In May of 2006 a short article appeared in the Dance section of The New York Times. It concerned the soon-to-begin renovation of Terminal 5 at John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK), site of the iconic 1962 Trans World Airlines (TWA) Flight Centre designed by modernist architect Eero Saarinen. Closed for business soon after TWAâs demise in 1994, Saarinenâs terminal had been heritage listed, but its future uncertain, for close to a decade. Now occupied by budget carrier JetBlue Airways, the terminal was to undergo a revival of sorts, aligning its super-cool retro-futurist styling with the new super-cool airline on the block, JetBlue. Saarinenâs swooping, bird-like concrete structure is symbolic of the glamorous Jet Age of travel, and is well loved by architectural critics. The article caught my eye, however, because it interviewed two performance makers involved with the project: the theatre designer/architect David Rockwell whose architectural firm Rockwell Group was contracted to work on the interior design, and the choreographer Jerry Mitchell whom Rockwell had worked with on several Broadway productions including Hairspray in 2002 and a 2000 revival of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
That a choreographer should be employed on the design of an airport terminal really shouldnât seem incongruous. What it says is that this place, built above all for movement, requires an expert on moving. Rockwell Groupâs emphasis is on applying a cross-disciplinary approach to creating âimmersive environmentsâ (Rockwell Group 2010), and in the The Times article Rockwell explained, âwe began with the idea of using movement to personalize the experience and deal with the emotions of travelâ (in Green 2006). Rockwell and Mitchellâs involvement in the design of the new Terminal 5 highlights that movement in this kind of space is more than a mathematical problem of getting from A to B; rather, the quality and shape, speed, and contrapuntal rhythm of movements made by people and objects, individually and en masse, deserve attention.
This observation, so far, goes not much further than that of urbanists such as Jane Jacobs, who famously described the pedestrian movement on her Greenwich Village street as a âsidewalk balletâ (Jacobs 1992)1 or the architect and urban designer Jan Gehl, who in Life Between Buildings (2006) argues for a humanised approach to architecture and who has since pioneered a methodology of studying cities by tracking how people move in the spaces between buildings. From the Situationists and Walter Benjamin, to Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, we have developed an understanding of social spaces such as city streets as in dialogue with, constituting and constituted by, our movements through them. The airport terminal is another such public space, but it also participates in a global movement or transportation system. The airport has become emblematic of the extreme mobilityâin quantity and paceâof twenty-first century life. The network of airports spread across the globe makes it seem like nowhere (given economic and political access) is more than a day away, and time-condensed, animated visualisations mapping the planetâs collective commercial flights draw a picture of the Earthâs surface as a teeming web of transportations.2 This feeling, as Bharucha (2000) is careful to point out, typifies the First World, metropolitan bias of global cosmopolitanism. In reality globalisation is highly uneven; many of the worldâs people do not have freedom of movement at such high-speed or in terms of distance travelled, and many of the worldâs places remain remote and unreachable even for those with economic and political privilege. And yet global airports present exemplary in-between spaces.
It has become almost unremarkable that the airport symbolises contemporary globalisation on cultural and economic levels, and is linked to a related elite cosmopolitanism. Yet its very boundedness, heavily entrenching state borders, while also performing a ânowhere/anywhereâ cosmopolitanism, points to the need for a more critical assessment of cosmopolitanism at work here beyond the luxury-brand shopping mall or classed airport lounge. In fact, having moved from the late-twentieth centuryâs era of rampant globalisation into one in which the boundaries of nation are being evermore heavily asserted, it is important that we take a detailed look at the complexities of attachment to and enactment of place that manifests in the cosmopoles we have built.
This book takes the airport as the focus of its study, as a site, event, and above all, a practice of global movement. Its key interest is in the kinaesthetics of such a practice , what I refer to as the choreography of global space. In this site of emblematic movement, I ask, what is it to move in this space? Recalling my disorienting journeys through Hawai'i, in a haze of motion sickness, what is it to feel out of place, and even out of body in a space like this? And therefore, what can a study of the choreography of this space tell us about being in and of a world that understands its fluid, changing, kinaesthetic self? âWhile airports are most often mobilised as symbols of globalisation and transnational identity, they also illustrate the politics of mobility at the scale of the bodyâ (Cresswell 2012, 358). Taking the airport and movement as more than metaphor, as material and affective experiences that we apprehend bodily, I argue that it is difficult to bypass the politics of such mobility; that is, it is through studying corporeal practice that we might get to a politics of mobility.
Choreography is a key term here. I look beyond metaphor towards embodied movement analyses that draw heavily upon somatic and spatial knowledge of gravity, weight, proprioceptive sense , body shape, and other âtoolsâ employed by dance.
The mobilities literature is a touchstone, but I seek to ameliorate a lack of scholarship that puts ideas about practiced movement (movement as practised) from a field of movement experts (dancers) into dialogue with those developed through research on transit, migration, diasporic experience, and similar from mobilities studies, and aligned work within human geography, sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology in the wake of the new mobilities paradigm, and discursive spatial and corporeal âturnsâ of the late-twentieth century.
World on the Move
Over the last twenty-plus years, those of us working in the humanities and social sciences have undergone major shifts in the way we think about culture and cultural interaction. This is thanks in large part to the postcolonial critiqueâto our changing understanding of centreâperiphery relationshipsâand to the spatial turnâthe renewed interest in the roles of space and place from human geography and many other disciplines . The classical conception of culture honed by traditional anthropology sought to define identity through differentiation from others, and correspondingly, to map this differentiated group onto a specific place (Papastergiadis 2000, 49). This view of culture is inherently problematic, however, as unmoving and unchallenged conceptions of place map so neatly on to fixed notions of culture . Marc AugĂ© writes:
One of the major concerns of ethnology has been to delineate signifying space in the world, societies identified with cultures conceived as complete wholes: universes of meaning, of which the individuals and groups inside them are just an expression, defining themselves in terms of the same criteria, the same values and the same interpretation procedures. (1995, 33)
Borders themselves, however, are neither fixed nor natural. Rather, they are socially and politically constructed: the assumed homogeneity and internal sameness of bounded groups, or even bounded bodies, is on unsettled ground. A cartography of borders simply calls attention to the crossings, linkages and border-dwellings that have always constituted unstable and ever-changing worlds. AugĂ© continues in the same line of thinking, âfor a start, it works wellâor rather, it has worked well: land has been cultivated, nature domesticated, reproduction of the generations ensured; in this sense the gods of the soil have looked after it wellâ (46); but then, âit is also a semi-fantasy because, although nobody doubts the reality of the place held in common and the powers that threaten it or protect it, nobody is unawareânobody has ever been unawareâof the reality of other groupsâ (46â47).
Within a sense of perpetual movement and reforming groups of people, contemporary globalisation poses nothing wholly new, although it proposes accelerate...