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Hyperrhythms

Ecological Rhythms and Dance Without Nature

by Brendan P. Behan, MFA
a.k.a., Breandán P. Ó Beacháin

A prior version of this paper was first presented at the Experiencing Time / Embodying Rhythm Symposium at Columbia College Chicago on Sept. 19, 2024.

Revised and updated: November 15, 2024

Excerpted Version

José Arcadio Segundo seguía releyendo los pergaminos. Lo único visible en la intrincada maraña de pelos eran los dientes rayados de lama verde y los ojos inmóviles. Al reconocer la voz de la bisabuela, movió la cabeza hacia la puerta, trató de sonreír, y sin saberlo repitió una antigua frase de Úrsula.

—Qué quería —murmuró—, el tiempo pasa.

—Así es —dijo Úrsula—, pero no tanto.

Al decirlo, tuvo conciencia de estar dando la misma réplica que recibió del coronel Aureliano Buendía en su celda de sentenciado, y una vez más se estremeció con la comprobación de que el tiempo no pasaba, como ella lo acaba de admitir, sino que daba vueltas en redondo.

— Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad (1967, 2009), p. 399–400.

AND.

And before I sidetrack myself, let me rush to the point: this is a paper about dance ecologies, dance historiography, and hyperrhythms. I propose to apply Timothy Morton's concept of the hyperobject—"objects that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans"1—to certain kinds of ecological rhythms, which I call hyperrhythms, that are, similar to hyperobjects, massively distributed in time. The strength of the notion of rhythm as a framework for ecological understanding, I argue, lies in its ability to decenter Western individualism and historical exceptionalism, which are at odds with ecological integrity and survival. In sketching out this concept, I offer a limited but crucial critique of the notion of the Anthropocene, the recently named geologic era marked by the supposed recent emergence of humans as "geophysical agents" in the Earth's 4.5 billion-year history. Environmental concepts such as the Anthropocene designation continue to center humans—and very recent human history at that—in ways that fail to account for complex species and material interactions—ecology—dispersed across massive timescales—which is where the concept of hyperrhythms makes its crucial intervention in this discussion. By widening our temporal frame and allowing for the massive, messy complexity in which human existence is inescapably enmeshed over time, we can better attune to the ecological and material systems whose interdependence is foundational to the biosphere.

The ongoing debate about whether human activity has pushed the globe into a new geological era, the so-called "Anthropocene", has brought into sharp focus ecological changes along timescales that both exceed our capacity to easily comprehend and yet are all the more urgently salient because year by year, season by season, climate patterns are changing, glaciers are melting, and sea levels are rising. How do we attune massive socioeconomic systems built through colonial violence and environmental devastation2, both historical and ongoing, to ecological hyperrhythms whose cycles readily exceed and subsume human timescales? How do our collective bodies resonate with our disparate and highly unequal experiences of and exposures to climate, an expansive hyper-complex system of divergent, cyclical patternings that stretch along timescales that human cognition does not readily grasp?

My argument is that art can and must figure prominently in our collective approach toward addressing ecological crises, including climate change, mass extinction, and environmental racism. Dance in particular as an embodied expressive cultural practice rooted in and in many ways produced by its complex relationships to space, place, and other material assemblages (living and otherwise) presents a unique artistic format in this effort because of its particular ecological qualities, which help bring ecological relation to the fore. When deeply connected to ancestral ecological knowledge bases and critical of utopian ideologies of "Nature" rooted in white supremacy, dance and other artistic practices can serve as a powerful tool in developing culturally-rooted, place-responsive, and diverse attunement strategies in relation to to ecological crisis.

In support of this argument, this paper will build on the work of Arabella Stanger to situate European traditions of theatrical dance within longer histories of land theft and spatial appropriation. I do this through a brief examination of Rudolf Laban's theories of space which, as I show, situate his white body at the literal and philosophical center of his spatial geometries, notation system, and racialized vision of Nature in order to lay the groundwork for a critique of universalizing discourses of "harmony" and "harmonic space" rooted in eurocentric constructs of the Society/Nature binary. From this analysis, I turn to looking at the ecological dance methodologies of Jennifer Monson to queer our archival and embodied research practices in ways that are responsive to the critiques that Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian thinkers, artists, and writers have been pointing out for centuries and in collective solidarity with our shared "communauté terrestre"3 ("terrestrial community"), as Achilles Mbembe has called it. This will then allow me to elaborate some preliminary recommendations for dance artists and collectives and the field of professional dance practice more broadly in the U.S. and Western Europe to build toward what Indigenous Brazilian philosopher Ailton Krenak calls a "futuro ancestral"4 ("ancestral future") that is better attuned, if imperfectly so, to the hyperrhythms of our present ecological era.

