Janneke Raaphorst

Since ancient times the bathhouse is known as a meeting place. Bringing spa to the theatre is a wellness performance. For Come Together #5 I'll set up a bowl and a pitcher in a warm corner of Frascati and wash hands. In one on one storytelling interactions I would like to bring one’s personal mythology to the surface. My proposal is to wash your hands. You can do it yourself, but let me do it for you. I would love to wash your hands. It gives me a perfect reason to touch you and you can allow yourself to be touched. We communicate via the skin. We meet in water. Water is an element that can transform and allows for transformation upon interaction. I will bring a bowl and a pitcher. This is a mini meeting place. During the meeting in the intimate mini spa I will invite you into the water, treat your hands with homemade scrub and treat them with nourishing oils after I’ve dried them. Before this last step I will have asked you if you want me to tell you what I see when I look at your hands. They show a portrait of you. If you say yes, I will take a minute to observe the lines and patterns. The fingers and the landscape of the palm are named after the protagonists in Roman mythology; Jupiter, Saturn, Apollo, Mercury, etc. In order for these characters to become a protagonist, they undergo a transformation. The way the lines appear in the hand tell about the qualities of these protagonists in your character. If you ask me about it I will tell you about this mythology as I understand it. If you prefer, we communicate in silence. When I talk about your hands, it is storytelling of a story you already know very well. I look for contradictions, how your pitfalls and your qualities coexist. You are the main character of your story. The patterns in your hand are fixed, the lines change if you alter the patterns of your behaviour. The key to transformation is to recognise patterns. You can direct your play. If you ask me how I came about this practice, I will reply that I wanted to learn a language I couldn’t possible recognise visually or compare to anything I know. I looked around for classes in cuneiform, the Babylonian clay tablet script. By lack of such a course I stumbled upon palmreading. I'm dealing with a language indeed as it turned out studying for over the last five years. The well known story clay tablets have carried along is the Gilgamesh Epic. This story tells us about the qualities and pitfalls of Gilgamesh. And it tells us about the way to become immortal. Gilgamesh was challenged to stay awake, so that he would come immortal. He failed, he fell a sleep. As I am telling you this story now, that is the way he became immortal. He became a protagonist. When our interaction is complete, we thank each other and I will dispose the water with traces of you.

Janneke Raaphorst, Terneuzen 1981, lives and works in Amsterdam. She works with text and textile. She makes flying carpets, vehicles for fantasy, storytelling or travelling. Both in her texts and in her textile works she brings to light equivalences, looking for connections and harmony. At the same time she keeps record of things falling apart. The resulting contrast of decay and birth points at transformation. With this fascination for the life of material she specialises in the performative aspect of textile. This can mean a plastic bag folding out into a T-Shirt or a catering service with dissolving shirts. As a costume designer she collaborates with choreographers, artists and activists. In the recent collaboration with Brussels based artist Helena Dietrich, called Elastic Habitat, the audience is invited to get under someone else skin, by wearing a textile sculpture. Elastic Habitat was shown at Frascati at Something Raw Festival in 2018.

Concept Handwashing: Athena Lewellyn Barat
Handwashing & Palmreading: Janneke Raaphorst