In Passing

The act of passing and dancing through a landscape, whereby bodily knowledge is combined with knowledge of place, creates the opportunity for a site-specific lived experience. Choreographer Crystal Pite, whose work Light of Passage (2022) responds to the refugee crisis and other intransient themes of the cycle of life, defines passage in multiple ways. Three of these definitions are apparent in the work here: ‘passage as movement,’ ‘passage as change,’ and ‘passage as journey or voyage’ (cited in Crompton, 2022: 29). These definitions enable an acknowledgement of both past and present. My own migratory movement to Northumberland and to the specific sites in In Passing is considered, as well as the history of previous passages of movement contained within the landscape itself.

Passage as movement, from one place to another, brings about an embodied awareness derived from being in the particular places. There is an interrelationship between the self and place. This directly links to passage as change, a process of changing from one condition to another. In In Passing, my body is responding to changes from being in an urban landscape to being in a more natural landscape, moment-to-moment. As well as awareness of the present lived experience, memories of bodily experience also influence the movement. Moving in a multitude of landscapes lives on in the memory after withdrawing in actuality; the recollection of past places and adapting to the present place influences the passage.

Passage as journey or voyage, with freedom to move from place to place, considers a wider view. The movement in In Passing is influenced by the questioning of who has passed through this specific site before me? I am not dancing alone at the site. I follow in the footsteps of previous humans and animals that have passed through the landscape, and I move presently alongside birds that are making a voyage above me. There is a concern for ‘being-with-the-world as human while also being part of something larger’ (Fraleigh, 2018: 40). In considering migratory-movement, the displacement that exists when moving from place to place perhaps creates a heightened awareness in the body that is able to consider past and present alongside its own lived experience: reconfiguring the act of passing as an essential form of motion whereby the body can still attain a sense of belonging and identity.

This empathetic view of interweaving movement, place and passage has resulted in an understanding of the complexity of place-identity. Rather than viewing a place of belonging as a self-contained entity, there is a relationship that expands from body to place and from place to body. This interrelationship that forms, establishing a place-identity, is in a constant state of flux: ‘the places are anchoring points that enable people to both explore […] and to maintain a sense of rootedness’ (Olwig, 2003: 74). Place can become a source of belonging and identification, but in an ever-changing form. The lived experience of the body in passing through and dwelling in certain places inhabits a place-identity by sensory and kinaesthetic means, but also in memory. The present moment is prolonged, becoming a memory carried in the passage onto another place.