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“Four of them are in this room” is a potent statement from Portugese performance artist and collector Raquel Andre, which causes us all to stir in our seats and swivel heads. Recently, Andre has been collecting lovers, 245 to date and we have just learnt that four of them are also sitting in the snug space within the Project Arts Centre. This is not the only shocking statistic in a show which primarily functions on Andre’s strangely meditative voice taking us through numbers and experiences of intimacy within her encounters. “In ninety percent of these meetings, loneliness is a topic” Andre tells us deliberately yet without sentimentality. A project exploring intimacy, staged and presented in the presence of a small audience seems like an unlikely moment to look at the juxtaposing experience of aloneness. Yet, anyone who has ever become familiar with online dating apps will also know that the two can coexist incredibly effectively. A feature of our current media obsessed age? Perhaps.

A common theme within a steady stream of Andre’s diverse encounters was her question, what does intimacy mean to you? We hear that ‘lover 117’ classifies it as “what stays between these four walls.” As well as a general aphorism for human connection, this lover has unknowingly created a perfect analogy to the importance of theatre in an increasingly mediatized age: four walls and a moment in time which can never be repeated—as Walter Benjamin states,‘reproduced’. Despite their reduction to numbers, which seems ironic in a piece exploring unique moments and by extension authenticity, these lovers are not mere statistics or data for Andre’s project. She lovingly shows us gifts given or letters written to her by the men and women that she came into contact with through her explorations. Like an archaeologist loves his artefacts, Rachel Andre loves and is fascinated by the ‘unique moments’ that make up a life. She reminds us that our gathering here in this theatre listening and observing together is one of these unique moments. Indeed, perhaps we will make up a part of her next collection—“of spectators”. 

One point which is not brought up during the sixty minute show is how Andre met these lovers. I like to think that swiping right through a certain dating app was not involved in the process but instead a more ‘human’ approach in a show which does well to remind us all of our corporeality, providing hope that “connecting with the other is still possible”.