Can You Feel It? (2019)

It’s hard work feeling strong and deep. It can be absolutely exhausting, painful, exhilarating and messy. Here, there are labourers at work, working the feeling, again and again; staying with it and insisting, in a roller coaster study of emotion.
– Sara Ruddock

Can You Feel It? is a stage show about the performance of feelings. Footballers collapse in agony, toddlers melt in anger, and fetishists writhe with pleasure. As two performers navigate the impossible line between sincerity and artifice, Can You Feel It? reveals our insatiable desire to feel something, and our terror at feeling nothing.  

The performance is a collaboration with lighting designer Alex Fernandes, that reveals and plays with the potent and seductive materials of stage lighting. Within an otherwise-empty stage, bodies are continually re-framed through subtle and forceful shifts in light and colour. Even if something’s fake, it can still make us feel.

This extensive experimentation with lighting was made possible through our residency at PACT Zollverein, which allowed us the rare opportunity to embed lighting materials throughout our making process.

We think Can You Feel It? is weird, but good. It is our response to many years of witnessing and participating in somatic dance practices. It’s also one of the ‘biggest’ stage works we’ve developed. We’re not sure if there is really a touring circuit for UK performance that can host this kind of work – particularly as the COVID-19 2020 lockdown hit at what would have probably been this work’s ‘opportune’ moment. When we have some free time(??) or some money(?????) we intend to adapt this work for more low-fi contexts.

Stage performance: First performed at Rich Mix, London, October 2019. 

Made with collaborator Alex Fernandes. Developed through PACT Zollverein Residency programme with support from DanceXchange, Birmingham, and with funding from Arts Council England.

You can download and read texts written about this work from Lara Pawson here and Sara Ruddock here. 

Photos by Jemima Yong.