not only a model of pandemic performance- or, rather, a performance that just so happens to take place during the pandemic- it also integrates, as part of its aesthetic design, pandemic safety measures in order to limit audience members' exposure to contagion. The audience member may touch, and be touched, but it's always within a framework of containment informed by the wider COVID -19 context. It's interesting, too, that the performance has the potential to meet a possible, social, need for touch- in a climate of touch withdrawal- and I put further pressure on the significance of this towards the end of the article. Specifically, I'll think through the implications of Skin Hunger as an invitation to engage in an act- touch- that had, for so long, been associated with risk and with a lack of care for wider society.

But what is 'skin hunger'? In 'Touch in times of COVID -19: Touch hunger hurts', Joanne Durkin et al. (2020) focus on the phenomenon of 'skin hunger', 'touch hunger', or 'touch starvation' in a health care context specifically, and in a wider social context more generally. They explain that the phenomenon results from experiences of social touch deprivation and explore the implications of social distancing measures during COVID -19 (2020: e4-e 5). Durkin et al. emphasize that '[t]ouch hunger impac ts all facets of our health and has been associated with increases in stress, anxiety and depression (Pierce, 2020)' (2020: e4). Reflecting on the impact of the withdrawal of tou c h on wider society, they observe that touch hunger 'can feel very painful,' and advocate that 'we may also have to recognize the pain and suffering caused by the absence of touch in our own lives and the lives of our friends, family members, colleagues and patients' (2020: e4). While refraining from touch -based contact became a necessary expression of care for others, it also became an expression that exacerbated other forms of pain in our wider social fabric -a fact that's important to recognize and respond to.

Just as Kearney observes that 'as COVID-19 enjoined separation and isolation, everyone suddenly discovered how much tangible space we actually shared with each other every day' (2021: 134), neuroscientist Francis McGlone describes, in the foreword to Dante or Die's Skin Hunger, how the absence of touch draws attention to its significance-particularly for our well-being (cited in Dante or Die 2021: 5). Touch hunger, as we have seen, is associated with experiences of stress, anxiety and depression. McGlone writes of the two touch systems in our skin and how these relate to our stress levels. He explains that there is:

[a] fast one that relies on sensory nerves that send signals to the brain in tens of milliseconds, and a recently discovered slow touch system of nerves that send signals to the brain over seconds. The fast one 'senses,' the slow one 'feels' and it is this 'feeling' one that is responsible for this more subtle property of touch. The slow touch nerves respond optimally to a gentle caress or a hug and when stimulated, release oxytocin and endorphins in the brain and lower heart rate and stress levels. These nerves, called c-tactile afferents (CTs) … have led to the 'skin-as-a-social-organ' hypothesis. (McGlone in Dante or Die 2021: 5)

The production of Skin Hunger, and each of the one-to-one performances, has the potential to tap into this slow touch system. If someone is experiencing skin hunger, then the desire for contact- even if it's plastic-mediated-might be somewhat satiated through the invitation to take part in touch-based interactions, such as holding hands or hugging, which, in turn, may trigger the slow touch nerves to release oxytocin and endorphins. It's a common response to stressful situations to want a hug, or some kind of tactile reassurance that things will be ok. When this kind of contact is restricted, therefore, the desire for touch-based interactions-or skin hunger­ may develop because we know that there are well-being benefits in that hug that we just can't have.

The skin is the body's largest organ, but the pandemic has changed how we experience it as a social organ- this function was, effectively, interrupted. Of course, Durkin et al. do not question the necessity, or effectiveness, of social distancing measures in controlling contagion but rather suggest how- in a proverbial catch-22 - '[s]uch measures, while intended to keep people safe, have concerning short- and longer­ term implications on the health of already isolated individuals' (2020: e4). They draw attention to 'the important role touch plays in … healing' patients and, more generally, they point out that touch functions as a 'powerful method used to relieve the suffering of others' (ibid.). If social touch stimulates CTs and such stimulation can release oxytocin and endorphins, then it's clear how social touch deprivation may have a negative impact on our overall well-being. This is a comment not only on our well-being as individuals but also, in light of Durkin's call to acknowledge others' pain, on the well-being of our social fabric, which is at stake when skin hunger is experienced. Skin Hunger offers opportunities within a performance context for the stimulation of c-tactile afferents that may go some way to satiating a desire for contact, but in a sanitized form.

