Narrating Textures

Abstract

The following writings explore textures in the context of devised projects inspired by daily and performative encounters and research creation. Three practical projects, undertaken in the field of theatre during the course of the author’s MA studies at DAMU Prague, used textures as a principle, stating the interest to facilitate and experience qualities and consistencies of meetings. Textures hereby create links between different elements of these projects, stretching from haptic and magical practices to methods of archaeology, body work and strategies of queering, work with technology or experiments with scenographies and strangers. In the context of these projects narrating is identified as a practice to incorporate and create various subjective and intersubjective experienced realities. The motivation for this field of research was an impulse for performing experiments which are thinking through their doing and are claiming, inventing, changing or identifying connections. Besides incorporating spontaneity, randomness and intuition, this thesis is influenced by the curiosity of extending and reading practical research with theories from embodied, sonic and vibrational approaches and writings by thinkers critically moving between art practice and philosophy. The thesis subsequently considers and proposes modes of touching, listening and gathering as ways to perceive and shape visible and invisible tissues between our relations. As abstract and concrete materialities, the idea of textures explores a conceptualization of surfaces as a ‘ground’ for creation.