Touch, containment and consolation in This is For You

The article examines the resonance of a particular quality of touch identified, with reference to the somatic practices of Alexander technique, as ‘touching with empty hands’ with the psychoanalytic notion of maternal containment. It focuses on the way this quality of touch works to generate boundaries; creates physical and psychological safe spaces, both within the body and between body and object in the practice; and operates as a form of listening. By revealing the role that the ability of touch to hold and accentuate the indeterminacies of the dancing body plays in its capacity to console, the article makes a distinctive contribution to current understandings of choreographic affect. This research is significant because whilst there is considerable literature within somatic and arts-based therapeutic practices that uses psychoanalytic discourse to explore the effect of touch, this work demonstrates the importance of psychoanalytic containment in understanding haptic affect within a choreographic domain. In addition, the highly original focus of this research on the interrelationship of body and materials, rather than interpersonal touch, creates a distinctive and productive opportunity to bring recent discourse from haptic geography, from writers such as Dodge and Patterson (2012), to work on choreographic affect, whilst expanding the impact of somatic haptic analysis, to the interdisciplinary areas such as boundary studies.