Choreographing the Airport by Justine Shih Pearson

Author:Justine Shih Pearson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

This folded relationship between repetition and difference (as the “always something new and unforeseen that introduces itself into the repetitive”) is not unlike the concurrent relationship I described in Chap. 1 between dance practice as the acquired technique of the body and also practice as a perceptual training that makes the body alert to the production of something new. This could be due to internal rhythms, to changes in the space around the performer, perhaps in relation to others. In Bodyweather—a performance practice derived from butoh in which practitioners are trained to become alert to the environmental pressures around them and as created by bodies themselves—air pressure and temperature, the thickness of time and the passing of the light are all atmospheres that manipulate and can be manipulated by the practitioner, really and imaginatively (as Soja would put it). The idea of “cosubstantial” space that I explored via Laban in that chapter is likewise applicable to the notion of rhythm: it is a thing that brings into relation the internal dimensions and movements of the body and the world of others around the body. As I said earlier, however, if we are being trained to be perceptually alert to anything at the airport it is a shift in perception between the solitary and the crowded, inside and outside, self and other.

Crowd movements at the airport are polyrhythmic, fluctuating, temporary and changing; this may not be the kind of togetherness or sense of belonging that classical anthropology prizes amongst embedded, “grounded” communities, but neither is it necessarily a direct inverse of togetherness or belonging. It has none of the magic solidarity and equality perhaps of Victor Turner’s spontaneous communitas, which “breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality,” and involves “the whole of man in his relation to other whole men” (Turner 2008, 128 and 127). But neither is it the single-paced, human machine of Fordism, nor the total self-containment of Augé’s character Pierre Dupont. We maintain aloneness in togetherness, aware of individual movements of self and others, as well as our (shifting) cohesiveness.

But this is a knowledge that can only come about through embodied movement analysis—here I take up further the opening argument of Chap. 1, that we need a choreographic approach to lived experiences of airport in order to “see” past it as just a space for looking. It is that too— Augé’s description of the passenger is a reminder of how much of travel and tourism has historically been bound up in a relationship to landscape and the gaze: “we should still remember that there are spaces in which the individual feels himself to be a spectator without paying much attention to the spectacle. As if the position of spectator were the essence of the spectacle, as if basically the spectator in the position of a spectator were his own spectacle” (1995, 86). As with his distinction between anthropological place and non-place, Augé makes clear a distinction between passenger and traveller, one who is defined by destination

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