FIVE.

Aí Macabéa disse uma frase que nenhum dos transeuntes entendeu. Disse bem pronunciado e claro:

– Quanto ao futuro.

Terá tido ela saudade do futuro? Ouço a música antiga de palavras e palavras, sim, é assim. Nesta hora exata Macabéa sente um fundo enjoo de estômago e quase vomitou, queria vomitar o que não é corpo, vomitar algo luminoso. Estrela de mil pontas.

— Clarice Lispector, A Hora da Estrela (1977), p. 85.

And now I would like to offer an aside, a digression, and a tangent—that which does not follow, non sequitur, lo que no sigue, qui ne suit pas—made up of knowledge-objects arranged one after the other, in the way that as a child I would line up my collection of toy cars along the sidewalk, an introduction which goes away in order to come back, eventually—or so I believe. What follows, or perhaps better put wanders away in order to double back again, is my articulation of a neurodivergent choreography of writing, which proceeds (which is to say, by not following in the traditional sense (which is to say, the neurotypical sense of enacting of traditions of thought organization and the performance of narrowly defined notions of clarity)) by way of digression and by way of nested statements within subordinate clauses within parenthetical comments, bracketed off from the point, which is indeed a volume, and fully lost in the forest or meadow or bog or desert or in the valles (valleys) which cleave the mesas from each other, to follow the movement of connectivities that lead me off path, off stage, and off balance, off, and off, and off, believing deeply, bodily, and fully that neurodivergent assemblies and embodied linkages of thought-objects are vital and richly abundant in their unwieldy configurations—and here I'm referring to specifically ADHD and autistic methodologies of knowledge assemblage. What I offer in this approach is not an essentialized, monolithic, and falsely universalized understanding of ADHD or autism (or AuDHD) but rather my particular embodied experiences of these, which is personal to me and which is wrapped up in and permeated by, among other subject positions, my whiteness, my cisgender maleness, and my settler position on occupied, unceded Native land, which are three subject positions that are themselves regularly bracketed off by way of elision and obfuscation. Like Nicholas Mirzoeff, I acknowledge my complicities in the very systems which I seek here to critique.5

The discussion that proceeds is my attempt to embody a queerly disabled methodology that resides within and is coextensive with my body and which I am operationalizing in and against the hegemonic impositions of whiteness and white supremacy, specifically against white supremacist modes of knowledge production in the fields of ecology and dance studies, knowing full well that my desire to deploy queer disability politics to disrupt and upset my whiteness and the whiteness within these fields of knowledge never escapes whiteness but instead doubles back against itself to surface the disappearing of its structures and mechanisms. While I may momentarily resist the force of the Earth's gravity by jumping, metaphorically speaking, I know bodily that there is no escape velocity that launches me beyond its pull, that whiteness is a "structuring structure"6 with "an interest in disinterestedness"7 with regard to its "right to speak"8 that I simply do not step outside of because I so much as wish it to be so particularly because identity is imbricated with my very notion of space to begin with—built into the very idea of "outside" itself, as Edward Said once identified so presciently9—, which is to say that it is an organizing construct of both space itself and its perception. Timothy Morton makes a parallel point while speaking about anthropocentrism which fully applies here:

This brings up a deep philosophical insight about the fact that we simply can't be on the outside looking in. [...] It means that you realize you can't achieve escape velocity from your phenomenological style or embeddedness in data interpretation or confirmation bias (three different ways of saying the same thing). We cannot get out.10

Knowing this, however, does not relieve me or my fellow white people of our responsibility to question, analyze, and deconstruct the ways in which whiteness operates or of our responsibility to ascertain how whiteness structures our perception, and it certainly does not warrant the self-reinforcing fatalism that would leave the full burden of this work squarely with Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. To do so, indeed, would be to cynically make the project of liberation the sole and double burden of those who already suffer its ongoing, systemic violence and from the very position where we marked our constituency within the oppressor class.

