Our project “Embodied trust” was initially motivated by contact improvisation. Contact Improvisation is a form of contemporary dance where two or more people move together often with one point of physical contact. It typically involves giving your weight to the other person. The intensity of contact varies and the people who move together, need to constantly read the body language of each other. It requires you to have trust in each other. We therefore chose trust as our topic that we wanted to explore further.

The costume was inspired by Denmark based artist Malin Bülow. Our costume was created for two people. The garment is two shirts connected by the head and the left arm (process photo 11.). Just wearing it already requires you to trust the other person in it. We chose a light stretchy fabric in beige colour (process photo 1.). In the headpiece and the sleeve there are stretch sensors on each person's side. Touch sensors with piezoresistive wool are placed on the upper back and in the palm of the hand since they are the most touched places during contact dance. Initially we didn't want to make a wearable that would be used as an instrument only. We were aiming for a musical composition, a dance performance that is a musical piece at the same time. We dedicated a whole session just to get to know each other and trying to understand what trust means to each of us personally. In this session each of us drew a mind map with the word "mistrust" and "trust" as starting points. We wrote comments on each others' mind maps and marked the things that resonated with us (process photo 6-7.1.). After that we connected our emotions and body sensations to mistrust and trust and then translated our body sensations into movements. The result of this session was the design of a performance in four acts. It is about the journey from mistrust to trust. We noticed that it is much easier for us to mistrust than to trust people. We associated mistrust with tension, fear, acting, or having a mask in front of each other. Often mistrust was also caused by a traumatic event that happened in the past. Why do we even mistrust? Maybe we're afraid to fall, afraid to be a failure, afraid to get hurt. But in order to trust other people you have to learn to trust yourself first. Trusting yourself means simply believing in your inner strength. That you have the ability to get up again after failing. Believing that you will recover and be ok again after getting hurt. It also implies falling and failing with responsibility, without completely wrecking yourself and the other people around you. Self trust is essential in order to be able to have trust in others. Trusting others connects and it gives you energy, much more than mistrust will give. Trust can give you the comfort to simply be joyful and tranquil.

Our performance was designed in four acts: Falling Hard (Trauma), Mechanic (mistrusting), Flow (learning to trust yourself), and Contact (trusting others).

We used everyday sounds like typing on the computer, S-Bahn, scissor cutting, sewing, writing with a pen and slamming doors. They symbolise our everyday acting, playing a role, keeping your face in front of others in our daily life. The movements were either mechanical, stagnant, taking little space or taking up a lot of space. In contrast we have nature sounds like sea waves and forest sounds. They symbolise the energy, the recovery we get when we are in nature. We associated flow and playfulness as movements. For that we worked with musical instruments like piano, guitar, percussion sounds. We also included Breath and Vocal Sounds, which symbolise the inner voices that are calling you to let go, melt to the ground. It means learning to fall, to fail with agency and to get up again after. Right before the evaluation we noticed that having four acts was a bit ambitious. We had too many Machine Learning Models going simultaneously, using grain, mangle, polydelay. That resulted in Max MSP crashing all the time. We decided then in the end to only perform one part of the piece, where we would only need two ML models at the same time. Besides the two performers we also had one person operating Max MSP who could change the sounds during the acts and also manipulate the sounds further in case the cables come off while dancing. For the final presentation we performed Flow and Contact. Learning to trust yourself and starting to trust other people.

Team and performers:

Ron-Jonas Verlin, Maximilian Wehner, Thanh Dung Nguyen