S2E10: In the Air
LK: Lutz Koepnick
MD: Mariama Diagne
TH: Tori Hoover
ML: Maren Loveland
JG: Jennifer Gutman
EV: Emma Vendetta
INTRODUCTION
LK:
Earlier this summer, I visited the Very Large Array (or VLA) near Socorro, in southwestern New Mexico. As if to greet my early morning arrival, the VLA’s 27 radio telescopes—neatly distributed in a giant Y across the Plains of Agustin—swiveled their antennas in perfect synchrony. Nice to meet you too, I thought.
At nearly 7,000ft, the air was still cool and crisp, its transparency and unrelenting luminosity truly uplifting. The landscape is remote and hauntingly beautiful – hauntingly quiet, too. Yes, of course, heavy winds—I was told before—often rip through these plains and numb your ears. And if you step up to any of the dishes you can hear the buzz of their cryogenic cooling system, lowering the receiver’s temperature to just 15 degrees above absolute zero to optimize their receptivity. But otherwise: all this, though radically open to the vast New Mexico sky, feels like a sanctuary, futuristic and yet curiously grounded, high tech but also strangely organic, almost alive.
The VLA asks visitors to turn off cell phones when they arrive on the premises – so as not to disturb the antennas as they catch radio waves from distant stars and nebulas. With my phone off, I walked along the designated pathways, stopped with some sense of awe next to one of the massive dishes. They weigh more than 200 tons, but to the bare eye they appear much lighter than that, as if they somehow managed to trick gravity at its own game.
The altitude of the Plains of Agustin makes you breath hard and heavy, but the thinness of the air, the proximity of the sky, at the same time makes you feel light, as if you could levitate any moment. Meanwhile, the VLA’s advanced machines make us dream of worlds and lives way beyond our orbit.
The icons of disruptive tech today—the Bezos and Musks—have great ambitions to leave Earth and move things human to planets far away, ideally with their tools of transport. We should start from scratch, they suggest, reboot history somewhere else, build new habitats with most advanced technology to escape our damaged planet. This desire to transcend earth’s air, atmosphere, and gravity: It is meant to propel us into the unknown, no? And yet, at the same time, it envisions a future in which we primarily inhabit places of our own making; spaceships and stations that protect us from inhospitable environments. So do those utopias really offer any promising formula at all to reboot human history? And for that matter, are they really even “utopias” at all?
Today’s conversation with dancer and performance scholar Mariama Diagne is inspired by these considerations. Contemporary as much as classical dance, she proposes, explores the art of heavy hovering. Let me say this again: HEAVY HOVERING. Dance always desires to take flight, Mariama says, yet only because it works with the inevitable pull of gravity. Ballet dancers know how to take off from the ground, they develop all kinds of techniques to become and be air. But they do so only because their bodies and minds know that ultimately, they can’t escape the ground. Earth and air, ground and atmosphere, movement and stillness need each other. Heavy hovering, they teach us, is the best we can accomplish: a flash of ecstasy borrowed from the burdens of the everyday; a weighty moment of airful suspension – much like the VLA’s antennas back in New Mexico, striving toward a glimpse of extraterrestrial life even as they stand firmly on the ground of the plains of Agustin.
PART I
MD:
I'm Mariama Diagne, and I'm a dance scholar and dancer coming from a diasporic background. So my dance research is based on my cultural and artistic practices and thinking about how we move on earth.
LK:
You're both a scholar of dance and a dance practitioner. I'm curious how you got there?
MD:
Yes, it is actually quite common in the United States to being a practitioner and becoming an academic. But since I started my academic life in Germany, I was confronted with the opposite. I started to learn ballet and study ballet at the Dance Theater of Harlem in New York, and it was a political approach going beyond the idea that only a certain body type is able to perform ballet, which means a very light skin, pale and light weighted body is able to interpret the figures that we know from ballet. At the Dance Theater of Harlem I started already to understand that it's a political question, who is performing on stage and who is performing a body that can defy gravity at its best. After my studies there, I did perform on stage in Germany. But as we know, life is short as a classical dancer. You have to decide early on whether you want to keep auditioning. Or if you want to have a second life and I did choose the second life and went to study theater, media and music in Bayreuth, Bavaria, which is a really small town.
