Festival of Intimacy

The Festival of Intimacy is a day-long festival of intimate performances, conversations and interactions that responds to the themes of touch and intimacy and asks what intimacy has meant as we live through the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Events in the Theatre

Contact in Isolation
Bloomsbury Theatre Studio
Various time slots available
Contact in Isolation is an immersive movement workshop where participants will work with exercises that encourage relaxed, confident, and playful investigation of movement within your own body and with the bodies surrounding them from a social distance. The workshop has come out of Contact Improvisation, a style of partnered improvised dance, and asks what contact improvisation will look like in the socially distanced future. Please wear clothes that allow you to move.
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Almost Apart
Bloomsbury Theatre Circle Bar 
No booking required
Almost Apart is a five-minute, one-on-one experience that brings intimacy to washing our hands; seeking to reinsert tenderness, care, and awareness into this act. When touch has been taken from us in so many ways in this strange new reality, we seek to return to it in Almost Apart through acts of love, and self-love. This experience will be 5 minutes per person. 

Film screening: Distance Is Nothing
Bloomsbury Theatre
No booking required
Film shown on a loop from 11am - 3pm 
This film will explore an unusual perspective on intimacy; that of Benny, an autistic man who did not miss the physical presence of his girlfriend while being separated during the pandemic. The narrative to the short film is provided by a love poem Benny wrote to reflect these feelings. The film is by the FlowUnlocked collective who came together during the pandemic. Flow Unlocked is a creative knowledge exchange project which highlights the importance of relationships to autistic people. The project is supported by UCL Culture's Trellis programme. 

Film screening: Creature
Bloomsbury Theatre
No booking required
Film shown on a loop from 11am - 3pm 
This film is an attempt to process the duality of fear and desire in a world where physical touch has been out of bounds. It features a costume made responding to navigating intimacy in a global pandemic – a suit that could be worn and used for ‘covid safe’ touching.
 

Events in our Museums

It Shows Up In The Hair
Petrie Museum
Various time slots available
We are coming to the end of lockdown 3.0. Hair salons have been closed since the 18 December 2020. For many black women, the salon is more than a place to simply get their hair done. It is a space of joy, refuge, and community. A great deal of trust is placed in a hairdresser, who can often quickly tell the mood and wellbeing of her clients from the moment she touches their hair. Co-created by hair stylist June Forbes and writer Rhianna Ilube, this intimate performance weaves in true stories from inside June's salon over the past 30 years. Inspired by the history and unique dramas of the Black British hair salon, this pop-up salon is open to all. Join us for a space to reflect on what your hair means to you, and us, within the context of touch, trust and intimacy over lockdown. 
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Unravelling
Grant Museum of Zoology
Various time slots available
Unravelling explores the relationship between textile technologies as a tactile means of making and marking time in isolation, and web-based technologies as means of communicating and experiencing intimacy without touch. In this performance-workshop, participants will be guided through weaving small squares. The square they weave will become the marker for a person, place, or thing they miss. Through a collaboration between artist Fiona Mathison and researchers in Connected Environments at the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, participants will be invited to attach their memories to their own woven markers using web-based AR tools. 
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Explore the UCL Campus

I Need You So Much Closer 
The posters are across the UCL Campus
No booking required
Available from 11am - 3pm
An interactive poster campaign incorporating images, audio and video. The exhibition explores a range of individual responses to being unable to be physically close and intimate during the pandemic and periods of lockdown. Please bring your own headphones and internet enabled smartphone. 

Audio-guided walk: Steps & Steeps
No booking required
Available from 11am - 3pm
Steps & Steeps performance invites the participants to tune into a sensory audio-guided walk as they travel between festival venues concluding with a tea session at Gordon Square. The tea session will provide the social frame for listening and reflecting on participants’ sensory encounters during the walk. This participatory performance will provide the material with which to re-think themselves within the familiar-unfamiliar grounds of the campus, re-new their registers of touch, movement, smell and taste, bridging the gap between the human and the natural. To initiate the walk, please go to http://opryymak.com/steps for details and the audio guide. Please bring your own headphones and internet enabled smartphone. 

Festival image: I need you so much closer by artist Ramona Mason.