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Touch, Hear, Feel
- By: Helen Hall & Belfast International Arts Festival
- Location: City Centre
- When: October 2024
- Creative Me Profile: City Explorer
Touch, Hear, Feel is an ambitious new project by dancer and visual artist Helen Hall, created in collaboration with the blind and partially sighted community and produced by Belfast International Arts Festival.
Touch, Hear, Feel invites us to reimagine the way we experience art, pushing the boundaries beyond the visual by engaging our senses of touch, hearing, and feeling.
The work is being developed in a series of co-designed workshops with the blind and partially sighted community, whose diverse perspectives and lived experiences will form the heart of the project. The sessions are taking place across Belfast and are facilitated by Helen in collaboration with the RNIB, Open Arts and University of Atypical.
An interactive installation, located in a public space, will be designed to be a more multisensory experience and feature reclaimed materials. In Touch, Hear, Feel, art is felt, heard, and understood in ways that transcend the traditional visual realm. The installation will create a unique opportunity for audiences to physically engage with the work, breaking down the barrier between observer and art.
Accompanying the sensory experience, an audio narrative will feature the voices of blind and partially sighted people, providing insights into their experiences of touch.
The installation space will then transform into the stage for a new dance piece choreographed by Helen and performed by herself and two other dancers. The immersive performance will explore the theme of touch and the felt experience of dance.
The work will also explore how the language of touch and texture can be incorporated into audio descriptions to entice the audience into the world of felt sense and to make the work vivid and accessible to blind and partially sighted audiences.
Touch, Hear, Feel will premiere as part of the Belfast 2024 programme at Belfast International Arts Festival in October 2024.