In these understandings I am deeply indebted to the Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and other people of color thinkers, writers, and artists who have called on me and my white kin to understand racism as a system and not an assortment of individually held beliefs; to deconstruct settler colonialism and our racialized privilege; to understand and put an end to the long and ongoing histories of racialized violence, deterritorialization, and dispossession that are foundational to whiteness; and to be co-conspirators in the dismantling of the myriad and intersecting social, political, cultural, and economic systems that uphold white supremacy. Among those whose knowledge and insights weigh heavily upon my discussion here are Kathryn Yusoff, Dina Gilio-Whitaker, Sari Hanafi, Aimé Césaire, Ailton Krenak, Achille Mbembe, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Malcom Ferdinand, Edward Said, Ashis Nandy, Partha Chatterjee, Alexander G. Weheliye, and Saidiya Hartman. My thinking is also particularly enriched by the queer ecological thinking and artistry of dancer and choreographer Jennifer Monson, who volunteered to donate her time for an interview for my research presented here and who also served as my professor and mentor during my graduate studies. Monson, as a white queer woman, has been a deeply important mentor in helping me to perceive and deconstruct white supremacist structures, particularly in the worlds of dance, environmentalism, and academia.

As I start wandering my way back to the point-which-is-a-volume, I should also share that the choreographic structuring of this paper is my attempt to activate Jack Halberstam's "queer art of failure", which embraces "failing, losing, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing"11, and Henri Michaux's "schizophrenic table":

As it stood, it was a table of additions, much like certain schizophrenics' drawings, described as 'overstuffed,' and if finished it was only in so far as there was no way of adding anything more to it, the table having become more and more an accumulation, less and less a table…. It was not intended for any specific purpose, for anything one expects of a table. Heavy, cumbersome, it was virtually immovable. One didn't know how to handle it (mentally or physically).12

Halberstam and Michaux's insights became part of my choreographic practices back in late 2015, when I began work on my piece, Pxyxl OR Padrão e Compasso OR Boat Price OR [...] (2016), a dance work whose complete title would take several printed pages of text to include in its entirety. This titling practice I learned from reading Clarice Lispector's A Hora da Estrela in which the author gives multiple titlings to the novella and in doing so gestures toward a dispersal of identity—or better yet a thronging of identities—and an untethering of fixedness across namings while invoking an understanding of the multiplicity of interpretations, perspectives, and ways of understanding that blur and dissolve the illusion of unified interpretation. By continuing to engage with Halberstam, Michaux, and Lispector's work, I am extending my choreographic research into the archival research that I have assembled in this paper as an ongoing commitment to dissolving the boundaries of discipline that stand between embodied dance practice, which is itself research, and written composition based in archival investigation. Of course, in invoking Michaux, I must be forthright in noting that I do envision this present work as building toward a specific purpose (elaborated upon later), which is where the discussion that proceeds wanders off—perhaps in failure—from Michaux's schizophrenic table. Or perhaps this is merely where my embodied politics of hyper-focus and diffuse points of attention veer off from my understanding of the schizophrenic object.

One last item: my approach is also itself a critique-in-form, if not in word, of the notion of "deficit" in the clinical modeling of ADHD—a topic that is richly valuable, but one I will not be able to pursue here apart from my choreographic choice in structure and topical connectivities and juxtapositions.

I end this going-off-topic-before-the-topic with a quote from Halberstam, which is so richly choreographic that it is nearly a movement score as is. The objective for this inclusion is that Halberstam's words may function as a read-in-case-of-emergency coda to the reader about what to do should the veering-off-point become overstimulating or as a stimming score for finding ourselves bodily should we feel ourselves disassociating:

We will wander, improvise, fall short, and move in circles. We will lose our way, our cars, our agenda, and possibly our minds, but in losing we will find another way of making meaning in which, to return to the battered vw van of Little Miss Sunshine, no one gets left behind.13

SIX.

WHAT'S YR NATIONALITY!?!? This guy shouts at me during drag queen karaoke at this gay bar two stops down the line.

In order to talk about a hurriance, you first have to talk about a preexisting disturbance over the ocean so you have to talk about mean ocean temperature, so you have to talk about human industry and sun rays, so you have to talk about helium, so did you know helium was named for the sun god Helios and was defined by the gap in the solar spectrum so literally not itself but what surrounded it, so of course we have to talk about the solar system, the Milky Way, the networks of universe and the Big Bang.