LK:
But a big music city.
MD:
But a big music city and yes, there I got introduced into academia and the question: What does the body actually do and how can we find words to describe it and how can we connect it to science? What role does physics play when we talk about a body that defies gravity and how is dance history connected to cultural history, cultural studies.
LK:
In 2019, Mariama published a book on the work of legendary German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch. Bausch, who was born in 1940, is perhaps best known for founding the Tanztheater Wuppertal in 1973 and running it pretty much to the end of her life in 2009. Her company pushed modern dance to new frontiers. It reinvented expressionist dance traditions in face of the looming shadows of World War II, it eagerly experimented with collaborative movement practices, and it always exposed audiences to unconventional set and sound designs.
In her book about Bausch, Mariama Diagne introduces the idea of “schweres Schweben,” heavy hovering, as a figure that connects classical ballet to more contemporary forms of dance. Dance as we know it, Mariama proposes, is often driven by the desire to fly, to take off, to be in the air. And yet, as Pina Bausch’s work shows over and over again, this desire to be and become air of course always knows that gravity doesn’t go away. Dance celebrates lightness but every dancer knows that such lightness is simply borrowed it from the heaviness that grounds us.
MD:
Ballet is so much about using the floor as a partner to be light. It's not just the jump that gives you that impression of hovering. It's the light steps. It's maybe the balance. There's a whole technique of how to move your body upwards by using the floor and making maybe just the toes heavy. So you put a lot of energy into the ground by making your toes heavy and connecting with the ground. And even if it's just the tip of the toes and the point shoe to make the rest of the body light. One has to be aware where is my body the heaviest in a certain position and where can I counterbalance using my feet or my fingers. So, if you are not aware of your hand in a certain pose, you can fall because the hand does not have the right tension to counterbalance. So it's like an artistry of balancing, of shifting weight, that makes ballet so interesting.
LK:
In her writing on Pina Bausch, Mariama uses a quote from German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to introduce her discussion: “Man alone resists the direction of gravitation: he constantly wants to fall – upwards.” I was curious to learn more about this puzzling quote.
MD:
The need or the hope to be as light as possible is always connected unconsciously to the fact that one day there won't be any energy left to rise up. My experience from being a ballet dancer, is it's an amazing feeling to hover because the technique allows you to stay in the air. In circus we have technical tools to fly across the stage, but coming from ballet, you know, it's your own body with any other tool that lifts you up and that allows you float these few seconds on stage to fly is something that triggered me when I was looking at Pina Bausch's work. Pina Bausch's work is very heavy. And melancholic. At the same time when I watched one of her pieces, I thought it's amazing the dancers are hovering but they are not hovering up to the ceiling they're hovering into the ground. And that's where Nietzsche was interesting for me.
LK:
His quote, of course, says that we want to fall upwards. We want to fall upwards.
MD:
Exactly. Because the fall is something that makes it easy for us to move. The easiest movement is to say, yes, gravity, just take me. But the idea during Nietzsche's time was to transcend, leaving the body behind and letting the soul hover up into the sky. So I think what Nietzsche combines is that wish or desire to float, using the fall, which is easy to, hover up into the air. These are the two dynamics, that are, meant here.
LK:
I'm really curious about this idea of heavy hovering. A lot of industry leaders, all kinds of futurists these days suggest that we can escape the burdens of climate change by building colonies somewhere on Mars, by escaping gravity, by escaping our own atmosphere. For you as a dancer, but also for you as a scholar, who's really interested in figures of gravity, these kind of visions of trying to escape planet earth, of trying to escape gravity must be daunting.
MD:
I don't want to take away the utopian idea of maybe finding a new or better life on a different planet. But what I would say is we always want to land so we can choose Mars to, to find a new way of living. But the moment we land on Mars, we want to land on ground and walk. And so I think history would just repeat itself.
LK:
Many people want to flee to Mars in order to get out of our polluted atmosphere and experience a different form of gravity. If you could fly, if you were on Mars, would you be interested in exploring what that might mean for your dance? Can you dance on Mars?
MD:
I observed the movements of Neil Armstrong.
LK:
On moon.
