Atmos (Blue Light) Sphering

If Derrida defines a “borderline [as] preced[ing] as it were, the determination of all the dividing lines…between fantasy and a “reality”, an event and a nonevent, a fiction and a reality, one corpus and another” (1991), then how we find ourselves, or come to be with an atmosphere puts into crisis demarcation. An atmosphere knows no sharp edges; within the field of scenography, its evasive slipperiness lends to topological uncertainty. According to Sloterdijk the seemingly uncontrollable, “non-concrete and non-informative” (2014) nature of atmospheres meant that “they were passed over by the ancient and modern European culture of reason on its long road to the objectification and informatization of all things and facts.” (ibid). In his seminal writings on atmospheres Böhme (2016, [2013] 2017), has opened up a mediation of subject-object dichotomy, where a swirling reciprocity of discreet textured materialities and the human come into play, which for the purpose of this paper, lends itself well to the generative processes of non-representational forms of choreography. Written from a dancer’s perspective this practice research paper explores the development of choreographic language through the embodied experiences of coalescing energies of atmospheric light and the dancing body (Appia, Fischer-Lichte, Salter). In Atmos (Blue Light) Sphering I propose a co-poesis with a monochromatic landscape of blue, applying what Böhme after Benjamin recognises that, the action of “breathing means that one absorbs aura bodily, let[ting] it enter the bodily economy of tension and expansion, let[ting] this atmosphere infuse the self” (2017). Within the collective production and circulation of an atmosphere, I suggest that a sensorially experienced atmospheric light may allow for a photological fascination described by feminist philosopher Vasseleu as “an engagement in the texture of light rather than in relation to light’s value as…an ideal” (1998). Thus the dynamic process of staging an atmosphere may allow for reconsidering how the presence of light affects the choreographic.