Mixing real life with virtual reality in a synchronised one-on-one experience with headset and performer, Within Touching Distance is a new immersive show exploring touch. We spoke to Persis Jadé Maravala, the Artistic Director of multi-award-winning interactive theatre and digital arts company ZU-UK about the show.
Can you tell us a little about yourself and your work?
I’m Artistic Director of ZU-UK: we’re a disabled-led, global majority-led, female-led theatre and digital arts company based in Bootle, and East London. I founded the company [X years ago] with Jorge Lopes Ramos, who’s my main collaborator. Ethnically, I’m Persian, born in Yemen, and raised in East London. We live in a world where mainstream narratives are all about hate and fear, and in which there’s a contemporary loneliness epidemic, and our work tries to address this – we believe in the need for shared rituals, new narratives and experiences to empower vulnerable people to be able to experience culture and to make excellent art. To that end, we make interactive experiences using performance, games and technology with an emphasis on community, touch, and live-ness alongside the digital experience.
What drew you to working with virtual reality to explore touch?
Within Touching Distance is part of a big research project exploring the potential of using XR arts-led experiences to develop use of touch and emphasis on empathy in healthcare. We’re looking at using our work as training input for nurses and carers, co-designing binaural sound and 360º video with mental health patients, as well as exploring the work’s potential in therapy settings. Touch is important in human development, it unlocks the automatic response system of the body to recognise safety and is therefore an important tool in the treatment of mental illness and trauma. As a patient now in recovery myself, it helps with the lingering effects of depersonalisation and derealisation. We wanted to explore this through Within Touching Distance, combining touch with the synchronised use of VR in order to invite audiences to experience empathy through human contact.
Within Touching Distance is intended to help inform the future of healthcare training. How do you envision this experiment influencing health practices?
We want to address the under-representation of mental-health patients’ actual experiences in the healthcare solutions on offer to them – particularly within the field of digital mental health solutions. We are exploring the use of XR (Unreal Engine, Binaural Sound wireless broadcast) and bone-conducting headphones in conjunction with bespoke artistic storytelling content created by mental health patients, to address gaps in what is currently offered in digital mental healthcare training towards empathy and use of affective touch.
The wider project is aimed at improving the current delivery of clinical skills education and training. Our plans are, from the existing Within Touching Distance artwork, to produce a prototype VR/live-facilitated approach to training healthcare staff in the use of touch and empathy in their practice. The work on healthcare ‘training packages’ will also serve as a springboard for exploring new arts-led methods of direct therapeutic intervention for mental health patients combining touch/remote touch, augmented audio and VR. We will be exploring the possibility of developing other sections of the artwork to directly help patients: focussing on combatting anxiety and generating feelings of security and compassion, and providing a safe therapy setting for re-visiting difficult situations, focusing on self-worth and confidence. We are talking to researchers at UCL and City, University of London about a project using our VR and audio content and expertise towards developing artistic digital twinning experiences to improve the healthcare experience of young people with autism.
You have previously performed this work at Sheffield Doc Fest. Has the experience undergone any changes since then?
The work has deepened rather than changed. Since Sheffield the focus has been on the ammas. My goal was always to create an ensemble of women that have undertaken significant training in order to deliver this piece which is This work is an intimate and private experience with a single audience member. Their manner and way of moving will be mannered and measured with the weight of quiet care. They have a quiet strength. An important feature of the ammas is their rhythm which is always calm and deliberate. Each movement and gesture is carried out with preponderance and thought. The ammas are further complicated by an inner powerful force. It is as though the ammas are soft flesh surrounding an iron skeleton and the bones of this iron skeleton are vibrating violently – there is a protective force and a vigilance, a watchfulness and a safe-guarding spirit that brews and bubbles away just under the skin. It is this force that gives the ammas their almost silent, very powerful potency and this repressed energy is part of the impact on the audience member. This force requires the ensemble to be able to co-regulate each and every parasympathetic nervous system that arrives – and to recognise and respond to the fact that every person is a DIFFERENT person.
You are also presenting two other works, Binaural Dinner Date and Radio Ghost. How do these artworks link together?
All of these artworks use accessible technology, that ordinary people find simple to use, to add reflective layers to our experience of reality, by 1. using audio instructions, 2. delivering these audio instructions through software and devices that facilitate continued engagement with the embodied world around you, and 3. constructing perspective-shifts and ‘gentle’ role-play (exploring different versions of yourself) as a way of imagining shared futures and kindling empathy.
What are you hoping audience members will take away from this experience?
I am lobbying for the eradication of touch starvation. I don’t want anyone to live a life where they are not touched enough. I would love people to agree that something so common should not be experienced so little in our lives. For various reasons, some very important reasons, all guidance in the caring professions is to tell doctors, nurses, teachers etc to guard against being too hands on. But we are losing out. More and more. Because there is no cure and there is no care without touch.
ZU-UK present artworks year-round and specialise in thought-provoking immersive experience. More information about their work can be found at https://zu-uk.com/
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