QɄ∄ɆR(?) Touch presents four durational performances that will explore how bodies seek connections through incomplete and formless sources–fragments of memory and time. This evening highlights work exploring a profound desire for touch and gesture. QɄ∄ɆR(?) Touch asks: what does it mean to touch someone you’ve never met? How do we perform intimacy whenever identity or memory feels unreliable and partial? Engage touch as a conceptual and an embodied act, which reveals how intimacy, presence, and relation, involves complicated, ambiguous expressions.
Central to this event are the vocabularies and interventions of affect and [queer] studies. It takes seriously the instruction of José Esteban Muñoz, who emphasizes how queerness is “not yet here” but felt in glimmers and fleeting gestures. How may gestures, glances, and ephemeral encounters generate affective bonds? Action holds meaning, and the performances hold meaning in duration. On the potency of gestures, Juana María Rodríguez has argued, “just as ‘queer’ can function as a noun or as a verb, ‘gesture’ can signal both those defined movements that we make with our bodies and to which we assign meaning, and an action that extends beyond itself, that reaches, suggests, motions; an action that signals its desire to act, perhaps to touch.”
QɄ∄ɆR(?) Touch invites you to witness and participate in a living archive of QɄ∄ɆR(?) encounters, sharing in fleeting and tender acts left unresolved but no less meaningful. The stylization QɄ∄ɆR(?) gestures toward queerness as a concept in flux, one that is unfinished, questioned, and ever-evolving. It queers the word itself to resist fixed meaning in favor of ambiguity, possibility, and becoming. The performances unfold over time. You’re invited to arrive, linger, step out, and return as your body and attention allow.
Artist Performing:
Leah Crosby
Emerson Granillo
Melanie Manos
Logan Tillery
Curated by Emerson Granillo
Poster Design By Sky Christoph @sky.christoph
Also check out other Performances in Ypsilanti, Arts events in Ypsilanti, Entertainment events in Ypsilanti.