How far back do you have to go to answer any question about race?

— Tommy Pico, Nature Poem (2017)

And Timothy Morton in his book Hyperobjects describes hyperobjects, objects which are massively distributed in space and time relative to, say, plankton, crawfish, humans, saguaro cacti, giant sequoias, and other beings roughly within these relative size ranges, as having a number of key qualities. Among these qualities are the following: (1) hyperobjects exhibit a stickiness, which he calls being "viscous", that makes it difficult for smaller beings on the worm/oak tree/human/etc. scale to escape their effects; (2) borrowing the term from quantum theory, they are "nonlocal" in the sense that the appearance of any local aspect of the hyperobjects fails to capture its entirety, which far exceeds any instance of its immediate manifestation, similar to what is expressed in the English phrase, "the tip of the iceberg"; (3) their effects are exhibited "interobjectively", which is to say that we cannot experience hyperobjects directly but rather that the appearance of their supposed realness is in fact the result of a mediation through their interplay with other objects.14 There are two additional qualities to hyperobjects, namely "temporal undulation", which Morton describes as a "Gaussian temporality"15, implying that is like a wave-like curve with a "rippling"16 quality (a description that he repeats at multiple points), and "phasing", meaning "to approach, then diminish, from a certain fullness"17. I separate these last two qualities from the prior three for the reason that phasing and temporal undulation in Morton's analysis appear to be qualities of all objects in space-time and not qualities that are specific to hyperobjects. Some examples of hyperobjects that Morton offers include planets, the Florida everglades, evolution, the Earth's climate, and the sum total of all nuclear waste on the planet. Embracing the concept and nomenclature of the Anthropocene, Morton argues that we are in "the time of hyperobjects"18 as ecological catastrophes brought about by the hyperobject of human-induced global warming become all the more perceptible in our day-to-day lives.

There are important critiques which must be brought to bear on Morton's wholesale embrace of the notion of the Anthropocene as well as the idea that the present age is suddenly of an ecological nature, which are subjects that I will return to in a moment, but for now I want to bring into focus the importance of the hyper- prefix as it relates to entities that are massively distributed in time, as this is the basis from which I develop my concept of hyperrhythms. I posit that hyperrhythms are cyclical patternings that are more or less regular and whose distribution in time is of an enormous scale relative to the lifespans of, among other living beings, mushrooms, opossums, sea anemones, crows, coneflowers, woodlouse spiders, and prairie grasses. To be more numerically specific, the lifespans-scale employed here runs roughly from a day to a century, give or take, or from zero to one-hundred years (or 102 years). Examples of hyperrhythms at the lower end of the scale include the rhythms of soil formation averaging around a 1850-year-long (or 103.27) cycle in the case of Eurasian soil formation19, then expanding upward into rhythms of glacial and interglacial periods (ice ages) currently averaging around 100,000 (or 105) years20, and passing beyond rhythms of the slow carbon cycle (also known as the deep carbon cycle) wherein carbon passes between the Earth's exospheric reservoirs, composed of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and carbon reservoirs in the Earth's crust and mantle.21 To put this in perspective, humans evolved around 315,000 (105.5) years ago, dinosaurs evolved around 200 to 250 million (108.3 to 108.4) years ago in the Mesozoic era. For further context, corals evolved around 500 million (108.7) years ago in the Cambrian period, which is the first geologic period of the Paleozoic Era, and modern corals began constructing reefs approximately 60 million (107.8) years ago.22

As might be readily inferred, hyperrhythms are better scaled to geologic time frames, which are measured in hundreds of millions of years (108), thus making it an appropriate conceptualization particularly with regard to the Holocene/Anthropocene designations. The Anthropocene identifies a supposedly new geological era begun some fifty to two-hundred (101.7 to 102.3) years ago (depending on the source), aligned with either the advent of the Industrial Revolution or with the beginning to the Atomic Age marked by the detonation of the first nuclear weapon in New Mexico in 1945.23 The Holocene, by contrast, refers to the geologic period since the cessation of the last glacial period about 11,700 (104.1) years ago.24 As is readily apparent, the Anthropocene designation marks an extremely recent moment on the geologic time scale.

