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Skin—where the body touches air, earth, water. And where the body touches other bodies. Is skin the boundary between oneself and the rest of the world?
Dancer Rebecca Youdell’s collaborative project, Listening to Skin, went touching, caressing, shaking and rattling boundaries in many senses… the boundaries of dance, of performance, and of each of the artforms involved: movement, music, film, photography. It also explored boundaries in the sense of our relationship with landscape: the film and photographs featured the wide open spaces around Croydon in the Gulf of Carpentaria; a claustrophobic Spanish villa, Paronella Park, in the rainforest outside Innisfail; and the boundary formed by the sea near Cairns, where Youdell seemed to be drowning, not so much overwhelmed by the water as by the incongruity of skin, sun and shipwreck.
A word to describe the quality of the performer’s movement might be “nervous”— twitchy, unsettled, excitable. On film she staggered up the stone steps of Paronella Park as if unable to control her stilettos. On stage her performance was interrupted by a silent thought, as if she wondered if she’d left milk for the cat. This gave me pause to consider my relationship to this performance, to being in a theatre, lights dimmed, watching. (Did I leave out milk for the cat?)
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