At the crossroads of dance, percussion, performance and installation art, ‘Touch’ is a complete, unified experience that displays a profound dialogue between two entities, with an emphasis on ambivalent gestures and vacillating feelings. As audacious in its format than hybrid in its form, the piece features two protagonists: Mathilde Lin and Sébastien Forrester, within a neutral, modest, sometimes utterly naked setting. They take a fascinating creative journey, drawing on both sensitive, ancient, almost primitive kinds of musical and body languages and more abstract, modern modes of expression, rooted in urban and club cultures. The resulting show is physical and immediate, yet intensely evocative.

Driven by a common appeal for improvisation and spontaneous writing, Mathilde Lin and Sébastien Forrester began the creation of ‘Touch’ at MC93 in Bobigny, France, a leading institution for contemporary dance and theater, in June 2024. Blunt, pure and entirely acoustic, it challenges inner symbols and personal iconographies while remaining eminently essential and universal. The two performers’ connection somehow has more to do with a duel than a duo, the way they behave and interact is raw and stupendous, unpredictable yet surprisingly harmonic. The joust unfolds: magisterial, cathartic, ecstatic, forcing ourselves to embrace the body’s vulnerabilities and the way we connect with them, making the audience both euphoric and uncomfortable. Limbs become vigorous percussive elements and hasten the march that spirals upwards enlightening climaxes then leads to serene valleys of silence and emptiness. Beats, steps and shifts feel like they come from an earthly, kind of pastoral universe, but also one of playful ecstasy and revelry. As a first standalone piece, ‘Touch’ reveals itself as a contrasted, timeless, intricate world of texture, motion and physical rhythm, as well as a powerful, deeply personal statement for two performers whose quest seems fierce and irrepressible.

‘Touch’ is carried out as part of ‘Substratum’, Lin and Forrester’s laboratory of research on inwardness, restriction, identity and its symbolical relationship to the notions of soil, affiliation and empowerment, using movement and a musical manner inherited from acousmatic art as the main semantics.

With the support of: La Tannerie d’Avallon, MC93, Compagnie Dernière Minute