Before proceeding further, it is important to address the question of what the notion of rhythm, as opposed to cycle for example, offers in terms of our understanding of processes of nature. The term cycle designates a regularly ordered succession of events such as the cycle of seasons proceeding from winter to spring to summer to fall in that order, whereas rhythm is capable of subsuming the notion of cyclical patterns without being conceptually limited to a set order of events or stages. This flexibility in the notion of rhythm allows us to describe music as rhythmic since it certainly can but need not repeat itself in a precisely set ordering of sounds. Rhythm has also long been used to describe a number of natural processes, including circadian rhythms of the human body which are ecologically grounded in the cycles of day and night.25 Rhythms can interact with each other to produce complex, composite oscillations. So while the cycles describe patterns whose ordering and frequencies are singular, rhythms subsume a greater number of complex orderings and oscillatory patternings. As one group of researchers notes, the notion of rhythm is foundational to understanding the complex interplay between an enormous variety of biological and ecological processes which link the cosmic to the microbial: "Biological rhythms govern the entire biosphere, covering processes as diverse as pulsatile hormone secretion, cyclic variation in appetite and food intake, intertidal activity of coastal and estuarine animals, daily plant leaf movements, the sleep–wake cycle, diurnal vertical migration of animals in oceans and lakes, the menstrual cycle, annual bird migration, and seasonal hibernation."26 Rhythm, therefore, is of considerable value as an ecological concept through its correlation of biological, material, and environmental processes and particularly with relationship to discussion around the Anthropocene which involves the complex and temporally situated interplay between the biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and the Earth's mantle and core.

Turning back, then, Morton's discussion of the hyperobject of climate is key in explaining my choice of hyperrhythms to understand vastly scaled ecological issues. As mentioned earlier, there are several important issues with Morton's concept of climate as a hyperobject, first amongst which is the problems associated with framing the hugely complex and multiple systems which constitute climate as an object, an issue which Andrew M. Bauer and Mona Bahn have already touched upon.27 As a number of critics have pointed out, the anthropos in "Anthropocene" is problematic, not least because it appropriates all of humanity into a bland, homogenous assemblage wherein race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and differences of power and access are all too conveniently erased while at the same attributing asymmetrical contributions to the climate crisis as the equal responsibility of a flattened humanity.28 Additionally, core to the logic of the Anthropocene designation is the idea of the "emergence" of humans as a geophysical force. This is a point which Bauer and Bhan have argued powerfully against, in part because it relies on an entirely inaccurate privileging of human contributions to climate while ignoring the ways in which human agency with respect to climate is perforce the result of a complex, historically dispersed interplay with other biological and material agents, whose respective contributions are inseparable and non-negligible. Their argument is worth quoting at length:

To put the point bluntly: Respiring biological agents are simultaneously geophysical agents. Organisms that release gases (e.g., carbon dioxide, free oxygen), contribute to their production (e.g., anaerobic decomposition and methane), store materials, or even impact the distribution of other organisms and materials affect atmospheric conditions that contribute to climate in some way. To name any one of these species as a natural climatic agent to the exclusion of others is to ignore the countless interactions among earth's collection or organisms and things that contribute to atmospheric conditions and emergent climatic conditions. The effects of one group surely might be greater than others at certain points of time, but its effects are only realized through dynamic relationships among an assemblage of others that do not simply 'add up' to climate.29

Morton and others who have adopted the Anthropocene designation have done so by ignoring the contributions of Black and Indigenous writers, continuing a practice that Malcom Ferdinand in his work Decolonial Ecology identifies with a longstanding tradition of racial exclusion in academia, government, and non-governmental organizations, which treat the contributions of non-white peoples as "inconsequential".30 While I cannot do justice here to the many arguments that have been offered in all of their rich complexity, some key points bear noting. As a counterpoint to the Anthropocene designation, Kathryn Yusoff elaborates a powerful critique by counterposing her notion of the "Black Anthropocenes" to resist these homogenizing machinations that seek to ignore and erase the long history of ecological racialized violence of five-hundred years of colonialism:

The proximity of black and brown bodies to harm in this intimacy with the inhuman is what I am calling Black Anthropocenes. It is an inhuman proximity organized by historical geographies of extraction, grammars of geology, imperial global geographies, and contemporary environmental racism. It is predicated on the presumed absorbent qualities of black and brown bodies to take up the body burdens of exposure to toxicities and to buffer the violence of the earth. Literally stretching black and brown bodies across the seismic fault lines of the earth, Black Anthropocenes subtend White Geology as a material stratum.31

