The Agency of Touch


The Agency of Touch (2016-2023) is the framework of choreographer Mădălina Dan’s extensive research into forms of tactile choreography. The Agency is frequently an intervention in the form of a one-on-one tactile performance which utilizes touch, bodily/sensorial awareness and connectivity as an artistic service for communicating and researching within different artistic, social, cultural contexts.
 It is a practice privileging touch, haptic and physical experiences compared to the visual experiences that dominate contemporary technologised society. The work was created as a practical tool in order to be closer to society and its intrinsic problematics: the alienation of the senses, the neglect of somatic education, the social inequalities, the financial comfort equaling the comfort of the body, pandemics. 
The Agency of Touch is temporarily installed in artistic contexts-festivals, galleries, apartments - but also in social and clinical frameworks, health care institutions, hospitals, old people’s homes.
Agency taken both as the capacity of an agent (person and any living being) to act in the world and also as a reference to the existing social structures offering public/private service. 

The Agency of Touch is an encounter in which touch is approached as a performative, intentional gesture on the body of the receiver. The reception of the tactile compositions asks for an active participation through awareness and the sensorial faculties of sensing/perceiving/feeling the choreography on one’s own body.
In a non-visual paradigm, the body of the receiver is a landscape, an “affective texture”, a subjective corporeal surface. Subjective sensations and emotions arise during the tactile choreographies which are connected with the impulses that the living, biological structure- senses and movement receptors –receive.

After the tactile experience, the participant is invited to make a map of the experience and an exercise of remembering and transposing the touch into drawing, colour, shape, words and verbal guidance. All the drawings and maps are then collected  on a wall in the space where the installation takes place. A reflective notebook is also available for participants to write down impressions and thoughts. 





Created by: Mădălina Dan
Sound scape: Natalia Bustamante
Set-up concept: Ana Botezatu
Produced by: Inter-University Center for Dance Berlin (HZT-SoDA-2016)
Participantion: Temps D’Images Cluj, L'Etincelle - Théâtre de la Ville de Rouen, Chu-Hôpitaux De Rouen, IMPROSPEKCIJE festival, Zagreb, Center for Reahabiliattion Orlovac Zagreb, Tezst Festival- Timisoara, homeFest, Bucharest. Hospice “Casa Sperantei”, Bucharest; Magicamp – summer camp for children with oncological affections, Moses Rosen- Nursing Home, Bucharest.