On November 25th, one year and a half after the last enactment of “Can we touch?” in Rio de Janeiro’s capital, I had the opportunity to perform it again. This time, in the city of Belfast (Northern Ireland), at “Sonorities Festival: Contemporary Music and Creative Technologies”, organized by the Sonic Arts Research (SARC) of Queen’s University Belfast.

Different from the open space of Parque Lage’s Noble Hall, the location reserved to the enactment of “Can we touch?” at the Sonorities Festival was a charming and hermetic room. Its walls, which were filled with a wooden chess pattern, created an acoustic isolation that allowed for the silence of the performance to reverberate even more.

With this new spatial layout, the relational dynamics with the public also acquired new outlines: confronted by the uneasiness generated by the noise every time the door was opened and closed, the exchange regime happened one by one, little by little, person by person. The new frame revealed itself to be quite interesting: both the degree of intimacy and the availability of the participants were enhanced.

With each stay ranging from ten to forty minutes, the public at the Sonorities Festival was able to expand the possibilities of “Can we touch?”: movements that improvised dances, mirroring games, dilation of the resting time of a stare, asymmetries, bodies that stood up and, finally, the physical touching of hands.

There we could find a kind of texture: of relationship, of intensity, of an incitement to the stare as it became fetishized by the presence of the screen. It was a very rich and productive experience: new paths were open thanks to conversations and exchanges about the experience of the performance, such as the possibility to insert layers of sound based on intersections provoked by the encounter of cell phones.