As Yusoff makes clear, geology and geography are deeply intertwined with race, which makes discussions of the environment absent race another form of white environmentalism. The Anthropocene as an identifier of a geologic period defined primarily by human–environment interactions, then, must be positioned within discussions of race in its environmental modalities. Indeed, to place race on the periphery of discussions of environmental destruction and human-propelled climate change—or worse, to regard them as unrelated—fails to understand how race is formative within concepts of environmental relation in colonialist contexts and how black and brown bodies are not merely exposed to environmental harm but are also the material buffer against such harm. Yusoff's insights reveal how the discovery of an environmental crisis of geologic scale becomes interpretable as "recent".

That white settlers saw and continue to see themselves as entitled to the lands and waterways of African and Indigenous peoples is foundational to colonialist ecology. Within this logic, the forcible sequestration and violent relocation of these same peoples becomes a central ecological practice, revealing that within the colonialist framework. To put it bluntly, slavery, genocide, and the destruction and pillaging of material culture is White Ecology. This is because white supremacy conjoins notions of land, space, race, and environment under the material and administrative domain of European civilization which regards as its expansionary project the domination of Nature. As Dina Gilio-Whitaker notes, colonialism has been a policy of environmental destruction from its inception:

[...] colonization was not just a process of invasion and eventual domination of Indigenous populations by European settlers but also that the eliminatory impulse and structure it created in actuality began as environmental injustice. Seen in this light, settler colonialism itself is for Indigenous peoples a structure of environmental injustice.32

How is it possible to comprehend the forcible relocation of more than twelve million Africans through the Atlantic slave trade or of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands absent a frame in which land, environment, and space are more than just conincident? To argue that race has no environmental dimension would be to adopt the geo-logic of the colonialist framework which views lands and waterways as vastly open and available to the expansionary violence of the white gaze while actively, consciously, and proscriptively unseeing the native peoples already there. In short, it would mean to "discover" by means of a visual politics of genocidal disappearance and spacio-cidal terraforming.33 In this formulation, Nature retreats into an inert, ahistorical background against—and not within and of—which the racialized other appears as wholly incidental. To quote one particularly direct contemporary expression of this attitude: "Land does not belong to any Native American tribe just because they lived there."34 Violent systems of deracination, enslavement, and environmental devastation can thus be reconstituted as the logical consequence of a necessary and inevitable reordering of Nature in line a racial politics of territorial domination and environmental control which exploits and enslaves racialized others to carry out, among other jobs, the work of terraforming.35

To view the interlacing of race, space, and environment in this way does not require that we adopt the settler colonialist view of the peoples of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas as passive and somehow more "natural" relative to their European counterparts. Quite the contrary, to embrace the complex ways in which race, space, and environment are interthreaded serves to highlight how all humans are ecological beings (i.e., beings of relation( and beings of nature (i.e., beings embedded in and coextensive with the physical universe). Such a view enables us to locate nature in the European colonial metropolis as much as anywhere else and dislodges humanity from the lacuna of anthropocentric exceptionalism from which the Nature/Society binary emerges.

Race and environment were and continue to be deeply imbricated. This is so much so the case that even William Cronon in his "foundational"36 Changes in the Land, regarded by some as having "launched"37 the genre of environmental history, cannot but see the ecological dimensions of the political economy of settler colonialism in New England:

The replacement of Indians by predominantly European populations in New England was as much an ecological as a cultural revolution, and the human side of that revolution cannot be fully understood until it is embedded in the ecological one. Doing so requires a history not only of human actors, conflicts, and economies, but of ecosystems as well.38

It is important to point out that Changes in the Land is by no means a work that makes race and the logic of racism primary in its understanding of environment and land, and yet even absent an explicitly stated connection between race and the environment, Cronon nonetheless locates ecology at the highly racialized interstices of Indigenous and settler interactions in his ecological history of New England. This is because, as Alexander G. Weheliye notes,

The volatile rapport between race and the human is defined above all by two constellations: first, there exists no portion of the modern human that is not subject to racialization, which determines the hierarchical ordering of the Homo sapiens species into humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans; second, as a result, humanity has held a very different status for the traditions of the racially oppressed.39

