Project Contexts 

In my studio, I am looking at a photo of The Impossible — Man in Space, a performance that took place in a gallery in Paris in 1960. There’s a person seated, helmet on, at the end of a metal rod that arches across the room, with gallery guests swarming below him. I try to capture the performer’s physical state: the tense hands gripping the seat, the feel of the helmet against his forehead, and the people walking beneath him. The performer is the South African poet Sinclair Beiles, who, during the event, recited his magnetic manifesto about wishing to see all the nuclear weapons in the world turned into sculptures. I marvel at the image, its kinetic energy, and the conceptual complexity it stirs in me as a choreographer.

Felipe Cervera (2016), a scholar of performance studies, writes how one of the materials artists used in the 1960s was the giant leaps in technology, science, and space exploration: The first man in space (Yuri Gagarin in 1961) and the first human steps on the Moon (Neil Armstrong in 1969) took the human body and its functions into non-human conditions beyond Earth. The genealogies and visions of fictional worlds in science fiction and, one could say, in the science arts, were materialized in movies and news broadcasts for a wide public. Space has long been a subject of interest to artists, and the 2000s are no exception. The launch of the International Space Station (ISS) in 1998, along with the satellites and Moon and Mars rovers from the US, India, China, and the European Space Agency, Elon Musk’s SpaceX programs, and other independent commercial space tourism projects, have all captured the critical attention of many artists. Performatives such as ‘one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’ continue to thrive in art, not only as contemporary geopolitical reflections but also, as I understand it, as an art form in its own right: space art. Cervera (2016) writes about this, and about the rise of interplanetary culture. In the midst of a planetary and ecological polycrisis, the concept of the interplanetary has opened up space for me as an artist to reflect on my position, not only within local ecosystems but also in the technogenesis of humanity as a whole; how technology and the human body are intertwined in the artistic practice here on planet Earth.

As an artistic starting point, questions about how conditions unsuitable for humans can shape the creation of art have taken my choreographic practice into unpredictable outer-space realms. At the core of the project are experiments and reflections on what happens to choreographic site-responsive practice when the place-taking process that informs the choreographic thinking and artistic work extends into a space to which the artist has no direct access. This gap has activated the imagination, shaping the practice, processes, material choices, collaborations, and artistic outcomes throughout the project while probing and challenging the limits of my choreographic thinking. Like Dickens and Ormrod (2016) write about how outer space has long served as a canvas for human imagination, entwined with both divine mythologies and futuristic science fiction dreams, this research project lands into the field of speculative and expanded choreographies acknowledging the ‘beyond-atmospheric’ kinesthetic and material components in order to explore what it means choreographically to take a closer look at such components and what kind of impact inhabiting such incomprehensible dimensions has for the manifold notion of ‘a choreography’ and practices that form the recognition of ‘choreographic’ practices.  

In Dialogue with Choreography

One of the core elements of my choreographic practice is the entanglement of place-taking/making and hyper-reading (Kellokumpu 2019). I understand place as a dynamic, particularly, and continuously forming space, of which the actively moving human body is a part and a kinesthetic material component. Hyper-reading is one source of a bodily practice named ‘choreoreading’ that I have developed during the doctoral artistic research project and continued to develop it in this project. From the perspective of embodiment, I’ve been primarily interested in what happens during the hyper-reading and how this duringness involves choreo-orientation.

I understand choreography as an artform of moving relations. When it comes to this kind of understanding and its connection to outer space, working with such entanglement offers the possibility to probe the liminal spaces of any relation within a dynamic ‘frontier’. I have adopted this perspective from Dickens and Ormrod’s (2016: 2–3) notes that outer space is not an outside space of ‘other’ cultures but outside all existing social relations. However, they also note that the organization of the whole universe has informed social orders and relationships in numerous civilizations, for example through diverse belief-systems. This being said, if outer space is approached as being outside all social relations, it offers an exciting possibility to test the liminal potentials of choreography, particularly as an Earthly artistic practice focusing on simultaneously multidirectional moving relations, which aims to share the outcomes, and which itself is floating and orbiting in space as well.

