QɄ∄ɆR(?) Touch presents five durational performances that will explore how bodies seek connections through incomplete and formless sources–fragments of memory and time. This evening highlights work exploring a profound desire for touch and gesture. QɄ∄ɆR(?) Touch asks: what does it mean to touch someone you’ve never met? How do we perform intimacy whenever identity or memory feels unreliable and partial? Engage touch as a conceptual and an embodied act, which reveals how intimacy, presence, and relation, involves complicated, ambiguous expressions.
Central to this event are the vocabularies and interventions of affect and [queer] studies. It takes seriously the instruction of José Esteban Muñoz, who emphasizes how queerness is “not yet here” but felt in glimmers and fleeting gestures. How may gestures, glances, and ephemeral encounters generate affective bonds? Action holds meaning, and the performances hold meaning in duration. On the potency of gestures, Juana María Rodríguez has argued, “just as ‘queer’ can function as a noun or as a verb, ‘gesture’ can signal both those defined movements that we make with our bodies and to which we assign meaning, and an action that extends beyond itself, that reaches, suggests, motions; an action that signals its desire to act, perhaps to touch.”
QɄ∄ɆR(?) Touch invites you to witness and participate in a living archive of QɄ∄ɆR(?) encounters, sharing in fleeting and tender acts left unresolved but no less meaningful. The stylization QɄ∄ɆR(?) gestures toward queerness as a concept in flux, one that is unfinished, questioned, and ever-evolving. It queers the word itself to resist fixed meaning in favor of ambiguity, possibility, and becoming. The performances unfold over time. You’re invited to arrive, linger, step out, and return as your body and attention allow.
Curated by Emerson Granillo Poster Design by Christoph
Leah Crosby makes work about care and human connection.
Charli Brissey is an interdisciplinary artist who works choreographically with various technologies and materials. This primarily includes bodies, cameras, objects, genders, desire, instincts, language, and ecosystems. Brissey’s performance and video work has been presented in various galleries, conferences, film festivals, and performance venues nationally and internationally. They are an Associate Professor of Dance at the University of Michigan where they direct the MFA Program and teach courses in physical practice, composition, graduate pedagogy, improvisation, digital media, and seminars integrating critical theory and art-making.
Emerson Granillo is a queer immigrant artist and curator working at the intersection of performance, memory, and diasporic identity. Their practice centers on how marginalized communities navigate intimacy, shame, and belonging through embodied gestures and collective storytelling. Emerson holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and is the curator of Queer Touch, a durational performance event that explores care, presence, and the politics of connection.
Utilizing her body in absurd and precarious actions, Melanie Manos uses humor and solemnity to convey the inequities and insecurities of daily life and the systems that perpetuate them. Her work spans live and mediated performance, video, photography, mixed media drawings, and digital collage, unified by a relentless, heroic perseverance. Manos is a Knights Art Challenge In Detroit Tech Awardee and a 2020 Kresge Arts in Detroit Award Fellow for Live Art. She held fellowships in 2023 with both the University of Michigan’s Center for Academic Innovation and Arts Initiative for Public Art & Engagement, following her 2022 appointment as a Faculty Fellow with the Center for World Performance Studies. During recent residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and I-Park, she created large-scale video projections featuring improvised live narration with interactive audience prompts.
Logan Tillery is usually behind the scenes as a sometimes fabricator, sometimes lighting assistant, and sometimes gallery prep hand. They have performed with Kara Beadle/HEAP, and their ponytail made a cameo appearance in a piece by Leah Crosby. Logan is trying to not be a biochemist anymore and to spend more time with bikes and art.
Leah Crosby
Charli Brissey
Emerson Granillo
Melanie Manos
