Choreographing the Airport

Justine Shih Pearson is a designer and scholar of contemporary performance and dance, and Honorary Associate in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia.

This book investigates the global hub airport as an exemplar of cosmopolitan culture and space. A machine made for movement, itself perched at the crossroads of the world's incessant mobility, the airport is both a symbol of and stage for the ways in which we construct and inhabit the world today.
Taking an ethnographically-inflected approach, this study brings together knowledge of the moving body from dance and performance and the study of systems of mobility within cultural and mobilities studies, in order to call attention to the kinaesthetic experience of global space. What is the choreography of the global airport? How does it perform on us. How do we perform within it?
Extending thinking about contemporary cosmopolitanism and cultural identity, and the performativity of places and identities, this book is essential reading for those interested in cultural debates around globalisation, the innovative application of performancetheory towards everyday experience, and interdisciplinary methodologies.

Contributes to recent critical scholarship of performance and the airport, exploring dance specifically

Prologue.- 1. Towards a Practical Cosmopolitanism.- 2. Persistent Place or Thirdspace?.- 3. Mass Transits, Micro Transitions.- 4. Performing Self at the Border.- 5. Bodies Under Duress (the Dystopic Future is Here).