Colour Melos 2

The second version of my interactive painting performance Colour Melos took place on June 10th 2011 at 1000 Pound Bend in Melbourne, for the event Samba Cine Club and EL TARRO (see the poster and the first Colour Melos). 

In this occasion I closely collaborated with Colombian dancer Kathleen González, who shared the stage with me. We used background projection of TAO.S's colourful painting animation and A Sound Design put together a soundtrack for the piece.

The main concept of Colour Melos 2 remains the same as the first version: the intention to start a conversation between performer and audience through touch, bodies, colours, now adding music and projection. The aim is to reduce the space between us, to remember that we are all human and need to feel each other, to literally "keep in touch".

Colour Melos is an experiment part of my artistic exploration of the sense of touch, and aims to observe how we interact through this sense in different settings, in this case, when people are allowed to touch someone with the excuse of it being an artwork.
Both presentations have been as part of an art event, but with very different spaces and audiences. In this case, there were more people in the audience, but much less participation than the one at Renaissance Festival. 


See photos of the event by Phillip Werner here (thanks Phillip!).

Photos by Antony Kraus (gracias!):

The idea of the collaboration with Kathleen was to start the performance as separate beings, slowly recognising each other as similar and complementary. This is why our costumes were in complement with each other: where I showed skin, Kathleen had covered in white, and viceversa. 

We each started wearing a vest made of latex gloves tied together, that represent a leit-motif in my work around the sense of touch, since my first OutsideIn tactile installations. Gloves represent a barrier that we use when we don't want to directly touch something, so we undressed from them at the point of the performance in which we started to recognise each other, literally taking off a barrier to allow interaction.

Each colour of the paint we had in front of us had a previously accorded movement effect, that we first showed painting on ourselves and then on each other. We only painted on our 'active' zones, the ones covered in white stockings. 
After doing it with each colour, we 'realize' that there is an audience and invite them to interact with us. It was hard to get people involved and make them leave the confort of their seats to get their hands full of paint and risk getting it on their clothes. Nonetheless, there were some brave ones (mostly male) who did participate. 

When no more people were willing to participate, the end of the performance was marked with a hug, the final recognition of each other, one of the best manifestations of the sense of touch.