Choreographing the Airport: Field Notes from the Transit Spaces of Global Mobility

139 Pages·2017·1.58 MB·English

by  Justine Shih Pearson

CHOREOGRAPHING
THE AIRPORT
Field Notes from the Transit
Spaces of Global Mobility
Justine Shih Pearson
Choreographing the Airport
Justine Shih Pearson
Choreographing the
Airport
Field Notes from the Transit Spaces of Global
Mobility
Justine Shih Pearson
University of Sydney
Sydney, NSW, Australia
ISBN 978-3-319-69571-6 ISBN 978-3-319-69572-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69572-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017957222
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P
rologue
As a child I suffered terrible motion sickness. The memory of being per-
haps seven years old and curled up in the cargo area of a small amphibious
plane leaving Fiji, or the many times I wrapped myself in a scratchy nylon
aeroplane blanket as we flew across the Pacific, are burned into my soma.
My nose wrinkles at the mere suggestion of powdered ginger (my moth-
er’s all-natural solution). I don’t even want to mention boats.
My motion sickness would not have been such a memorable part of
childhood if not for the fact that we travelled quite a lot. Growing up in
the San Francisco Bay Area we would regularly fly to Australia to visit fam-
ily. In the early years of this period non-stop trans-Pacific commercial
flight did not yet exist, and it was a significantly long journey that involved
stopping in Hawai'i in either direction. We never actually visited Hawai'i,
but I remember the plastic seats in the gate lounge, the strong scent of
flowers and above-standard fresh fruit plates we would get once we
reboarded. It must have been night time or early morning every time we
stopped there on the way to Australia because the terminal had a slightly
hushed and insulated feel as people waited at the gate, as if there was no
other world going on beyond its linked chairs.
I could of course be totally wrong in this memory of Hawai'i; I viewed
it through a haze of being forcibly woken to deplane for refuelling. On
these flights I would make a bed on the floor between middle rows of seats
and try to sleep all the way to Australia. It was loud and cold but any kind
of sleeping was better than the stomach-churning, head-aching feelings of
motion sickness. Actual turbulence was a relief; it was the going-nowhere
calm of cruising flight that did me in.
v
vi PROLOGUE
But I loved visiting Australia. We stayed with my grandparents and ate
big meals of jiaoze, Chinese dumplings. It was usually winter (my summer
school holidays) and the heater in the living room made an exotic clicking
sound as the gas lit up (I was used to the electricity-consuming Silicon
Valley). During the day I would have Chinese lessons with an aunt, or sit
by my grandmother and wind wool as she knitted over Days of Our Lives.
In this way Australia was both the place of soap opera families, the Hortons
and the Bradys, and the place of bonzer Meadow Lea ads and Schweppes
in glass bottles. The journey was in one movement both leaving and com-
ing home: we carried Australian passports in which were clipped our green
cards for the USA. Australia was (and is) the place I felt most American,
even when I began to carry passports for both. Australia was also the place
of my immediate Chinese family; it was where I went to be American and
also, in a way, to be Chinese.
That is to say, in my experience Australia is a highly ambiguous kind of
terrain. Its placial quality is a layering or coexistence of several seemingly
distant places. That going home to Australia is in some way also folded
into some sense of China or Chineseness is a product of my diasporic rela-
tions and the serial migration that has occurred in the family over several
generations. That I feel American in Australia is compounded and con-
founded by my feeling that while I could be Asian Australian, I am some-
how not Asian American (or is it the other way around?). But further, I
want to suggest that this confused set of associations made the space of
“Australia,” for me, a kind of in-between space not unlike my “Hawai'i.”
They were both travel spaces, both of a kind of real/imagined order, con-
structed out of my journeying through them. Amidst the structures of
national belonging they existed somewhere out of bounds or out of bor-
ders or out of place, in altogether more contingent and mobile domains.
This is a book about the in-between experience of travel, or more spe-
cifically, about in-between spaces of transit and how we negotiate and
experience them. The title, Choreographing the Airport, points to one of
the key travel spaces of contemporary life—the global airport. It is my
contention that such spaces perform themselves (and perform on us) in
ways that we don’t pay much heed to. Despite their covert performance
however, these in-betweens have a lot to tell us about the turbulent and
movement-filled world we have constructed and inhabit.
A
cknowledgements
This has been a lengthy project that I wasn’t sure, at many points, would
ever see itself into book form. To the friends and family that persisted in
their encouragement, I give my biggest thanks. To steadfast colleagues
who were at the ready when I needed a critical reader: Kate Rossmanith,
Ingrid Voorendt, Lizzie Thomson—and especially Amanda Card, unfail-
ing in your support; to Paul Dwyer, whose guidance towards Ghassan
Hage’s work assisted the concluding thoughts of the book; to Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, whose email back in 2006 linking to that day’s
New York Times article about the Saarinen terminal renovation sparked my
first ideas; to Jacqueline Lo, who gave me generous feedback on parts of
the research when they were in dissertation form; to Sydney’s Writing
Dancing group, whose writers and choreographers foster such a collegial
environment for exploring practices for writing about, around, and along-
side movement; to Tenjinyama Art Studio in Sapporo, Japan, who pro-
vided such valuable residency space for intellectual and creative
regeneration; and to Tim Sinclair, who always said I should write books.
I have a young friend, six years old, who in his six years has probably
flown more than most people will in a lifetime. His favourite way to spend
a long-haul flight is to watch the flight map. In my last few weeks of work-
ing on the manuscript for this book, I spent an afternoon with him in the
park, enjoying the winter sun. For hours he ran in lines and loops, unflag-
ging as six-year-olds can be. Later that night he recounted, via a hand-
drawn map, the many take-offs, landings and flight paths he had made
around the globe. He reminded me, just when I needed it, what capacity
for imagination we need to grasp the idea of our world; and the need we
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
have to spatialise it through our embodied movements in order to make it
real to us. To Luca, keep flying.
This research was supported through an Australian Government
Research Training Program Scholarship, and the James Kentley Memorial
Scholarship from the University of Sydney. Parts of Chapters 1–3 appeared
in different form in an article for the journal About Performance.
c
ontents
1 T owards a Practical Cosmopolitanism 1
2 Persistent Place or Thirdspace? 37
3 Mass Transits, Micro Transitions 61
4 Performing Self at the Border 83
5 Bodies Under Duress (The Dystopic Future is Here) 103
Index 129
ix
CHAPTER 1
Towards a Practical Cosmopolitanism
Abstract Claiming the airport as an exemplar of contemporary global
space and the incessant logics of movement seen to be at the heart of glo-
balisation, the introductory chapter asks what is it to move in the airport
space? What is the choreography of the airport? Reviewing debates on criti-
cal cosmopolitanism, and the corporeal and spatial turns, this chapter
argues for the need to further embodied analysis of global movement
through a kind of kinaesthetic ethnography, which puts the wealth of think-
ing about moving bodies in space from dance studies into dialogue with
mobility studies. Such an approach, the chapter argues, can lead us to
important knowledge about the ongoing tensions between sameness and
difference, national and transnational, self and other, as experienced in the
transit spaces of global mobility—a practice of cosmopolitanism.
Keywords Cosmopolitanism • Airport • Kinaesthetic ethnography
• Choreography
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 archi-
tect Eero Saarinen. Closed for business soon after TWA’s demise in 1994,
Saarinen’s terminal had been heritage listed, but its future uncertain, for
© The Author(s) 2018 1
J. Shih Pearson, Choreographing the Airport,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69572-3_1