Wind meeting

Abstract

This article explores our human relationship to wind. In the context of ‘wind meeting’ - a transversal durational performance experiment where I joined three interior designers to meet with wind in The Performance Arcade, a live art festival on Wellington’s waterfront, Aotearoa/New Zealand (2018) - ‘meeting’ was explored as medium, matter and movement. At The Performance Arcade a shipping container, open on all sides, was covered in a white curtain, fluttering and billowing – responsive to drafts, puffs, sweeps, gusts, whirls, gales, lulls – offering up an invitation for us, the wind meeters, as well as visitors, invitees, passers-by, watchers and publics to meet wind. Here, to meet wind was an encounter, a thinking through and with meteorological forces in a reposing of current flows of people, power and values. In addition, audiences were invited to join our ‘meetings’, held four times a day, where we gathered around a round table for a period of stillness and refreshment. With a draft agenda each meeting was a period of time to review, re-orientate, discuss and propose new strategies for meeting wind. The meeting format afforded playful, earnest, inclusive ‘scores’ that enabled us to meet other kinds of flows. Draft minutes and actions taken at these meetings became both scores for future tactics and a recording of outcomes. This essay unfolds - through my practice of choreography and performance - how meeting wind in all its physical, cellular, dimensional and metaphoric resonances has become a way of opening up the potential of thinking, encountering and inhabiting air space i.e. the space above, below and between us.