One of the spatial focus points that has informed the artistic material for the project has been a question of how space is place and vice versa, and what means and tools the project produces when there is no immediate access to such vast place, and its material, cultural, and social conditions. Anthropologist, researcher Lisa Messeri talks about the planetary imagination that space and exoplanet scientists use to study exoplanets. According to her, the concept of place helps scientists make sense of their findings by talking about planets as places (2016: 2). The concept of place suggests an intimate realm that can be used to translate the scale of the cosmos into human experience. In making art, I recognize the motivation of ‘place’ in this way as a practical and methodical way of ‘locating’, which deals with materialities, histories, kinesthetic fields, movements and distances beyond my perception. What Messeri (2016: 9) finds particularly important is that the concrete location of scientists on planet Earth is transformed at the spatial scale into the ability to imagine location, for example on an exoplanet, based on research data. In dialogue with this, the artistic works of this project can be understood as the materialization of spatial imaginative conditions through a choreographic practice in which the simultaneous recognition of the materiality of speculative and actual place and the positioning within the materiality of these places are key methodological tools of the artistic embodied process.

From the position of the performer-choreographer, the project continues to explore the practice and notion of ‘choreography’ alongside the one, ‘choreoreading’. In short, the practice of choreoreading is based on the idea that writing (graphing) and reading are simultaneous embodied practices, but in the history of Western choreography, the artistic potential of reading has been ignored (Kellokumpu 2019). Reading is understood in my practice as a task-based series of visual attention directions through which the human body begins to create a movement texture in a specific location. The embodied practice usually starts by 1) choosing one point in space which invites the performers’ attention, followed by choosing another point and locating the body and attention in between these points with rapid eye movements and peripheral gaze, and 2) by bringing in the conceptual knowledge and experiential history of the performer at play of that/those specific points and 3) experimenting with specific tasks that are stemming from taking a closer look at the elements of hyper-reading. In practice these starting points extend quickly to outer space, everyday orbits and rotational movements of the planet Earth. This entanglement of approaches could also be described as falling in between visual signs and working with that sense of falling. In practice, little by little, the space, place, body and movement-related tasks build upon each other and form a complex motional texture, which stems from the kinesthetic awareness, moving attention, conceptual knowledge, historical experience and the zooming in and out from and of the rapid eye movements characteristic to hyper-reading. One artistic aim of focusing on eye movements is the pursuit of stimulus information before the visual flutter of the eyes has time to articulate into perceptions. This said, the body-texture thus contains contradictory tasks for example when it comes to directing one’s attention and rapid eye movements, and makes the performer navigate through and in the simultaneous choreo-principles. From the position of a performer, the purpose of this navigation is to produce dense moving embodiment in which movements are not developed by the performer, instead the kinesthetic sphere is more like touched (and thus created) by the performer. It is worth mentioning here that in this project the step of the artistic process, which brings in the decision-making process of how to share an artistic outcome with the audience, means to acknowledge the notion of context, the awareness and the exploration of its socio-cultural plurality.

From the position of a choreographer-researcher, the work has aimed 1) to articulate how to recognize the medium and exposed material of such exploration, which leads to an artwork and 2) to contextualize such material exploration to specific conditions in which the artwork takes place and 3) to contribute to the discussion of how to develop pedagogy of choreography through artistic research orientation, focusing especially on the question of ‘How can choreography be taught in the paradigm of choreographic expansion?’ formulated by choreographer-researcher Jana Unmüssig (2023: 7). Aligning with Leon’s (2022: 312) and Rouhiainen and Heimonen’s (2024: 23) notes on choreography and artistic research, defining ‘expanded field’ as a perspective, which pluralizes the very category of choreography, this project contributes to the above aims from the specific intermedial, spatiotemporal, and kinesthetic frames, which bring together cyber and outer space, place-taking and environmental, and planetary and interplanetary time-space-movement relations.