Through doing research in Emmanuel Lévinas, how we viewed our performance began to change. Lévinas speaks of the face and what happens when we see this face, however it could be argued that our piece extends this idea, as we go on to explore touch. From this we began to question touch? What does touch start to mean in the context of our performance?
Someone’s face shows their true emotions and humanity, and we a responsible for what emotions their face portrays. In our performance we are responsible for the audience’s experience and their feelings towards their involvement. We will be sat with them and touching them and for the whole time we will see their faces. This makes us responsible for them.
Lévinas spoke that when we see the face that is when a person exists to us. Therefore by touching the person to whom the face belongs, are we extending this notion as we are acknowledging their existence, not only to ourselves, but physically to that person. A single touch is letting ‘the other’ know that we see them, we are acknowledging that they physically exist. In light of this, I believe this puts a huge importance on the touch that happens in our performance.
The research done on Lévinas, and the new importance of touch, has affected our performance greatly. An idea that we at first believed was simplistic, suddenly became a highly complex performance. Therefore, it is important that we concentrate on making sure every detail is just right in the performance so these complex ideas can be realised.