Sat eagerly at a picnic table on the roof, we excitedly dreamt our desires, needs and goals for the encounter we were looking to create. After our adventures in Clapham, we decided not to explore a form, theme or political stimuli, which we had all done historically, but instead spend our process chasing a feeling. The bubbly, surreptitous excitement of a night out inspired us, and we landed comfortably on pleasure.

 

Problem being: what is it? Pleasure could be a sensation, a hormone, an atmosphere, a peak, a trough, productive, destructive, collective, individual, sensory - the list continues.

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Kuenzle argues that ‘pleasure’ is used as a description of subjective and/or phenomenally recogniseable characteristics - that pleasure describes a sensation that although can often be recognised or assumed, isn’t always shared depending on an individual’s subjectivities (2018). Pleasure is individualised and inhabits cultures, personalities and atmospheres uniquely. Therefore, the only starting point we could find was what we as individuals find pleasurable within the confines of our subjectivities. This included things like coillective dance, loud music, catharsis, alone time, confusion and interactions with strangers.

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We wanted to learn how to perform and create hedonic pleasure on stage and within audiences. We adopted Kuenzle’s description, recognising that there are untapped nuances within it that prevent us from clarifying what our definition of pleasure is, and allowed ourselves the room to propose that pleasure is a ‘concept-under-construction’, a term used by Kuenzle to acknowledge the inimitable, ephemeral, slippery nature of the phenomenon.