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gloATLATLANTAProphetically in a 1967 lecture Michel Foucaultpredicted that profound changes to our concepts ofspace would result from the emergence of digital culture,stating, “space takes for us the form of relations amongsites.” In the book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism andSchizophrenia, first published in 1980, French philosophersGilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari famously definedrhizome as a nonlinear model of culture that develops ina new space without beginning or end, but “always inthe middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.”Hippodrome, performed at The Goat Farm Arts Center inAtlanta [March 21–25, 2013] by the collaborative danceand performance group gloATL, examined the interiorityof urban life, in a new and very old kind of space,created by movement and gesture, light, pigment, reflection,tastes, scent, and sound. As if mirroring newspaces of digital culture, the collaborative elements ofdance, music, lighting design, and visual and culinaryart in this performance engaged real and imaginedspace with multiple sensory experiences.A hippodrome was a long oval stadium in ancientGreece, created for horse and chariot races and ringedwith multilevel seating for spectators from all ranks ofsociety. Choreographer and gloATL founder LauriStallings chose the name of this ancient stadium for thisfirst piece designed specifically for the historic 19thcenturyGoodson Yard warehouse at The Goat Farm ArtsCenter, gloATL’s creative home. Inside the historic industrialspace an elevated wooden track planted with grassand live flower beds was built with help from installationartist Gyun Hur to ring the oval dance floor, which wasthen bounded by mirrors and edged with a fragile dustingof finely shredded green silk flowers. Near the warehouseentrance a circular pit was dug into the floor andfilled with more of Hur’s silk flowers. Spectators watchedfrom the risers of the hippodrome space.Before the house lights seemed to dim, as the last ofthe audience trickled in, a single dancer began to slowlycreep along the flower bed track and down, into thehippodrome space. Then the high-tech chamber musicensemble Sonic Generator, accompanied by four soloistsfrom the Atlanta Opera, performed Estonian composerArvo Pärt’s doleful Stabat Mater. The solo dancer wasjoined by her ensemble, and Communication, the first ofthree sections identified in the program as “Triptychs,”commenced. As the lighting and music changed, thesecond section began with individual dancers beinglifted in Celebration, and then at one end of the space asingle dancer discovered Hur’s shredded flowers, liftinghandfuls in wonder as the soft powder flowed throughher fingers. Later, from the opposite end of the hippodrome,scented smoke wafted from beneath the risers asperformers offered edible flowers and small vials of liquid(provided by Atlanta restaurant Top FLR) to willing audiencemembers.At one point the singers moved into the middle of thehippodrome space, giving the aural component corporealexistence, making the music visible. The languageof movement vicariously conveyed the sensation oftouch to the audience, as one dancer ritually sank intothe pit of silk flowers, the hippodrome’s “belly button,”physically dug into the warehouse floor. She spreadyellow and white silk flowers onto the floor as she reemerged.Near the end of the third Triptych, as waterbegan to rain down on the live flowers, the sound of raindropsand blue-green atmosphere evoked a sense ofLoss, followed by the subtle emergence of clear Light(the subject of the last movement of the Triptych). Lightplayed perhaps the least obvious but still essential role inHippodrome, as designer Rebecca Makus focused onthe center of the space, neutralizing the surroundingbrick walls of the warehouse.For Hur, the Hippodrome landscape is both a continuationof and departure from her explorations of literaland metaphorical space. For example, one of her firstinstallations was composed of shredded silk flowerscollected from cemeteries to re-create her memory ofher parents’ wedding quilt in Korea. As a small child sheimagined floating above and looking down on the quiltlaid across her parent’s bed. The work included strips ofbrightly colored, finely shredded silk arranged carefullyin lines on the floor and on a shelf lining a wall. A holewas cut into a wall above the work so that the audiencecould view it as she had remembered imagining it. ForHippodrome, Hur continued to expand the physical andmetaphorical viewing space by including mirrors thatincreased the dancers’ realm and dematerialized theviewing space between the real flowers, her silk shreddings,and their reflections. To enhance the multisensorynature of the Hippodrome performance, for the first timeHur’s flowers were intended to be touched, which for Hurresulted in a cathartic “surrendering” of her work to theaudience. This surrender enabled the artists and theaudience to fully interact with the hippodrome, a conceptthat was central to the collaborative nature of theperformance. The “belly button” filled with flowersprovided a center for these interactions. It also expandedthe literal space of Hippodrome beneath the historicwarehouse floor.Hippodrome’s expansion of performance beyond sightand sound to include touch, smell, and taste, dimensionseven digital culture hasn’t been able to reach, mirrors theexpansive space of narrative that resulted from the emergenceof hyperlinks and social media. Digital space istruly shaped by relationships among sites. With onlinemedia, writing has become nonlinear and collaborative,and narrative occurs in the space between, beneath, andabove the text. Similarly Hippodrome was necessarilycollaborative and nonlinear; within Hur’s environment,gloATL’s narrative existed in real space, reflected space,and imagined space. If postmodern really means inresponse to modern rather than after modern, thenperhaps postdigital is the best way to describe the newspace of Hur’s strips of pigment on flat surfaces in realspace that links sites of memory with perception, or ofHippodrome’s collaborative, sensory experience, for boththe performers and the audience, that exists beneath,around, and in the center of Goodson Yard.—Dinah McClintockABOVE, LEFT AND RIGHT: gloATL, performance view of Hippodrome, 2013 [photos: Thom Baker; courtesy of gloATL]56 ART PAPERSFuture Anterior