The Eyes of The Skin
The Eyes of The Skin* is a dance performance created by choreographer Jennifer Salk in collaboration with media artist Maja Petrić. They explored the often twisted and delicate nature of tenderness.
Choreography: Jennifer Salk
Media Artist: Maja Petrić
Stage Director: Peter Bracilano
Fabrication Lead: Nathan Wade
Dancers: Alethea Alexander, Callie Arnold, Chloe Bonnell, Arianne Herman, Courtney Lawson, Jennifer Lin Le Mesurier, David Lorence
Tenderness is defined as a tendency to express warm, compassionate, or affectionate feelings. But in medicine it stands for pain or discomfort when an affected area is touched. By definition, tenderness is both a pleasure and pain as a result of susceptibility that is being defined by juxtaposition of the two opposed characteristics. Maja focused on the dichotomy of tenderness that ranges between pleasure and pain and as such relates to her research of the sublime and the multiplicity of the sublime experience. Her ideas were combined in a form of the deteriorated wall that covers the north wall of the stage and that cracks over the course of a performance. As the wall is cracking, the light appears through the cracks and changes color and intensity in response to dancer’s behavior and dance narrative.
*Title of the dance performance is inspired by Juhani Pallasmaa’s book Architecture and the Senses: The eyes of the skin. In the book Pallasmaa quotes Georg Hegel:
Touch, since it senses the weight, resistance, and three-dimensional shape of material bodies and thus makes us aware that things extend away from us in all directions.
