WITHIN TOUCHING DISTANCE Comes to Stephen Lawrence Gallery Next Month

Exploring the importance of touch, the new show from leading digital performance innovators ZU-UK takes one audience member at a time through a journey from childhood to adulthood and old age through the medium of a bedtime routine. Within Touching Distance combines an immersive VR and spatialised binaural audio-world with a live, intimate one-on-one performance, in which a caring choreography of touch is received from the performer and synchronised with the VR experience. The artwork has been designed through a patient-led process, informed by ZU-UK Artistic Director Persis Jadé Maravala's lived experience within a mental health unit. It asks audiences to consider the ways that we interact at a sensory level with the world and how the decisions we make can shape our lives. At the start of the 35-minute production, a motherly figure guides each participant gently through a bed-time routine, and into a VR headset, where they are immersed in an interactive dreamscape exploring childhood memories, life journeys and mortality. Each stage asks us about the nature of touch and the unquestionable depth of human connection.

Within Touching Distance is a ground-breaking experiment in using art and participatory performance to inform and change healthcare research and practice, and in using live art experience as a starting point for therapeutic and healthcare training strategies. ZU-UK is working in collaboration with the Centre for Creative Futures and GLASC (Learning & Simulation Centre) at the University of Greenwich, as well as Liverpool Cares, to explore ways in which elements, methodologies and care/participation strategies developed by the arts company can be utilised and transposed to therapy and healthcare training settings. Together, the partners are pioneering co-creative, patient-led approaches in the under-realised areas of touch and empathy for nurses and carers, co-designing binaural sound and 360º video. The project has recently been awarded one of the first ever ‘Inclusive Innovation Awards' and received a special mention by the Jury at Sheffield DocFest Alternate Realities Competition for the courageous application of its “innovative multidisciplinary approach to challenge audiences in a way that is specific to its form”.

Writer and director Persis Jadé Maravala, said, “Post-pandemic, we couldn't be better placed to talk about touch. Touch starvation is real. Skin hunger is real, and the consequences in terms of a loneliness epidemic are real. We have been working closely with neuroscientists, clinical psychologists, and nurses to understand how, beyond the functional, there is something extraordinary in the act of resting one's hands on the skin of another.  As someone in recovery from mental illnesses, I wanted to explore how touch is of huge benefit to physical and mental ailments. There is no care, there is no cure, without touch. We wanted to explore this through Within Touching Distance, combining touch with the synchronised use of VR to invite audiences to experience empathy through human contact. Inspired by the words of Margaret Atwood, ‘touch comes before sight, before speech, it is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth' in a touch-averse society this piece is an imploration to recognise that our bodies are made for touch.”

ZU-UK is an established multi award-winning theatre and digital arts company. ZU-UK is based in Stratford, East London and Liverpool and led by immigrant working-class artists Persis Jadé Maravala, who was the sole recipient of the inaugural ABTT Stephen Joseph award in 2021, and Jorge Lopes Ramos. ZU-UK believes in the need for shared rituals, new narratives & experiences that empower those most vulnerable to experience and make excellent art. ZU-UK creates interactive experiences using games, performance, and technology. They can happen anywhere including on your phone, in your house, on a stage, in a shopping mall or a field. Previous projects include the serious game Radio Ghost (winner of the Lumen Prize 2022), the post-immersive dating experience Binaural Dinner Date, interactive audio experience Pick Me Up (& hold me tight) in response to the rise in suicides, #RioFoneHack at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and Project Perfect Stranger & Plague Round.

Within Touching Distance is presented as part of a six-week season of ZU-UK works as part of the Sound & Image Festival running from November to December presenting three artworks from the makers of the award-winning and genre-defining Hotel Medea. Included in this season ZU-UK are also presenting Evening Standard recommended Binaural Dinner Date, an audio-led interactive performance in which two participants are guided through the curious urban ritual of dating, and the 2022 Lumen Prize Winner Radio Ghost, an interactive radio show, game and ghost hunt in which participants team up to take on the role of a ghost-hunters and broadcast their journey as they unlock ghost stories, described by the Guardian as “an act of resistance”.

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