(SKIN)AESTHETIC MATERIALS

The work's design is by Khadija Raza with additional design by Jemima Robinson. And, as I mentioned earlier, it's inspired by the plastic hug tunnels in Brazilian care homes. I'm interested in the way in which the plastic functions as a '(skin)aesthetic', or a material that in some way stimulates or emulates the skin, or tactile sense, to influence intersubjective relations in the performance environment (and beyond) (Verlander 2021). And, second, I'm interested in the way in which the plastic (skin)aesthetic lends itself to a wider socio-material analysis in this produc tion. In other words, how does plastic intervene in our experiences of the skin as social organ? Deborah Lupton et al.'s The Face Mask in COVID Times, for example, offers a comparable sociomaterial analyses of the face mask:

Face masks have become central sociomaterial objects in the post-COVID world. Viewed from one perspective, they are nothing more than pieces of flimsy plastic or cloth fabric. From other perspectives, they bear intense symbolic weight and potentially threaten the health of the planet as well as acting as our only barrier between air-borne novel coronavirus infection.(Lupton eta/. 2021: 84)

If face masks 'emerge as part of assemblages of care constituted through networks of humans, technologies and political and affective forces and non-human others' (Lupton et al. 2021: 82), then the plastics in Skin Hunger similarly gesture towards, and are part of, such assemblages. Reflecting on the design vision, for example, Attias writes:

I could instantly picture the chapel in Stone Nest wrapped in plastic. Plastic-a material that ha[s] quietly become such an integral part of our lives by covering our faces and hands, creating a barrier between us and the world, becoming a protective layer for so many parts of our everyday. (Dante or Die 2021: 10)

In this production, the plastic functions as part of an 'assemblage of care', which draws in the network of audience members, performers, creatives and directors involved in the production of Skin Hunger. It also works to signal an awareness of the virus, demonstrated by cleaning practices, and the wider social networks that intersect the performance space in the context of a global pandemic. These assemblages of care all operate within the framework of government guidelines and legislations pertaining to the staging of performance and social interactions.

Similarly, and as another example of personal protective equipment (PPE) required in this production, I suggest that we might understand the mask as a pandemic (skin)aesthetic. The mask was required as part of public health efforts - a piece of rna terial that sits on the skin, interacts with the skin and goes some way to mediating our relationships with others-as well as being part of the (skin)aesthetic experience of this production that uses the public health measures of social distancing and PPE as part of its framework. I suggest this as Lupton et al. not only consider the way the face mask emerges as part of a global assemblage but also the interaction between the material of the mask and the skin. They draw attention, for example, to the 'dramatic images of frontline workers with sore and damaged skin' that circulated in the early days of the pandemic; the '[s]kin protection guidelines for using PPE' issued by the American Academy of Dermatology association (2020) (Lupton et al. 2021: 74); and 'maskne', or the acne caused by mask wearing (40). Maskne is itself an expression of assemblage because it 'emerges as the tangible expression of human and more-than- human entanglements, of the generative intra-activity between fabric, flesh, and air' and bacteria (ibid.). While dermatologists and skin theorists¹ across various disciplines have long acknowledged our capacity to think through the skin and for our skin to register our thoughts, mask wearing in the pandemic has brought this to the forefront of public consciousness through the embodied reality of maskne. The skin, as site, responds to the pandemic (skin)aesthetic of the mask.

Lupton et al. also consider the ways in which the mask wearer becomes aware of their breath, in condensed form, as moisture on the skin, and the so-called 'yuck' factor, which also includes an awareness of the smell of the breath within the mask. In the same way that 'placing a mask on our face is deeply corporeal, sensory, and affective [and] disrupts our usual ways of being in the world and reconfigures our relations with others' (Lupton et al. 2021: 49), the plastic gloves and plastic sheeting (alongside the mandatory masks) in Skin Hunger are part of the audience members' cutaneous experience of the work and the intersubjective processes it gestures towards. The PPE functions not only to protect audience members and performers but also to mediate the touch-based experience and, ultimately, reconfigure our relations with others through plasticky interventions that register at skin­ level.

The face mask highlights the porosity of bodies, then, as well as the intra -actions between bodies in relation to the potential transmission of COVID; the material conditions of Skin Hunger make the leakiness of bodies part of the embodied experience of the work. In other words, it's got the 'yuck' fa c tor. Moisture gathers in the gloves, between skin and plastic, and the skin senses of touch and temperature are activated via moments of plastic-mediated contact. As well as, of course, the potential for affective contact to be made in moments of touch-or the slow system 'feeling' triggered by the c -tactile afferents as the stories unfold. Attias's reflections are pertinent here: 'In such proximity to the audience,' she says, 'every breath matters, even the temperature of your hands could change the story' (Dante or Die 2021: 11).

