Free Touch: Staging Presence

How does a theatre touch? And how do we recognize each other through touch?
 
#FreeTouch is a street-based artistic practice initiated by Chou Kuan-Jou in post-#MeToo Taiwan, exploring bodily and spatial boundaries. By inviting strangers into one-on-one consensual touch in public spaces, the project questions what "public touch" can mean. It has traveled through 4 countries, touched 13 locations, and 44 strangers. Now, this body—marked by fingerprints, sweat, and shared warmth—faces the strange yet familiar ultimate public body: the THEATRE!
 
As a body of collective imagination and disciplinary structure, how does touch play out under the gaze of performance?
 
Free Touch: Staging Presence brings this action into the black box, crossing the divide between performer, audience (and stage manager?), front and back, public and intimate. Driven by tactility, the work reimagines theatre’s body—its devices as organs, systems as digestion, audience dynamics as photosynthesis. The result is a multisensory touch interaction, that fuses sight and sound. It is not merely a performance, but a live experiment in bodily politics, spatial power, and sensory negotiation.