Performative solar rituals with Aerocene

‘Under my Gaze’ is a dance quartet performed by three people and an Aerocene sculpture. The project was presented at St. Elisabeth Church Park in Berlin in the summers of 2022 and 2023, and has an upcoming excerpt in the Tanz Im August – Interconnecting Dance & Ecology program later this month. It is the first part of a trilogy of works combining dance and the Aerocene, led by choreographer and dancer Renae Shadler whose research is centered around making more-than-human relations tangible in the context of performance art.

Renae Shadler, along with project dramaturgs Ally Bisshop and Maikon K, offers insight into their artistic process and exploration of solar energy’s impact on Earth’s ecosystem in a conversation at Volkspark Rehberge in Berlin while preparing for their performance.

Renae: Since my first Aerocene flight with the Susurrus group in 2018 (Samuel Hertz, Maria Nurmela, Kalle Ropponen and myself), I’ve been interested in the Aerorcene sculpture as an envelope that gives a physical form to the air, wind and sun that animate it.

We see the effects of these forces all the time – when a tree moves, when a big gust of wind knocks something over or when we get sunburned – but we cannot see the forces themselves. Aerocene gives a ‘body’ to these invisible entities that stir and surround us. For this reason, I wanted to create a trilogy with the sculpture, working with it as a collaborating dance partner for each unique creation.

Maikon: Indeed, understanding how the Aerocene interacts with atmospheric forces was one of the main starting points for the project. For Part 1 of the Trilogy, Renae decided to focus on solar energy, as reflected in the title.

Renae: Yes, the title ‘Under my Gaze’ alludes to the sun’s gaze, borrowed from Agnieszka Polska’s short film ‘The New Sun’ (2017), depicting the sun as a child-like witness to Earth’s development.

Ally: The ‘gaze’ is a metaphor for the direction of solar energy. The sun creates all these direct and indirect interconnections that define our actions and environments. It has shifted how organisms grow and shaped the ecologies that we live in.

Renae: When reflecting on my connection to the sun, its enormity and power often overwhelm me. I cannot begin to comprehend something of that magnitude. I began to see the Aerocene as an intermediary between the sun and humans, enabling us to experience the power of solar energy through the upward tug of the sculpture, as it heated the air inside and caused it to rise. This exploration led to the core questions in ‘Under my Gaze’: How to make a performance that acknowledges the sun as the driver of Earth’s ecosystem? And, how to collectively create a new poetics of movement that ‘moved with’ instead of ‘extracted from’ the atmosphere?

To achieve this, I was interested in the potential for the sun, wind, and air to guide our movements. For instance, wind direction significantly influences our choreography. If the wind is going northwest, we adjust our positioning to counteract it, adapting to achieve set spatial geometries on the ground.

Renae: The attempt to give the sculpture more agency led to set designer Camille Lacadee and costume designer Geraldine Arnold developing technology that enabled the sculptures to be strapped to the dancers bodies through the use of carabiners, reels, waist belts and chest harnesses. This strengthened the symbiotic relationship between the sculpture and the dancers, allowing the sculpture to steer us, forging a link between our solar plexus and the tethering point. The design created newfound freedom in movement as we were able to maintain the connection hands-free.