While your other four senses are site specific (eyes, ears, mouth, nose) located on particular parts of your body, your sense of touch can be found all over your skin. A huge part of our brain is devoted to perceiving the world around us through our sense of touch. In her book, Skin, A Natural History, Nina Jablanski explains that TOUCH is known as the mother of all senses.  “Primates use it to patch things up after a dispute, and our levels of stress decline tremendously when we touch one another. Though we may sometimes consider ourselves more advanced than the grooming apes–we still pay plenty of money for facials, massages, and other forms of physical contact.”

We gather enormous amounts of information through our skin. But what is your awareness of the sensations your brain is receiving from all these different body parts?  Some parts are more developed.  Your hands.  Your feet.  Your face.  Easy.  Actually the pic above is a representation of what we would look like if the size of our body parts was proportionate to its relative sensitivity to touch.  So what about your lower back?  Your chest?  We go day to day unaware of many of the sensations transmitted from say our clothes.  When Magicians remove someone’s watch or tie without them noticing– those tricks are based on our disconnection with certain receptors in our body.

According to Jablanski, “In our skin, we have our humanity [...] through the millenia, we have been in physical (not electronic) contact—with our lovers, elderly, and children.”  She reminds us to, “take a moment to connect to one another and to make physical contact with one another. The depth of understanding experienced through touch tunes us in to the ancient elements of our human evolution.”

So what’s the point?

Our sense of touch is a full body experience.  Similarly our performances should be full body experiences.  Over the next couple of weeks, we’re gonna get you back to exploring the world with your ENTIRE body, and see how your entire physical nature can stimulate your imagination and work.

All this without getting too dirty…

– TV,Bitch!