Weheliye makes clear that to engage with the human, as we do in constructing "human history", is to engage with race. Race as a defining modality of European notions of land, space, and environment make this fact inescapable, no matter how much one may wish to regard issues of race as peripheral or tangential. As R.L. Martens and Bii Robertson ask, "What happens if we think the current ecological crisis the earth faces, with its uneven impacts, as inseparable from Indigenous genocide, enslavement, monoculture, the carceral state, and pervasive anti-Blackness?"40

As we will see later in my discussion of Rudolf Laban's philosophy of space, race is literally and figuratively everywhere—that is, every where. In arguing this, I echo Weheliye's underscoring of "just how comprehensively the coloniality of Man suffuses the disciplinary and conceptual formations of knowledge we labor under, and how far we have yet to go in decolonizing these structures."41 To the extent that the political right and the liberal left have long lamented "mak[ing] everything about race",42 it is because, as Black, Indigenous, and other writers of color have long pointed out, their worldview is built from the foundations of race. Indeed, it is embedded in the very meaning of "world" from which their view becomes thinkable in the first place. It is therefore of vital importance that Black studies and Indigenous studies, in addition to all fields of critical ethnic studies, figure into historiographical and philosophical endeavors as well as into environmental studies and dance studies.43

SEVEN.

Did I—the gnat on the giant's nose—stand there for many thousands of years or only for a fleeting moment? However long it was, so many and such momentous things happened at that time.

— Rudolf Laban, [1935] 1975, p. 15.

Laban... he was my teacher, though never in the sense this word is generally used. He was the moving spirit, the guide who opened the gates to a world I had dreamed of, not yet knowing that it was dance I was seeking for. He was the one who showed the little path leading into the jungle, which, later on, I had to clear for myself so it might become my own place to live in and to spread out from.

— Mary Wigman, 1954, p. 5

Acknowledgements

Most writing is communally produced, particularly so with works of historical scholarship which depend so vitally on vast, vital networks of shared knowledge and feedback. "Hyperrhythms" is the result of a generous, diverse, and deeply knowledgeable community that surrounds me; I hope that I have been able to adequately represent this community's crucial knowledge and many multifaceted insights. The extent to which the soundness of my research or its presentation falter, however, is my sole responsibility. My thanks first and foremost go to my husband Michael who helped me relocate my grounding amongst my innumerable subtangents off subtangents in our many kitchen talks about my research on this topic and the related writing. Thanks is also due to Jennifer Monson for donating her time, knowledge, and wisdom to be interviewed about her deeply embodied dance-ecology research-in-practice and artistry. I am also indebted to her mentorship and teaching during my time as a student of hers in the graduate program at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which provided the ground from which the research questions underlying this writing first emerged. Additional thanks are due to the students, staff, faculty, and broader community of Columbia College Chicago whose 2024 symposium on rhythm, where this paper was first presented, produced many rich conversations and ideas that became central to this work in its revisions and later development. Particularly among the Columbia community, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the Dance Department and specifically to Dr. Ayo Walker whose insightful questions and conversation were core in helping me arrive at my "race is space is place is land is environment" formulation among other ideas expressed here as well as for her deeply important question which memory only allows me to paraphrase, What is it that gets people to listen past the point? This question has helped me to foreground the ways in which my own whiteness and white privilege precede and structure how my arguments here (and generally) are received and is a vital reminder that race is, indeed, as always a "structuring structure" (sensu Bourdieu).

Suggested Citation for this Paper:

  • Behan, Brendan P. 2024. "Hyperrhythms: Ecological Rhythms and Dance Without Nature". Last modified November 15. https://brendanbehan.dance/research/papers/ecology/hyperrhythms/.

