The production of atmospheric thresholds: Guangchangwu dancing at Jialing Park, Chongqing

This paper examines the operation of atmospheric thresholds in producing various social relations and identities in Chinese collective Guangchangwu dancing. Existing studies on atmosphere tend to emphasize its diffuse nature while leaving its boundary issue insufficiently addressed. Informed by Sloterdijk's spherology, this paper argues that an atmospheric ensemble comprises not a seamless totality but different micro-atmospheres whose thresholds adjoin and jostle, reshaping the ensemble's socio-affective dynamics and symbolic environment along with their formation, maintenance, infiltration and disruption. To articulate these processes, this paper draws upon Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis as a framework, and applies it to the empirical data obtained from a five-month field study of Guangchangwu dancing at Jialing Park in Chongqing, China. Accordingly, a dance group's choreography, playlist and style bend individual members to its peculiar rhythms of collective dancing, and thereby construct around them an atmospheric threshold within which they internalize the aesthetic values, rules and identities of their group and define themselves in opposition to other groups as a constitutive outside. Furthermore, inside a group, thresholds of leadership, membership and selfhood rub against each other across embodied rhythms of teaching, imitating, accommodating and affective exchange, throughout the process of which the three spheres co-constitute and negotiate with each other, hence recalibrating the group's socio-affective status quo while enabling dancers to develop variegated identities and relations. This paper concludes that atmospheric threshold provides a conceptual lens to address the ideologically formative dimension of atmosphere on a horizontal level.