You Touch Me is a duet about Arash and Emmalena, two dancers in Vancouver who grew up far from here and far from each other. Through their encounter they tell stories from the past to illuminate their possible imagined individual and collective futures. They entertain, inquire and provoke as they move through universal themes such as togetherness, aging and love to those more arrestingly contemporary such as our rapidly changing climates and migration. What is it that links this wild range of themes? Us. Through questions, answers and attempts to understand this moment in time, Arash and Emma bring humanness to the foreground in far reaching dances of seriousness and silliness, madness and hope.

​You Touch Me explores contact and text improvisation in dance performance. The research began with a residency at Simon Fraser University in the summer of 2016. In 2017 they received the Chrystal Dance Prize from Dance Victoria to develop the project further through a residency in Victoria and in Örebro, Sweden. The piece premiered at Dancing on the Edge in July 2017  and has to date been performed at: 

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