During a residency at PACT, we started to use our database of our daily GPS recordings spanning two decades to ask about time spent together or apart. We also got very curious about proxemics (the study of distances between humans in different situations) and what were the furthest that humans had been together or apart. This inspired a poetic book work which can be seen below from our Vimeo page
We thought about bed-ins again and The Beatles’ Come Together (see our piece Bedfull of Songs which always begins with Come Together) and juxtaposed it with non human togetherness such as the wondrous slime mould and flocking starlings. We were able to visually show the years as charts of time spent together alongside the spatial representations of those years, we can say when we were the furthest apart in distance (Dan in Brazil and Sophia in Berlin) and years we were mostly together, like 2015.
Then the pandemic came and yet surprisingly (as very little live work was possible) we had two opportunities to show the work as a lecture performance at the Haus der Statistik in June 2020 as part of Stadterweitern and again at the Floating in 2021, (both at the invitation of Sabine Zahn). However living with the corona virus meant there were other details to consider now the whole society was bound to either be together in small house hold units or apart from others.
Proxemics also took on a new set of meanings through potential infection and codes of conduct in public and private space and our audiences were not able to be close but in the Floating, we benefited from being outside. We explored what Edward T Hall’s (the inventor of proxemics) notion of ‘intimate, personal, public and social spaces’ meant now and how we have had to re-consider them in times of a pandemic when so much performance work had to be online we were grateful for small moments of careful in real life gathering in those difficult times.
Still we feel like there was more material to be teased out from the research and the invitation to take part in the Performance Weekend at the Kleine Organerie allowed us to make The Taxonomy of Togetherness as a short performance format.