Touch: immersive and intimate and spectacular
03Oct 2021

by Drew Rowsome - photos by Dahlia Katz

The key word describing the "immersive dance performance" Touch is "immersive." In a giant box of a cement-floored white room, seats are scattered around the edges facing in to the looming support pillars, the central one surrounded by handfuls of sand. The lights go down and a booming voice announces that we are about to be part of an "immersive event," "a series of moments in a relationship" with the "images on the walls generated by the movement." The dancers, Carleen Zouboules and Evan Webb on the night we attended, enter in pools of light and circle each other warily, making gestures of attraction, curiosity and fear. Then Zouboules stamps her foot and the circle of light surrounding her explodes, flows over us, and expands to cover the walls and floor with a universe of stars. It is dizzying and breathtaking.

From there the environment fills with shooting comets, pulsating body organs, a forest that grows to tower over and around before releasing a flock of birds, stabbing beams of jagged neon, an ominous grid, a haunting set of eyes, and eventually pink heat sensor images of the dancers in intense humungous close-up. The room is at least four stories high and the imagery is certainly immersive, almost overwhelming. Certainly overwhelming for the dancers whose artistry suffers from our inability to focus on what they are doing. The room even fills with fog, stealthy tendrils that engulf the dancers and eventually the entire audience. Touch is as spectacular as it is immersive.

Not that the dancers are slouches. Clad in skintight white, they are mostly close enough that - Touch is intimate as well as immersive - we can see them sweat and the deep breaths of exertion rippling their abs. The lights are sometimes commanded by them, sometimes antagonize them, and sometimes just dwarf them. It is all very sci-fi CGI come to life. Thematically the relationship seems to start and sputter and then be torn apart by technology as they, and we, are dropped into a nightmare scroll of news-like images, a cell phone on steroids from the inside out. The most disturbingly beautiful moment has them embracing by the sand they have occasionally played with and the lights go up. Everything is stark for a second and then shadows, sperm-like squiggling creatures, slither down the walls through the audience and bombard a circle of shadow surrounding the pair. I would swear that I felt the refugees from a '50s sex education horror film ooze over my feet.

The choreography by Guillame Cote may dictate the projections by Thomas Payette but it quickly becomes subservient. The physicality of the dancers is impressive with dashes of acrobatics or impressive technique to liven the pas de deux, but there has been a choice made to have their faces remain impassive. Much of the time their motivations are obvious but for considerable lengths of time is it is impossible to tell if they are fighting or fornicating. While the walls are full to overflowing, we have to fill in the dancers' emotions which, dangerously, results in the current status of our own relationships being projected onto the state of the dancers'. Risky business as the pandemic has thankfully ebbed enough for us to be able to gather for art again, but most relationships have been through confined together hell.

This collaboration between Cote Dance and Lighthouse Immersive Artspace is a unique experience and it nestles somewhere between an enhanced dance performance and an awe-inspiring spectacle with dancers. It is an experiment and I suspect that as it evolves and grows into future endeavours, an incredible fusion will be in store. Touch immerses us in an entirely new and alien world, a world where touch remains crucial. After a year and a half of at least semi-isolation from our fellow beings, it is heartbreakingly sumptuous to watch, to be immersed in, two gorgeous examples of our race touching and almost triumphing over the technological connections we have been forced to settle for.