Encounterism: The Neglected Pleasure of Face-to-faceby Andy Field
It’s surprisingly easy to get out of the habit of spending time with other humans. All it took was a world-stopping pandemic that asked us to keep our distance from each other and taught us to use technology to maintain that distance for months on end.
Those of us in homes with screens have not yet recovered from the chaos and reintroduced old habits like commuting to the office or watching movies at the complex. If the recent trend of bad behavior is any indication, it’s possible that we haven’t yet relearned our coexistence skill sets. throw hard things at musicians During a live show, even if it resulted in an eye-catching video.
Into this precarious situation emerges the argument “encounterism: the neglected pleasure of being face-to-face.” British artist Andy Field To adventure among the masses. For him, our most mundane sidewalk interactions can be steeped in “friction and possibility…anxiety and joy.” These are small opportunities where compassion can be cultivated.
“What will we lose if we stop living on the streets of towns and cities?” he asks. “As we spend less and less time in close proximity to all these strangers and their lives so different from ours, what understanding do we have of the world and of each other? ?”
In the author’s notes, Field said that the idea for Encounterism came before, not in response to, the coronavirus pandemic, and that much of the book was a “coronavirus-created chaos.” He is the first to state that he wrote it in the middle of.
This partly explains why the chapter, essentially the essay, portrays the reality of another time, as if the paradigm had not changed, and feels trapped in amber. help. It may also explain why the book so often relies on research that can be done at home, even though its premise suggests a limited gateway to understanding it. I can’t. (Yes, I am a journalist and cover theater. I believe I will show up.)
Field’s most vivid and powerful writing conveys a sense of physical immersion in an activity he clearly cherishes. Dancing in clubs, he believes, fosters empathy by finding a collective rhythm among strangers in the dark, or by navigating shared experiences while sitting in a crowded movie theater. With an audience that laughs, cries, cries, and screams, “We hold each other tight until the moment the lights come on, and then we all go our separate ways.”
But Field’s opening chapter, an homage to the tactile care provided by hairdressers and an homage to the absence of care when the salon is closed, feels more like a performance of appreciation than authenticity. can be read in And a chapter on eating together explores the importance of the daily dinner, ignoring that these simple social rituals held sacred longings early in the pandemic when people were unable to eat together. I am trying to convey
This is the cacophony that haunts us throughout the book and persists throughout. Field makes plays, performance art, And he tells some funny stories about his quirky career. (In one case, a stranger who was trying to feed him as part of one of his experimental works bit him hard enough to leave a bruise.) hardly mentioned. Human presence, and often with travel – remoteness.
It’s not that the memories don’t belong. As much as the insights that change brings, so does change. The best part of Mr. Field’s chapter on city parks is about the communities Mr. Field found in London’s green spaces where he walks his dogs, and in 2020 and 2021 when people were often forbidden to meet indoors. and how important the place had become to him.
Yet Field never truly understands the fundamental, tangible value of being physically present with our fellow humans. Until a lovely final chapter about the joy of holding hands, he describes one of the most excruciating deprivations of the early pandemic: the inability of people to be with their loved ones while holding hands on their deathbeds. mentions very briefly.
But the book doesn’t capture the despair that many people feel about face-to-face contact, that is, hugging and touching. Smell the head of a newborn baby. You can measure someone’s health in 360 degrees and 3 dimensions, not limited to a video screen frame.
Multisensory pleasure is back, but with too few audiences returning, the entire in-person art form (theatre) is in financial trouble. Vulnerable moments like these call for furiously compelling arguments for engaging with the world directly, not through a screen.
A quote from the French novelist and essayist Georges Perec, the Encounterism epigraph deals with the question of the habitual. But our habits aren’t what they were just a few years ago. It would be much better to register your habits now and examine them.
Freelance journalist Laura Collins Hughes writes about theater for The Times.
Encounterism: The Neglected Pleasure of Face-to-face | By Andy Field | 288 Pages | WW Norton & Company | Paperback, $17.95