MD:
On moon. And I thought, how clumsy. This great achievement being on the moon and it looks so clumsy. I don't want to be on the moon looking that clumsy, like a heavy bear. He's not dancing. He's not dancing. Like every heavy dance, heavy moving being on earth has more grace than, um.
LK:
Because it's too easy.
MD:
There is not enough gravity in order to articulate the way one wants to shape the movement and wants to walk. And this is what happens in outer space. Um, so, if, uh we admire to be able to fly and to be in outer space, then we have to give up any concept of aesthetics, because we won't be able to control shape. It's impossible.
LK:
You need Earth to Dance.
MD:
You need Earth to Dance. But you can use being lighter than the body is meant to be to make a connection between earth and, the atmosphere, and maybe it's, it's more interesting to articulate that than to leave one for the other.
INTERFERENCE 1
LK:
Guys, I, I really need to admit that I'm a, I'm a terrible dancer. Somehow my hips, they just don't do what I, or I guess what great rhythmic music often wants them to do. There's nothing that, that really hovers. Everything seems to be way too heavy. But what about you all? Emma, Jen, Tori, Maren, do you want to share some thoughts about your experience of dance, of connecting earth and atmosphere, as Mariama called it in her interview? Maren, you, you want to start?
ML:
Though I'm not particularly good at dancing, I do enjoy it. And I have a couple of memories actually from childhood of dance being really fun and important to me.
LK:
I'm so curious about this.
ML:
So I loved dancing. Just dancing in general. I love dancing to my favorite CDs. As a kid, I remember I really loved dancing to a Barry Manilow CD, strangely, that my parents had. And um, also the soundtrack to You've Got Mail. That was another great dancing moment for me.
LK:
Oh, I must admit I don't really have any recollection of that film's soundtrack at all anymore.
ML:
But in particular, I really loved the game on the Nintendo Wii called Just Dance, which is not really a dancing game in the sense that to play the game, you really just need to move the controller to match the, the motions of the people on screen in order to, to win the game and get the highest score.
You essentially just sort of match their movements with the controller, But I have such fond memories of just being crazy and dancing with my siblings after school to that game and um, yeah, just having a lot of fun and learning a lot about rhythm and movement, even if we weren't exactly the best or most coordinated dancers.
LK:
Thanks for sharing this, Maren. I think maybe, maybe I should find an old Nintendo Wii. I'm not sure actually they still exist, but find one to up my own dance steps a level. How about you, Jen? What's, what's your experience with, with dancing?
JG:
I am so glad that you asked. Um, yes, I do have a long history of loving dance and participating in dance, I am a tap dancer. So even while it might not seem like tap dance relies on the art of heavy hovering as much as something like ballet does, um, there is a fine balance that occurs in tap dance.
LK:
Could you explain that a little more?
JG:
You know, the history of tap, it's, it's really an indigenous American art form that emerged out of black culture, African American culture alongside rhythm jazz. And at one point tap was much more heavy footed, flat footed, stomp oriented, but, um, One tap dancer in particular, um, named Bill Bojangles Robinson, who is perhaps most famous for his role as the butler in the Shirley Temple films, he revolutionized tap dance by bringing it up onto its toes. So essentially American tap dance as you learn it today basically instructs never to have your heels on the ground unless you are purposefully trying to make a sound with your heels.
Now when you have metal clamped onto the bottom of your shoe it becomes really important to find that balance on your toes otherwise you might slip in a sound that you didn't mean to that might mess with the precision and kind of cleanness of the tap sounds that you're trying to articulate. So even in the world of tap, you're really trying to find this balance between being rooted, being grounded, um, but also finding that buoyancy in the air that allows you to have the finesse and flexibility to be intentional with how you're making sounds between your toes and your heels.
LK:
Wow, I really love how you describe the connection between dance and sound, Jen. That tap dance isn't just something energized by music and rhythm, it's a form of music itself, right? A percussion instrument on its own terms. Let’s move on to Emma. I know you are a really accomplished musician and you play a wide range of instruments. Is dance part of your relation to music as well?
