Touch - Akshay Sharma
Photo by Akshay Sharma, 2021
I am sat in my pink chair. My hands are typing on the black keyboard. My feet are placed on a mess of wire that fall on the grey floor, I can’t tell if it’s wooden or some vinyl nonsense. My forearms slide down the edge of the reclaimed wood table that feels soft. Reclaimed wood - the history of this table top surrounded by mystery and yet I try to imagine what it was before. All these colours touch my eyes and the light illuminates the space that I am sat in typing. My mind touches upon these various questions that arise instinctually, from a felt place, and at points navigate the territory of knowledge.
Touch is a project at this moment but it's also the very moment of my understanding where I start becoming a part of this world. My hands, wrists, pelvis and feet make me aware of where I am and where I could be going. Lightness of skin, the hairy patches that hold the light and air, the temperature that allows me to be experience the joy of being alive. Roll with it, pour into it, spirals of blood floating about and then here it is in the breath. I breathe into my partners neck as he lays asleep unconscious of all the various ways my body touches his, my hand touch his. I take your hand, you take mine.
Photo by Akshay Sharma, 2021
I remember being touched intimately for the first time. My momentary partner at the time kissed my lips as the whirlpool in my brain sent a shiver down my hands where I grabbed his neck and that came back to me through his hands slightly above my lower back wishing for more. Ecstasy I guess is the drug that you consumes when confronted with new found intimacy. Countless memories of intimacy inspired by touch. All those who have touched me have inspired me. Becoming.
This becoming explodes into an intriguing question what is it about touch that is left once the physical act is withdrawn. I dance, and all these physical spaces that I have danced in, I leave my touch in theirs. Those charged spaces belong to me, belong to you and seeing happens. Aliveness. in those moments where the body offers its labour and in touch is touched by the physics of it, the emotion of it, the heat of it, the felt essence of something so special that craves for holding and intimacy. Intimate performing.
The joy of being touched by hot arms, the joy of being touched with love, the joy of surrendering into someone with grief, the joy of falling into the floor with abandon and crying on someones hand, the joy of kisses in a dark alley, the joy of being alive.