Request an act of intimacy – read to me, cut my hair, tell me your first memory of your mother, hold your breath with me, listen, teach me something, it’s up to you.
Who the person is is not important. This is an exchange and Ruby Donohoe is offering an encounter. You'll only have a short time together. Given the chance to step into a room with someone – stranger or otherwise – and be present, what are the impossibilities involved in the performance of intimacy? Given the chance to be intimate with another person, what is it we want and need?
Performance artist, Ruby, shares 5 acts of intimacy that inspired her upcoming work:
Putting my ear to a friend's cheek while we listened to the sound of popping candy inside each other's mouths
Perched on stools in their kitchen late one night after being at a gig, we ate our way through a 80 cent six pack of old donuts with popping candy on top. This memory is utter quiet joy for me. It was as simple as "I can hear what's going on in your mouth and I can feel and taste it because I'm doing the same. I understand this part of you and this is delightful and sweet." I am also terribly attracted to this person, so maybe that had a little something to do with it. Maybe.Singing a friend to sleep for hours in a made-up language after they broke their ankle
I am infinitely at ease with this dear friend. In the height of madness and the depth of sadness they have always made me chuckle. I can't remember precisely how it came about but I knew I wanted to sing to them to soothe their pain. Now, I'm not a very good singer although I'm pretty wonderful at making noise. The solution was simple. I decided I'd just make sounds that vaguely sounded like another language. It worked. Mostly, they laughed. Then after hours of content warbling and company keeping they eventually, despite their pain, fell asleep and I slipped away into my room down the corridor in the house we were sharing.
A lover checking my pulse one morning
There was something dangerous about this intimacy. I can't articulate exactly why but it felt exposing even though we had known one another for some time. This gesture, someone reaching out to feel the blood coursing through my body and listening deeply, made me stop. I spoke to them a year or two later about the experience and they were shocked. It had felt like a clinical, concerned action for them at the time. So much so that they had worried that they had come across as cold. This is my most notable experience of one-way intimacy.Taking the time to breath in-sync
After developing a portion of this work in Melbourne, I met someone who I clicked with immediately and I asked if they'd mind doing the show with me. The act of intimacy they requested was to breath in-sync together. We didn't know one another very well. Despite our connection, it was awkward. It was well-intentioned. It was self-conscious. It was gracious. We chatted later and both decided it hadn't 'worked'. Yet, this clumsy, very human but largely forced attempt to be intimate with another person was in its very nature intimate – in spite of itself. I have two photos I still need to post her – one directly before and after this moment.Eating artichokes from our shared garden with a friend as they grieved the loss of their father
I was in Vancouver in the summer, sitting quietly, sweating and silently crying beside a friend on our verandah eating the artichokes from our garden after he'd learnt that his father had died. Grief is intimate. It can divide or bind people. This was the last time we were ever really close.'An Act Of Intimacy' performs 2high Festival 15 January.
