Making Sense of Air

Abstract

The stage, argued the art critic Adrian Stokes, is more than just the boards. It is also the rush of air that comes with the movements of curtains or flown set, and its displacement by the bodies of performers: ‘The dancer makes of that air a thing that seems tangible to us’ (1935: 54). Tracing lines in the air, and displacing it in eddies as they move, dancers work not only on, or across the boards that ground them, but on the atmosphere above it. In this article I argue for the necessity of thinking more extensively about this ‘tangible thing’, the air, as it is shaped in performance, and how the exertion of the various pressures and movements of these shapings become meaningful as aesthesis - the matter or practice of ‘making sense’. Part of the difficulty of thinking about air in relation to aesthesis is that it not only pertains to bodies but also to situations beyond them; as Peter Adey notes, it is ‘both personal and planetary’ (2014: 39).In this article I examine the aesthetics of air in terms of the tangibility discerned by Stokes (albeit outside the theatre itself) in Rosemary Lee and Simon Whitehead’s 2016 Calling Tree. This performance invoked a tangible sense of air, I argue, in movements of sound and bodies through the canopies of two giant plane trees in St George’s Gardens in Bloomsbury, in central London. In considering the aesthetics of air in Calling Tree I also look to the implications for performance of a range of eco-critical studies - from Ingold’s invocations of the materiality of the ‘weather world’ to the ekstases of Gernot Böhme's staged atmospheres - in which haptic, optic and aural senses testify to the materiality of what Steven Connor terms the ‘palpable absence’ of air (2010).