A collaboration with Terrill Maguire, Coman Poon, and Rosemary (Rosie) Horsley, Audrey Joyal, Carol Lim, Diane Milliard, Lynn Shaw, and Lorna Williams, Hands become Ears is a two-part performance, commissioned by the Blackwood Gallery, exploring “affective virtuosity” “[A]ffective virtuosity: this is a matter of a criterion of social ecology, which breaks with the idea that care happens because someone loves you and presents it more as an ethical element that mediates every relation.” Precarias a la Deriva, “A Very Careful Strike – Four Hypotheses,” trans. Franco Ingrassia and Nate Holdren, in The Commoner, no. 11 (2006): 40. in site-specific encounters. The performance cultivates techniques of talking, listening, moving, smelling, tasting, and touching in order to probe the space between performer and audience. Guttman considers attention to be a combination of all bodily senses—a participation of the senses in each other.

In Part I, invited seniors accompany a student audience member on a walk through the University of Toronto Mississauga campus. This gesture unites the hospitality of two strangers meeting, and the rhythm of walking with the exchange of personal narrative, memory, and conversation. The student audience member is then dropped off at the door of a campus residence, and Part II begins: a private indoor performance that accelerates and enhances the everyday tempo of things.

Intertwining modes of performance in private and public sites, Hands become Ears collapses the everyday gesture and the choreographed encounter to situate social codes of engagement within unfamiliar circumstances. Guttman asks of her audience a small surrender of autonomy in order to attune to an ethics and poetics of interdependence, in which care involves fluctuating exchanges of power that are continually renegotiated.