The zig zag woman performance

Once the body parts have been metaphorically separated, audience members are invited to placetheir hand inside one of two boxes in order to “excite” the performer positioned in the otherasshereads aloud the fifth chapter, “Actual and Virtual,” from Gilles Deleuze’s Conversations,gradually breaking into heavy breathing and entering states of increasing arousal. The simple act ofa hand touching in one place produces visceral effects elsewhere, embodying the idea of virtualityand the performativity of the body in unexpected ways.This dynamic not only stimulates theperformer, but also heavily implicates the spectator to the extent that in later iterations the duowere forced to interrupt the performance as actions began to verge on aggression, revealing thefragile balance between intimacy and violence that arises when the body itself becomes amedium.