EV:
I love this question. I come from a long line of dancers. My grandmother was a ballerina. My mom danced all of growing up. And I was in dance classes of all kind since I was big enough to walk. But let’s just say by the time I was old enough to get my pointe shoes for ballet, we collectively decided it must be a gene that skipped my generation. Still, I’ve never missed the San Francisco Ballet’s presentation of the Nutcracker. I can still hear my grandmother critiquing a dancer’s lines and my mom pointing out the difference between dancers who are simply executing the moves well and those who are really letting the dance speak through them. So, my ancestors did pass on their innate knowledge of rhythm and love of movement. I will cut a rug to Mama Mia at any dive bar or wedding reception. Busting a silly move is one of my surefire ways for improving my mood on a bad day. While I’m not going be tapping next to Jen anytime soon, maybe I could try my hand at Maren’s Nintendo dance game. That’s more my speed. It brings me joy regardless.
LK:
And how about you, Tori? Do you dance when you don't sit at your computer to edit soundscapes for a podcast or write academic essays?
TH:
Well, you know, I am somebody who loves to dance. I don't know if I really come across this way in the world, but I love the sensation of simultaneously losing your body, losing yourself, and also completely and utterly inhabiting it. That and playing sports are pretty much the only two places I feel like I can actually access that experience. Now, I know Lutz is always bringing up soccer on this show, but in my opinion that's not actually the sport that is most suited to this season, air. But as a big basketball fan, I think that that sport, for me, most connects with dancing. And the air. When we talk about heavy hovering, right? That's exactly what basketball players are doing when they're up in the air. These players, when they're dunking or grabbing a rebound. It feels like they're up in the air for so much longer than their bodies should allow them to be. These guys who are made mostly of muscle, and yet, they seem like they can fly.
TH:
There's a lot of similarity to dancing and the footwork in the game too. In the way masterful point guards and ball handlers like Allen Iverson or Kyrie Irving make a simple spin move look like dancing.
In 2022, Golden State Warriors coach Steve Curry sat down for an onstage conversation with dancer and artistic director Alonzo King, who founded the San Francisco Alonzo King Lions Ballet.
LK:
That sounds intriguing. Did they perform together?
TH:
One thing they actually connected on was what it feels like to be a performer in the moment, right? As Curry said. I don't know how it feels to be a dancer, but as an athlete, you have to get into the zone and find that mind body connection. And that's the connection I make between art and sports.
Where you see someone who is so connected, their mind, their body, their spirituality, everything is so connected that they're able to achieve something so beautiful.
LK:
Thanks Tori, thanks Jen and Maren for sharing all these wonderful thoughts.
I wish we could stay a little longer in this zone and talk more about the beauty of Nintendo Wii and tap dancing, and of course the ballet of basketball athletes. But let's return to our conversation with today's guest, Mariama Diagne.
PART II
LK:
Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have sent all kinds of rockets and space capsules into the orbit in recent years. Their hope, at heart, is this: escape the self-made emergencies on this planet, leave Earth’s foul air behind, restart human life elsewhere. It’s not a bad dream—if it weren’t simply techno-capitalism’s latest investment scheme, designed for highly privileged individuals—and if it reckoned with the existing beauty, the diversity, the vibrancy of terrestrial, gravity-bound life.
This is what Mariama Diagne’s work over the past years, as dancer and scholar, has tried precisely to do. Earlier in our conversation, she spoke about the tensions between lightness and heaviness in dance: good dancers use the floor as a partner, as collaborator, in the effort to hover. I asked her to share some more thoughts about this notion of collaboration, but also about her research trips to Western Africa, about her efforts to study a different vocabulary, a transformative rhythm of moving the body—not in outer space, but right here, on this planet.
MD:
Ballet functions in a group, but it is reduced to the one single body. But since I started to learn indigenous dance practices, I had to completely shift my understanding of who do I dance with and who does support me? It makes more sense to close your eyes, to listen, to be aware of other bodies and the resonance, and to let go. To control the movement like in ballet, to master the floor work, is very much hindering if you want to dance a traditional movement practice, like the one that I'm learning now. It is called Sabah
LK
Sabar is a tradition of social dancing and polyrhythmic drumming of the Wolof people who mainly live in Senegal and Gambia, at the western tip of Africa. The word sabar itself refers to the drums used to energize the dancing, but also the dance itself. YouTube offers countless videos to learn its essential steps, but . . .