BETWEEN CONTAGION AND CONTAINMENT

The warmth of your hands inside plastic gloves is not only part of the (potentially) sweaty, atmospheric, conditions of the work but, as Attias notes, the temperature has the potential to change the affective dimensions of the story. While I have briefly considered the sociomaterial significance of the plastic in Skin Hunger as a (skin)aesthetic, here I move towards the way in which certain rna terials and infrastructure within the work merge the atmospheric and affective experience with political concerns and controls.

More specifically, I suggest how selected sections from the government guidance for those working in the performing arts are visible in the stagecraft of Skin Hunger. The terms 'statecraft' and 'stagecraft' have been borrowed from Fintan Walsh's edited collection Theatres of Contagion (2 020: 16), which focuses on the interplay between contagion and containment in the theatre. But what are 'statecraft' and 'stagecraft'?

In her chapter, 'Nomadic contagion and the performance of infrastructure in Dale Farm's post-eviction scene', Lynne McCarthy looks at the use ofbunding, a form of wall-like infrastructure designed to contain chemical and toxic waste, at the Dale Farm site. Dale Farm was an Irish Traveller settlement in Essex that was dismantled by local authorities in 2011 because it was unauthorized by them (2020: 136). McCarthy reads bunding as a form, and enactment, of environmental racism against the Traveller community. McCarthy explains how, on the Dale Farm site, local authorities 'mould[ed] the disturbed soil of the eviction into 6 -foot banks [that] enclose[ed] the boundaries of family [housing] plots' (ibid.). The use ofbunding effectively designates the Traveller community as a form of 'contagion', as well as keeping the remaining residents in close proximity to literal contaminants-including open sewage and asbestos that accumulated in storm water (ibid.). As Walsh describes in the introduction, 'bunding is a form of statecraft-which has clear resonances with stagecraft' (16).

The adaptation of'statecraft' into 'stagecraft', and the attendant biopolitics involved in the government's guidelines for the precise choreography of audience movement through the pandemic theatre is a wider research focus of mine; however, we can see how the ideas of 'statecraft' as 'stagecraft' operate at a more localized level by using Skin Hunger as a case study. The interplay between contagion and containment is enacted at the level of de sign, form and practice throughout the work. Walsh writes 'to think about theatre and contagion … is always to consider their enmeshment in the realities and fantasies of touch' (202 0: 6) and Skin Hunger taps into both the reality of contagion, and the potential threat of touch and proximity, as well as the fantasy of realizing such contact. Skin Hunger-as a socially distanced performance installation-embodies a theatre of contagion that integrates control and containment practices, or 'statecraft' as part of its 'stagecraft'.

The analysis, to which I now turn, draws on the government guidelines for the performing arts during COVID. First, I focus on section 4.8 'Set design and construction' of the 'Working Safely During Coronavirus (COVID -19): Performing Arts' document from the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy and Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport. The objective of 4.8 is: 'To reduce transmission and maintain social distanc ing where possible whilst designing and construc ting the set' (Department fo r Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy and Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport 2 02 0). Skin Hunger, as we know, is a soc ially distanced performance installation and the objective of 4.8 is integral to the design concept-the maintenance of social distancing, for example, between the three audience members who attend each performance. In this installation 'statecraft' literally become s 'stagecraft' within the COVID-19 context. We see how guidelines such as 5.6 'Entrances, exits and managing people flow' (Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy and Department for Digital, Culture , Media & Sport 2020) informs Khadija Raza's technical drawings of the installation and audience routes through the space (see Dante or Die 2021: 24-5), as part of the performance de sign. A de sign that not only takes COVID-19 safety, PPE and social-distancing practices as inspiration for its aesthetic but works to operationalize statecraft as part of this performance of health and safety that, literally, also served to protect against transmission or contraction of the COVID virus. To achieve the objective 'to maintain social distancing wherever possible when people move around the site, premise s or venue during performances', section 5.6 outlines the following:

Steps that will usually be needed:

1. Adapting performance scheduling to support social distancing and good hygiene. For example, scheduling sufficient time between performances to reduce the possibility of different audiences coming into close proximity and to allow time for cleaning … 

7. Using queue management and marking out one-way flow systems through the site, premises or venue to reduce contact points … 

8. Helping visitors maintain social distancing by placing clearly visible markers along the ground, floor or walls, advising on appropriate spacing.

