When I manage to catch an online conversation with Emilie Gregersen, she has recently returned to Copenhagen after a choreographic residency in São Paulo. She excuses herself for being confused and jetlagged, and even though I empathize with her sensation, I find her presence to be extraordinarily calm and focused.
It’s been 3 years since the last time Gregersen presented a work in Gothenburg (in 2022 she presented Caresses, the second part of the Touch-trilogy at 3:e Våningen) and I’m curious to hear her thoughts about the last few years and the completion of her trilogy on Touch.

Can you tell me about this trilogy you’ve been developing for the last five years ? How did Touch come about?

–The core concept for the trilogy is working with touch through a queer- and phenomenological perspective. The first work, which is called touch, is a solo, which was created just before the pandemic. I was interested in working with touch through the tension between intimacy and distance, and portraying that through this figure or version of a cyborg set in like a very text-sensual sci-fi universe.
The second piece, Caresses, is a duet performed together with Paolo, who is actually also performing in On My Tongue. In that piece, we were specifically working with caresses as an omnipresence; a lens of understanding sensory modalities, specifically the haptic and the optic- the touch and the gaze- taking the audience on a trip with us through this sensuous aesthetic and poetic universe.

– And now we’re here with On My Tongue [The cast consists of Paolo de Venecia Gile, Sigrid Stigsdatter Mathiassen, Luisa Fernanda Alfonso, as well as Emilie Gregersen herself]. The piece started with an interest in working with consent through moving, and specifically also questioning the history of dance through moving together and finding ways to make this a place to talk more about consent in relation to touch and movement, specifically when improvising together in contact improvisation. That was my core entrance into the work, and then it really became a piece about communication and trust. 
In the piece, you’re following these four characters as they navigate friendship, queer romance, but also the complexities of intimacy and consent, and what it means to be in connection with each other. I feel like it really became a piece that [acts like] a force field of touch and of desire and of moving together. 

In touch, you worked with the notion of a cyborg body. Is the non-human a theme which has stayed throughout the trilogy?
I read you as this piece being very connected to sensuous experience, and I wonder, are you still exploring questions of the human versus something else? 

–Well, for the solo, touch, the first piece, it was specifically the relationship between the human and the non-human, which I was interested in. In this piece, On My Tongue, I definitely work with characters, and I’m not so focused on the human, non-human situation. I’m more interested in taking familiar situations of human relations and queering them, or distorting them, twisting them into something else. From the human and non-human kind of conversation in the solo, now it’s more about four humans relating to each other and the touch and gaze in that universe.

What about the duo Caresses? Does it act as a bridge between the two?
Do you see any (chrono)logical development of your exploration of touch, or how do they speak to you in retrospect when imagining the three pieces next to each other?

– I think they have similarities in performativity. Everything is very heightened and there is a similarity in the way they relate to music.
All of the pieces are created very much in connection with music, with Karis Zidore, who has composed music for all three pieces, and that is quite essential for all of the works. But if I think of it like a journey through all the pieces, I would say that the solo touch is very much about a phenomenological understanding of touch through this very specific android figure, and Caresses for me is way more about an essential trip – and trip in multiple understandings… On My Tongue is more about friendship, queer romance and relationships, going more into the psychological understanding of touch, where physical and emotional boundaries somehow blur.

Your close collaboration with the composer Karis Zidore, did it start with the trilogy?

– Yes, we worked for the first time together on the solo.

[If you have seen the work On My Tongue, you will have experienced this interconnectedness between music and movement, how they blur into each other, creating unexpected material, which in its turn creates the fluid and constantly morphing expression so emblematic for the work] 

I’m curious about reason how this became a trilogy rather than three separate pieces? And did you envision it as a trilogy already when you started creating the first piece?

– I started creating the first piece without knowing it would become a series of works. But then I invited Karis, and also dramaturg Naya Moll to work with me, and I feel that together we really formed a foundation for the trilogy. It was while creating touch that I understood there’s more to this; that there’s much more that I want to dive into. I wanted to be very specific in the first solo, and even though I had a lot of ideas, I wanted to decide “this is what we go for.” The other things are for another piece. Then I realised that since [the ideas] are so related, I might as well create a trilogy…

It’s a great way of solving the “problem” of having many good ideas that are interconnected.

– Yes, but I also saw it a bit as a challenge for myself. I knew I wanted to create Caresses and I had an idea about the piece, but I had no clue what the third piece would be. But I knew that if I call it a trilogy, I would have to insist on this. And I liked the idea of insisting on something instead of jumping from project to project. So for me, it was also a way of going deeper with something.

It seems like the work has been multiplying itself. Was it a conscious choice to “grow” from solo to duo to quartet?

– Yeah. It grew bigger and bigger also because touch was my first work I ever did as a solo choreographer, that was signed just by me. So I feel like the trilogy has also grown along with my artistic development.