MD:
Sabah is not just a dance practice. It's also a cultural practice and it is a rhythm or it's a combination of many rhythms and in order to be able to dance that technique, one has to be in contact with the musicians. that give you a certain rhythm and at the same time the dancer, gives the musicians an impulse what kind of rhythm they should play because the dancer comes with a certain rhythm and this rhythm is not connected to a choreography. It is connected to a way one uses the feet to walk on the floor. So with that dance, practice, we start each, class by walking and we call it taking a walk and making the feet kind of light. So it is not the image of stomping on the floor to have like an earthly connection. It is more like use that space between the feet and the floor in order to dance, in order to listen to the drums, so this dance form, Sabah, does not exist if there is not a rhythm. another group of people that observes, that takes part, that also dances, that also listens.
LK:
You were trained as a dancer the US. do your scholarly work mostly in, in Germany, although with a lot of international connections, but you've also done various kinds of research trips to West African countries. It's a very intricate field of influences, so expand a little bit on that.
MD:
My research field trips did not just come out of an interest of I want to learn something new. They came also out of that interest in my family roots. My family is from West Africa, my father who is from Senegal was raising my sister and me. I was connected with, a Senegalese way of, being in the world, but unconsciously. So I didn't travel to Senegal. All of my childhood. It was kind of like a fresh new view.
LK:
Is it a discovery or rediscovery?
MD:
I think it is a discovery. One practice that is very crucial to my new research is cooking, for example. How to prepare certain dishes in Senegal or in Ghana and how, how are they connected to the dance practices and to the rhythms. what I experienced is preparing herbs with certain tools every day, using very traditional tools in the everyday life to cook, which means a meal, it takes five hours to prepare, but the rhythm and the sound of preparing is connected to the dance rhythms that I'm learning right now. So there are new connections now, connections that I could not know by reading about sabar or by drawing a line from ballet to non-European dance forms.
LK:
Is dance a good teacher for us?
MD:
. Dance, in any kind of style or technique reminds you that the body has limits. Unlimited movement does not exist. I think this could be a lesson one could take from dance. If you cross a line, you're going to fall hard. So if we make it to Mars, what if we want to leave? But we didn't prepare the way back or the way to another planet. So I think that's something dancers learn very fast. There's a limit and you have to have a plan B.
LK:
You spoke earlier about the extent to which Pina Bausch's dance theater was always seen as melancholic. You describe, on the other hand, forms of dance that are integrated into everyday practice, where dance is very life affirming, positive, it's optimistic, I guess one could say. For you as both a scholar and as a dancer, is dance an optimistic, is it a pessimistic formation?
MD:
We tend to think dance is healing, because it allows us to move freely or to be connected much more to ourselves. But dance as an art form can also be very painful and dark. And I think that's something that Pina Bausch experimented on, especially in the early works
She made it extra hard for her dancers to perform. One great example is Le Sacre du Printemps, this important piece of choreography where we have the floor of the stage surfaced with wet, earthy material.
It's also dusty and slippery. So the dancers would slip or fall and they would have to breathe in this dust, and this would cost them a lot of much more exhaustion than dancing on a wooden floor. Pina Bausch used to challenge the dancers and not everyone enjoys pain when being an artist, and I think this is also something that is very true for the movement practices that I'm dealing with. Of course they are optimistic and they can be light. But the teachers I'm working with, they always say, Sabah, it's not something that you can just do. You have to practice. The drummers, for example, if they don't practice, if they have like a two weeks’ break, it's painful to drum because the skin is not used to that beat anymore. It's the same with dancing. The optimism in movement practices is not there to fill 1,000 seats in an opera house. It is to enjoy time together.
INTERFERENCE 2
LK:
We hear more from Mariama Diagne later in the program, but let's take a short break from being in the air to reflect on this past season, our season of being on air. This is our last episode for this year. We've heard from lots of different artists with different backgrounds over the last few weeks and months. I'm really curious to hear what all our team members actually think about this season. Emma, Maren, Jen, and Tori, tell me about some of the most memorable moments. Jen, you want to take the first turn?