(Department f or Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy and Department f or Digital, Culture, Media & Sport 2020)

Skin Hunger can be understood to integrate such measures as part of the installation-the one-to-one performances, the management of the flow of people via taped routes and the one-way systems. Other 'statecraft' measures that can be understood as informing the 'stagecraft' include 6.5 'Cleaning auditoria ', which states its objective a s: 'To minimize the risk of transmission in auditoria ' and outlines the following:

Steps that will usually be needed:

1. Cleaning auditoria frequently, typically between each performance, with particular attention paid to surfaces that hands of audience and staff are likely to come into contact with such as doors, seat arms and handrails.

2. Scheduling performance to allow sufficient time to undertake necessary cleaning before the next audience arrives.

(Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy and Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport 2020)

These measures are intended to be carried out between performances; however, Skin Hunger integrates them as part of the performance and the management of audience flow. In what I suggest is a form of pandemic theatre, or the literal performance of public health and safety, the actions feel performative, given the context, but they are also practical. The cleaning activities address the steps outlined in 6.5 because the performers must ‘undertake [the] necessary cleaning before the next audience arrives’ during the work itself because the format necessitates the cleaning process between the delivery of each monologue. Audience members experience pauses as they move between each one-to-one performance; they stand in the marked space and watch the performers blast the inside of the plastic with antibacterial spray. Guidelines suggest ‘particular attention [be] paid to surfaces that hands of audience and staff are likely to come into contact with’ and the plastic sheeting is a (skin)aesthetic membrane, through which the gloved hands of all audience members and performers will come into contact.

While I’ve suggested that the objective of 4.8 ‘to reduce transmission and maintain social distancing where possible whilst designing and constructing the set’ is integral to the design concept, in terms of the way in which audience flow is managed, the design idea also works to make possible the opposite. While guidelines under 5.6 ‘Entrances, exits and managing people flow’ includes step 13: ‘Limiting the potential for guest contact with performers’ (Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy and Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport 2020), Skin Hunger actively creates the potential for contact between audience members and performers (if not between audience members themselves). In other words, while the reduction of transmission is always prioritized, the performance installation itself enables the COVID-safe collapse of social distancing by facilitating a contact, of sorts, between each performer and audience member.

This brings me back to my earlier reflection that it’s interesting that it’s a performance that opens up the possibilities for contact. And, more specifically, it opens up possibilities for contact that might meet a very real social, or well-being, need. Even if the majority of audience members were not experiencing skin hunger, Skin Hunger as a socially distanced performance installation still draws them into touch-based interactions that straddle COVID-safety legislation and the prevailing social and cultural attitudes towards touch during the pandemic. We knew, for example, that in participating in this work we must still follow COVID guidelines to protect ourselves, to protect the performers and to protect those beyond the performance space against the very literal threat of contagion. As I said, it’s interesting that it’s a performance that functions as a means to provide audience members with a safe space to experiment with consensual touch and making physical contact with strangers again. And, indeed, perhaps it is more than this and the performance actually creates a space to take what might be perceived as risks at the intersections between containment and contagion. To loop back to Walsh’s idea that ‘to think about theatre and contagion … is always to consider their enmeshment in the realities and fantasies of touch’ (2020: 6), Skin Hunger provides a performative opportunity to explore such fantasies, and possibilities, while being acutely aware of their enmeshment in the realities of touch—which are, here, risk and contagion.

In imagining the future of touch—it’s also worth noting that each of the monologues, in some way, asks the audience member to extend a form of touch-based reassurance towards the performer. One character’s monologue, for example, focusses on the death of their father, and another monologue traces the breakdown of a romantic relationship. The touch-based interactions between audience member and performer can, therefore, be understood as an acknowledgement of – and response to – the pain of others. As Durkin et al. stress, touch is one of the most powerful tools we have for alleviating others’ pain and experiences of suffering (2020: e4), and Skin Hunger invites us to engage, performatively, with this.

The brief given to the writers was to think about how touch might become a part of the story unfolding; however, I argue that this question also re-emerges, unspoken, as a provocation to thought for audience members. How will touch unfold as part of this, my, experience of the work? But also: How will touch unfold beyond this performance space? The touch-based interactions that we engage in in Skin Hunger are expressions of (re)connection for the performers in response to their expressions of pain. Their outstretched hands breaching the plastic sheeting. We know that, during the pandemic, side-stepping strangers and avoiding touch-based contact with those outside of your household was a tangible expression of care for wider society. Skin Hunger was staged within this climate of touch withdrawal—so, as (most) audience members peeled off their sweaty, plastic, gloves at the end of the work and put them into a box to be disposed of, questions as to how touch might unfold with others beyond this plastic-mediated performance would, no doubt, emerge.

CONCLUSION: TOUCH (SK)INTERRUPTED?