Footnotes

  • 1. ^ Morton, 2013, p. 1.
  • 2. ^ Later I will review the arguments of a number of Indigenous and Black writers who have shown quite decisively that environmental devastation is itself colonial violence and not a separate strategy of domination. However, because one of the goals of this writing is to help connect critiques of institutionalized forms of forgetting and erasure as they have permeated historiography in the Global North to dance studies and dance historiography, it is necessary, at least initially, to proactively note environmental devastation as a key aspect of colonial systems.
  • 3. ^ Mbembe, 2023.
  • 4. ^ Krenack, 2022.
  • 5. ^ Mirzoeff, 2023, p. vi.
  • 6. ^ Bourdieu, 1984, p. 170.
  • 7. ^ Bourdieu, 1993, p. 40.
  • 8. ^ John B. Thompson in Bourdieu, 1991, p. 8.
  • 9. ^ In discussing the concept of imaginative geography as bound up in ideas of an "us" and a "they" in his pivotal monograph, Orientalism, Said states, "To a certain extent modern and primitive societies seem thus to derive a sense of their identities negatively. [...] The geographic boundaries accompany the social, ethnic, and cultural ones in expected ways. [...] All kinds of suppositions, associations, and fictions appear to crowd the unfamiliar space outside one's own. [...] So space acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process, whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us here. [...] For there is no doubt that imaginative geography and history help the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away." ([1978] 2003, p. 54–55)
  • 10. ^Morton, [2018] 2021, p. 30–31.
  • 11. ^ Halberstam, 2011, p. 2.
  • 12. ^ Quoted in Deleuze and Guattari, p. 6.
  • 13. ^ Halberstam, p. 25.
  • 14. ^ Morton, 2013, p.1, 85.
  • 15. ^ Ibid., p. 62.
  • 16. ^ "[S]ome hyperobjects such as planets, which really do have time melting and rippling along their surfaces" (ibid., p. 62). "Rippling with time, objects tease other objects into their sphere of influence, their 'level,' as Lingis puts it" (ibid., p. 63). "Time and space emerge from things, like the rippling flesh of a sea urchin or octopus" (ibid.).
  • 17. ^ Ibid., p. 74.
  • 18. ^ Ibid., p. 24.
  • 19. ^ Sycheva, 2004, p. 353–354.
  • 20. ^ [[SRC: interglacial period length]]
  • 21. ^ Wong, et al., 2019, n.p.
  • 22. ^ King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, n.p.
  • 23. ^ Laurence, 1945, p. 1. See also Bauer and Bahn, 2018, p.7, for a summary of the development of the Anthropocene designation.
  • 24. ^ Walker, et al., 2009, p. 3.
  • 25. ^ Martinez-O'Ferrall, 1968, p. 305.
  • 26. ^ Thoré,et al., 2024, n.p.
  • 27. ^ Bauer and Bahn, 2018, p. 8.
  • 28. ^ Ibid., p. 108.
  • 29. ^ Ibid., p. 39.
  • 30. ^ Ferdinand, 2022, p. 4. See also p. 6.
  • 31. ^ Yusoff, 2018, p. xi.
  • 32. ^ Gilio-Whitaker, 2019, p. 12.
  • 33. ^ Sari Hanafi defines "spacio-cide" as "dispossession, occupation and destruction of Palestinian living space" (2009, p. 106) saying that the Israeli colonial project "targets land for the purpose of rendering inevitable the 'voluntary' transfer of the Palestinian population, primarily by targeting the space upon which the Palestinian people live." (p. 107). Hanafi's analysis bridges my focus here on sixteenth- to nineteenth-century manifestations of settler colonialism with settler colonialism in Palestine in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century within the context of a politics of visuality. According to Hanafi, "Since the inception of the Zionist myth of a land without people for a people without land, the policy of successive Israeli governments has been to appropriate land while ignoring the people on it. [...] The resulting institutionalized invisibility of the Palestinian people both feeds and is fed by Israel's everyday settler-colonial practices. For example, parts of the Israeli West Bank wall are being constructed specifically to remove the visual presence of Palestinian villages" (p. 106–107, emphasis in original).
  • 34. ^ NepentheZnumber1fan, 2024, n.p.
  • 35. ^ Including land clearance, agriculture, construction (fencing, buildings, and transportation routes and vessels), mining, and quarrying and the smithing of tools related to these.
  • 36. ^ John Demos in Cronon, [1983] 2003, p. xii.
  • 37. ^ Amazon.com, n.d.
  • 38. ^ Cronon, [1983] 2003, p. 6.
  • 39. ^ Weheliye, 2014, p. 8.
  • 40. ^ Martens and Robertson, [2019] 2021, n.p.
  • 41. ^ Weheliye, 2014, p. 7.
  • 42. ^ Young, 2020, n.p.
  • 43. ^ I discuss more on the particular subject of dance studies later.

References

Artography

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