JG:
This has been such a fantastic season. I'm so proud to have been a part of it. Every episode was fascinating, but for me, I can't stop thinking about our episode on air conditioning. Um, we're at the end of a very hot summer here in Nashville, Tennessee, and I personally don't do so well in highly air-conditioned spaces, and to think about the use of air conditioning and thermocontrol of environments as a tool of kind of colonial power and management of bodies is just horrifying. So I'm thinking in particular of Susan Schuppli’s work, who we had the pleasure of interviewing, and her Cold Cases series, which features different examples of this thermoregulation of environments and kind of climate colonialism, and in particular the case that she works on at the U. S. Mexico border with the detention centers there, which are also referred to as ice boxes, where migrants are, you know, forcefully held in these just absolutely chilling temperatures. It's really devastating to think about, and it makes me appreciate the work of people like Schuppli even more.
LK:
Maren, what did you think about this season?
ML:
I was really struck by our episode on wind. I love Theo Jansen's Strandbeests.
They're absolutely magnificent, and not to mention the interview with Theo is just such a joy to listen to and learn from. Wind is something that I had never really taken seriously, a moment to consider or think about the artistic or theoretical possibilities. It's always just been sort of an element that has been there. I experience it and enjoy it, but never really took the time to really, really think about it with any sort of meaningful thought or significance. So, this episode was an amazing moment to learn and really think about what are the possibilities of wind.
LK:
And how about you, Tori? What were your most memorable moments?
TH:
For me, this season, I really loved seeing how so many of the different artists we're working with are thinking through a kind of utopian lens. We talk a lot on this show about how to straddle the thin line between appropriately alarming and actively discouraging. But for some of the artists that we talked to this year, it felt like, really, they were working in a mode that was about creating an alternative reality. The beauty of art is that it can imagine a future that is different from what our current world looks like. I saw that in the work of Tomas Saraceno in Maren's episode on clouds. The imaginative worlds of his cloud cities are an exercise in envisioning a beautiful, better, alternative tomorrow. It's also evident in Judy Chicago's smoke and firework sculptures. And, of course, it's in Theo Jansen's Strand Beasts. There's some of that in Mariama's work, too. Just the idea of heavy hovering itself on its face is such a paradoxical notion. In order to actually create a new future, we need a blueprint. That's what these artists are gifting to us through their work. And that's one of the things that I loved most about this season. The way some of these artists were able to conjure an entire new world out of, forgive me, thin air.
EV:
You’re forgiven, Tori. Your point about the creative potential of air just reminded me of what I think has been my favorite part of this season—the versatility, the scope, the breadth of ways we experience air. It’s essentially everywhere, all the time, yet so often taken for granted by us. I didn’t before think of air as a quality of place. But Lutz started by drawing our attention to ancient thoughts on ether as a place of the gods. We reflected on how breath reshaped my experience of places during Covid-19 pandemic. You’ve got Saraceno’s cloud cities, as you mentioned, Tori, and thinking about air conditioning as an aspect of placemaking has just really shifted my thinking. I find myself pausing in places to notice the air quality. That is new for me. And it’s been powerful.
LK:
You know, I really learned so much from each and every of our episodes. We really went a long way, didn’t we. From astrophotographers picturing the sky above the Atacama desert and flutists playing amid volcanic landscapes in Oregon, to cloud artists, to artists who turn fog, smoke, dirty air, and even wind into compelling art pieces, and, yes, to curators and museum directors who think hard about what to do to reduce the art world’s carbon footprint. Such a diversity of positions.
Once thing I must admit, though, before we return to our conversation with Mariama Diagne is this: somehow, the title for today’s episode, “In the Air,” was set long before the interview with Mariama was even scheduled. I just can’t ever get it out of my head: Phil Collins’s famous drum fill, yes that drum fill, perhaps one of the defining sounds of the 1980s. There’s tons of people on Youtube who try to copy it. With all kinds of objects. Tin cans. Paint buckets. Cabinet doors. But no one can get it quite right.
I don’t really know why Collins’s drumfill is so special. But here’s what I think: like good dancers, perhaps like all good art, it creates this brief moment of suspension between the song’s two parts. It shifts time. Makes us pause in midstride. Mariama Diagne might say: It toys with gravity. It falls, upwards and downwards at once. It briefly hangs in the air, like a dancer during a performance. Or one of Tori’s basketballs as they approach the hoop. I am not sure ballet dancers will agree with this, but that drumfill, for me that’s practicing the art of heavy hovering as well.