As reviewer Kate Wyver reflects,

Skin Hunger prods the uneasiness of our current relationship with touch. Audience members have the option to say no to any offer of touch and no contact is skin-to-skin with everything being offset by at least one layer of plastic. (Wyver 2021)

This reinforces my observation that the work simultaneously models both the increased sanitization of performance and the potential for the satiation of our desire for touch. Indeed, there has been a socially and legislatively prevalent ‘uneasiness’ surrounding touch and proximity and Skin Hunger does ‘prod’ at this feeling as well as the ‘slow’ CT afferents responsible for feeling if audience members accept the touch offered. As Brendan MacDonald (2021) writes in his review for Exeunt Magazine, ‘Skin Hunger is an obvious product of the lockdown and interrogates the intricacy and importance of human touch.’ Pre- COVID pandemic, David Shearing has noted that Punchdrunk’s work is characterized by ‘the one desire that looms over the whole Punchdrunk experience[, which] is the craving, possibility and anticipation of touch’ (2015: 83). He suggests that the ‘promise of touch [functions] as an explicit dramaturgical tool’ (72). And I suggest that the anticipation and promise of touch functions similarly in Skin Hunger with its large clear plastic sheets with arm-shaped slots designed to safely allow for, at the very least, ersatz intimacy: an almost touch, a sheathed hug. (MacDonald 2021)

I want to focus on MacDonald’s description of an almost touch, here, and to suggest that it too functions as an explicit dramaturgical tool and, indeed, a dramaturgical product of the lockdown. If you choose to hug the performer, or to take their hands in your own, your touch is mediated by plastic and so it must always be an almost touch because there is no skin-to-skin contact. As Durkin et al. suggest, ‘while gloves provide a (necessary) physical barrier … for safety, gloved touch is not the same as skin-to-skin touch’ (2020: e4). This almost touch anticipates, however, the future and a moment when skin-toskin contact—skinteractions between performers and audience members—will return. Skin Hunger can, therefore, be understood as a model of literal pandemic performance. If, in the future, we look to stage pandemics, to tap into the fears of contagion, or the uneasiness surrounding proximity and contact that we experienced, would Dante or Die’s performance framework of the socially distanced performance installation lend itself to this and remembering(s) of pandemic performance? Would this be the mode of contact—almost contact—that is prodded and played with?

Mary Pollard suggests that the masks and gloves in Skin Hunger function as ‘oversized symbols of Covid restrictions that epitomize the social distancing we have endured’ (2021). While, certainly, the oversized gloves may come to symbolize this pandemic experience, it is worth minding that at the time the work was performed the gloves and the social-distancing routes were literalizing and performing the required health and safety measures. I kept my gloves though and one day – as Pollard suggests – they will just be oversized symbols of COVID restrictions and pandemic performance.

To conclude, then, Skin Hunger marked my return to live performance as a spectator, but the periods of UK lockdown were bookended for me by attending works that required me to wear PPE. In mid-March 2020, I attended Anatomy Lab Live’s Contagion: Dinner and Dissection event. It was an event that required the use of PPE because it involved the dissection of animal organs (which, here, represented human organs), and the potential for contact with pathogens. Narratively, Contagion positioned us as survivors of a global, bacterial pandemic. After nine years of quarantine, we were told that we were working at the U.K. Home Office’s Contagion Protection Facility. We were told that we were conducting experimental research on a host carrier’s organs (the animal organs) to help identify the bacterial pathogen so that basic human activity might resume. Thematically and narratively, of course, this participatory event felt uncomfortably close to the COVID-19 context that was escalating rapidly around us. We were acutely aware that human activity was shutting down, as quarantine measures were introduced, in response to the virus. Around two weeks later, the UK entered its first period of lockdown. While the plastic gloves, apron and masks in Contagion mediated our contact with animal matter, I argue that in Skin Hunger the PPE—as a form of pandemic (skin) aesthetic—harnesses the power of an almost touch as a dramaturgical tool that plays at the interstices between contagion and containment, between performance and public health. In so doing, Skin Hunger performs the conversion of ‘statecraft’ to ‘stagecraft’ and draws the attendant biopolitics in the government’s guidelines into sharp relief while also creating opportunities for affective experiences through moments of slow touch that satiate skin hunger during the ‘pandemic eclipse of the tactile’.

Notes

1 See, for example, chapter 7 'Psychological skin: How the mind and skin shape each other' in Monty Lyman's The Remarkable Life of the Skin (2009), which reflects on the relationship between the skin and the brain or Sara Ahmed's and jackie Stacey's edited collection Thinking through the Skin (2001).