The Companionship Scores is a durational, improvised, dance practice as performance that explores the nature and space of being-with and the movement composition that takes place when we attend to being-with others. Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s proposed that being is always-already-with –– that ‘with’ is our ontological foundation. We all say ‘with’ daily, using it as the means to form a mesh of relations or tangential associations between objects, ideas, ourselves and objects. Nancy exposes ‘with’ not as a merging, or bridge between, nor a signifier of relationship, but to be a spacing, or positioning, a word that defines our simultaneity, proximity and difference.

The Companionship Scores is a vigil of witnessing others, self-witnessing and being witnessed, which are acts of care performed through quiet processes of staying with, allowing, and ‘listening touch’. ‘Listening touch’ is not physical contact but a rather sensing of resonance in the space between dancers, as well as the wider environment, which enables movement to arise. The Companionship Scores is a practice of attention, exposure and abandon, opening to intimacy, strangeness, other, near, touch, far, to calling, to responsibility, no need, no obligation, no response, to the possibility that being-with is our optimism and our bond in a shattering world.

Originally presented at SDDS, performed by Carolyn Roy, Katye Coe, Margarita Zafrilla Olayo, Marina Collard, Lizzy Le Quesne, Florence Peake, Lauren Potter, Petra Soor and Rosalie Wahlfrid over 3 hours, the four Companionship Scores are practised in a random sequence, with each score interrupted at a 10 minute interval, thus always unfinished and, as a performance, potentially unending. The audience is invited to sit, contemplate, leave and return as they feel.

 Rehearsals at Raven Row with Lizzy LeQuesne, Florence Peake, Petra Soor, Rosalie Wahlfrid and Margarita Zafrilla Olayo.

Photography Sarah Dobai.