PART III
LK:
Ok. Let’s get our feet and minds back to the ground again. Or perhaps not quite entirely. Mariama Diagne, who is now a professor of dance and performance at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, discovered the idea of “Heavy Hovering” when researching the work of famous choreographer Pina Bausch—Bausch whose famous dance company was and still is located in Wuppertal, a small German industrial town north of Cologne. Wuppertal is best known for two things: (1) it was an important site during the industrial revolution and essential for the emergence of chemical industries in Germany, and (2) it has this iconic Schwebebahn, its hovering rail, a one-of-a-kind suspension monorail that dates back to 1901 and follows the course of the river Wupper for several kilometers through the city center. You see it over and over again in Wim Wenders’s moving film about Pina Bausch of 2011. The Schwebebahn here serves as a constant background for all kinds of wondrous dance routines. You don’t need to go to Mars to have transformative experiences. You can have them right in the middle of a very industrial or late-industrial landscape.
MD:
Pina Bausch had many offers to go to another city, to another country, to lead a company somewhere else. And she decided to stay there in that industrial, not very shiny, glamorous city and there's a lot of rain. And it's kind of gray. But I think the strength of her work was to actually work with that. What she used was the impressions of her dancers from their everyday life and to transform that into movement, into abstract movement, but also into movement that was very concrete, which meant the interaction between human beings.
LK:
So the project was how can you learn the art of hovering in a city that is as, as heavy and challenging as Wuppertal.
MD:
Yes. My most important interview with one dancer took place almost underneath the Schwebebahn. And there knowing, oh, this train is coming and it's, it's really noisy. And being exposed to that rhythm, I had an interview with, Bernd Marzahn, one of the dancers. And I asked him, so what does hovering mean to you when working with Pina Bausch. We really had at first a hard time to find words and then we found a movement that we could practice together to both understand what hovering meant to him as a dancer and what hovering meant to me as somebody who observed the choreography within that city. So, our experiment was to grab a heavy object, to lift it and to hold it really tight in one's hand and then to drop it. And the dynamic movement of the hand opening led to a hovering. So the arm would move upwards without any further active movement and . . .
LK:
It almost levitates?
MD:
. . . it levitates and, and you can feel that, and it's this like microsecond of levitation. But it was only possible because, I held this object so tightly. And the quality for Bernd Marzahn was to always know that you have to let go in order to feel light. And this was a quality that was very much present in Pina Bausch's work. So you can't ignore the heaviness. You have to embrace the heaviness. You have to embrace the darkness in order to feel light.
LK:
You need Earth to levitate, some kind of ground to truly enjoy what it means to be in their air, you need gravity to be graceful, and you need our atmosphere—however foul it might be—to define and redefine us as living beings on this planet. German nineteenth-century philosophers, including one born and raised in Wuppertal, namely Friedrich Engels, would call this dialectics. In my conversation with Mariama, we decided not to travel further down the route of mind-breaking German philosophy. Instead, to conclude our discussion, I asked Mariama how dance and thought, movement practice and academic work in her view impact each other. Is there some kind of back and forth?
MD:
Yes, but I would say the influence is not visible or even translatable immediately. Coming from dance helped me a lot to observe, observe differently, not only observing forms and shapes, but observing dynamics of the body. What I learned is to read the body in the way it moves. I can recognize bodies after several years, not seeing the person by the way they walk by the way, the alignment of the upper body towards the lower body shifts while walking or sitting. This helps me a lot when analyzing movements in movies or on stage, or even when it's a captured in a photograph. On the other hand, academics tend to keep the body still in order to analyze it. For me, I figured out with my current research project that I will become a different dancer, but I will have to unlearn the movement patterns that are inscribed into my body. And my knowledge as an academic helps me to unpack what my body learned for so long and to understand why certain movements are so difficult for me.
LK:
I love the idea of unlearning, learning in order to unlearn, unlearn to learn. For you, can academic work be a form of dance? Can you bring academics to dance?
MD:
I would say yes. Maybe because I'm socialized in an environment where we think about an expanded understanding of dance that is not limited to choreography. So I think, yes, in academia we dance. But maybe not only in terms of the body moving in a certain way, but creating thought that stimulates the body of readers to move. And this is a quality that I found very interesting and helpful when switching from stage to page. For me, writing can insert a potential for the reader to be moved and to activate something.
CODA
LK:
“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,” philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said. Nietzsche was a true champion, not just of hovering and falling upwards, but of unlearning, of rattling whatever we take for granted, a master of asking untimely questions. Movement and thought, for Nietzsche, belonged together. The point of both was to bring reality to dance, shake it up, not to escape it. “I would believe only in a God,” Nietzsche wrote, “that knows how to dance.” Dance, for him, was one of the few activities that kept humans from lying, lying to others, lying to themselves. Those who knew how to dance, to hover in the air, knew about the art of staying present to both the challenges and the pleasures of the day.
We started this season of Art if Interference with the aim to produce a series of episodes as light as air. But the urgent nature of our climate crisis has made many of our episodes a bit heavier than expected. Ours is a world of ongoing atmospheric emergencies. We alternate between apocalyptic language of climate grief and despair on the one hand and upbeat geoengineering solutionism on the other. It’s a kind of rhetorical whiplash, and much of it is – forgive me – hot air. Lots of things are way up in the air in this situation, but most often we find ourselves bogged down, locked into unmovable positions, pretending we know what needs to be known, eager to protect us from the kind of dance, the kind of unlearning, folks like Nietzsche wanted us to perform.
There is a lot to learn and a lot to unlearn to face the challenges of climate change, the precarity of air in our twenty-first century. There is still so much we don’t know, I also thought on that summer day on the Plains of Agustin, the VLA’s 27 dishes pointing at the open sky around me, listening to signals from the past that might change our future.
As I left the area, I remembered that some scenes from the 1997 film Contact were shot here. The VLA’s dishes served as protagonists of sorts, like the Schwebebahn in Wenders’s film on Pina Bausch. In the novel on which the movie Contact was based, written by famous astronomer Carl Sagan, the character Ellie visits billionaire S. R. Hadden in his orbiting space station. Tired of the world as we know it, Hadden has withdrawn to space, hoping the absence of gravity and his entirely man-made environment could grant him near-eternal life. But the novel suggests that it is impossible to live a life free of earthly entanglements –- even in outer space. Later in the novel, Ellie learns that unwanted insects from Earth invaded the space station after all and—somewhat ironically—caused Hadden’s accidental death. Other reports claim Hadden’s body has been frozen to four-degree Kelvin, shipped more dead than alive to galaxies far away: into an unknown future, immortal in some sense, void of what defines humans as humans in another.
Hadden’s vision is a life entirely free of any interference. And as Sagan writes: “He had found a low door in the wall of time.” But as I pulled away from the VLA, its dishes slowly disappearing in my car’s rear mirror, I had to disagree. Hadden, in his spaceship, in his cryogenic half-grave, doesn’t know how to dance. In his quest for immortality, he has forfeited the art, the pleasures, of walking and movement—and hence, if we follow Nietzsche, of thought, of interaction, of language. Immortal he might be thanks to his privileges, but alive he isn’t.
The VLA’s dishes are experts in heavy hovering, as Mariama Diagne might say. These giant antennas reach into the air, they fall toward the sky, all while firmly inhabiting the earth’s ground, New Mexico’s altiplano. Unlike Sagan’s Hadden, unlike the Bezoses and Musks of our own time, these dishes are all about the creativity of interference, the irreducible entanglement of things human and non-human. They are about turning our attention to what is not us. The VLA encourages us not to escape our troubled planet and its atmosphere. Instead, it asks us to learn more about the smallness of our place in the world and, yes, to unlearn some of our many strategies to turn the natural world into a mere resource, a site of extraction.
In spite and because of the breathless conditions climate change has produced on Earth, these dishes are beacons of hope amid our troubled times. They ask untimely questions. They dance and make the world dance. And in this, they urge us to remain faithful to our planet and its atmosphere – to walk more lightly across our Earth’s heavy grounds.