Choreographed by Clouds

This text was created based on a prompt from choreographer Kristin Hatleberg. A recording of these texts accompanied her 35-minute performance “Choreographed by Clouds,” which debuted at Green Space dance incubator in Queens, New York City on April 8-9, 2022.

Point of departure

I.

New message from Kristin.

photo of a shadowy cloud over the sea.

Orange, red, and yellow at the horizon

stacked puff pastry layers.

A third party witnessed this cloud, captured it,

sent it to Kristin, who forwarded it

while we spoke of clouds she’s been collecting.

Was this the cloud from Greece?

Or the one from California?

The specifics aren’t in the thread.

There was also one from Africa, wasn’t there?

Was it Kenya? I can’t remember if Kenya has a coast. I picture savanna under cloudless skies.

I tap the maps application.

Swipe my finger across the Atlantic.

Spread thumb and forefinger on the glass.

Zoom in from above. On east Africa. On the coast. On the largest city.

II.

I am at the edge of the ancient city of Mombasa at dawn staring east at the Indian Ocean. A walking path across the road from a fenced-off golf course. The sun is not rising in a red orange disc as I’d imagined when I set the alarm in my hotel room last night looking forward to seeing the sunrise. Instead high clouds form bent triangles like the sails of tall ships. A cold wind blows in. I pull my jacket closed, zipped. Hands in pockets, arms tight in on my body as I walk. There is an old stone lighthouse in the distance. I’ll walk at least that far before turning back. The sun fights with the clouds to put on a show. Yellow orange red. Shadows at every altitude exaggerated by the low light. A group of men jog in formation along the coastal road in matching blue t-shirts. Mombasa Fire Department in white letters on their back. I sit on the stone wall around the lighthouse, which retains some warmth from yesterday’s heat. The cloud-sails have moved over the land now and begin to break up. Clumps of gray thin to white. The sun is blinding white. I close my eyes and see nothing but the bright red of the blood in my eyelids.

III.

The sun is the most-photographed subject in history.¹ I am reminded of reading this fact when I type “clouds” in to Flickr and see that the most recent photos all tend to be photos in which clouds play supporting actor to the sun’s starring role. Often the ocean — or some body of water — acts as the stage, reflecting both sun and cloud.

My memories of clouds are not of sunsets or walking a harbor or a beach. I’ve always lived inland. My memories of clouds are above cities, above the flat prairie, above snow fields.

If I sort Flickr instead for “relevant” or “interesting” clouds, the sun moves away. Wisps and clumps of white float between green farmland and blue atmosphere. They stretch forward in waves. They are oceans of white framing islands of blue. They are mountains of white drifting in oceans of blue. Clumps like biscuit dough. Islands sleek as a sportscar.

Cycle

I.

The last clouds we worked under together, clouds that floated over our shared studio building as we documented the seasons on our street — clouds that poured rain on us when we walked, formed shapes in unexpected places, drifted lazily in summer skies, and all too rarely dusted us with snow — these clouds have by now drifted around the world, dispersed, joined oceans and rivers, joined the sky again, recombined in to perhaps the very cloud Kristin texted me after we spoke.

And back in time, did the same water molecules drift together over my childhood? Picking out shapes in the sky while waiting for the city bus in front of the supermarket with my grandmother.

II.

Or laying on the bright green grassy incline with schoolmates outside the old red brick school at the edge of the city.

I stared up at the blue sky and the white shapes drifting above us. This one a horse’s head. That one a cat.

After a time, the slow crawl of the clouds convinces me that it is not the clouds that are moving but us, the earth, the ground, as the clumps of cotton in the atmosphere stayed anchored in place.

“Can you feel the earth spinning?” I ask? “If you lay still like this, you can feel the earth rotating on its axis” (we were of an age where the movement of the planets was a fascination). We lay still for an unknown length of time as the earth moved under those puffs of white.

But then we were up and ran to some other game. Racing across the grass on to the red dirt ballfield where we never played baseball but instead invented our own games.

III.

Once (I imagine it being the same day as our cloud gazing, as if all of the warm days of recess were one), we became convinced that a fundamental mystery existed underneath home plate on our ballfield. If we were just able to figure out how to open it, we’d reveal… something. Various theories were discussed. Tunnels? A hideout? Treasure? I became convinced that when we finally opened the hatch, we’d see straight through the planet to the blue sky on the other side.

We used sticks and rocks to trace the edges of home plate in the dirt until we could get our little fingers underneath it. We talked as we dug, each of us excited by our wild theories of what lay beneath. One corner, then another, was dug up.

I pictured a long tunnel framing blue sky on the other side. But how thick was the earth? What if it was as thin as the wall of a house? Could I lean my head and shoulders through the window frame and peer at the other side of the world, climb through, stand on the other side and look up at its sky.

All at once the plate came up and there was nothing but more dirt beneath. The recess bell rang. We ran inside.

But the passage to the sky on the other side of the earth stuck with me. There had to be a way to unlock it.

Back in the classroom, I studied a globe. We were near 45° N and 92° W. The other side of the earth, 45° S, 92° E, was in the Indian Ocean, nearer Australia than Africa.

I pictured the tunnel to the other side of the Earth filled with water, the Ocean draining through the planet, flooding the ball field, the city, the sky. On the other side of the Earth, giant cargo boats stranded mid-voyage in a vast dry valley. Sailors jumping down and walking 1000 miles to port in Mombasa.

Geometry

I.

Cloud. A billowing shape.

Not the emoji cloud or the cloud of weather apps, or iCloud.

A few circles pushed together and flattened on the bottom.

More like a chef’s hat. bright white, flat on the bottom, a tower of soft presence stretching high, folding over itself, cauliflower florets, asymmetrical.

Or a race boat, starship pointed at the front, wide and tall at the back where a captain, a pilot, stormtroopers wait on an unending voyage

Or a feather of delicate wisps

II.

But a cloud also requires some relationship to the ground.

A surface over which to float, to cast a shadow upon.

On the flat prairie with no mountains, the cloud formations become the only sense of three-dimensionality breaking up our 2-dimensional plane. Shadows over the land on clear days.

Towering shapes created over the thousand miles since these water vapors crowded over the top of the Rocky Mountains.

Thunderstorms.

Long soaking rains through the afternoon.

Storm alerts, tornado warnings, scrolling across the bottom of afternoon cartoons in yellow letters

Little House on the Prairie, baseball games watched on a small boxy color TV in the basement tuned to channel nine waiting for the clouds, the danger to pass.

III.

Even younger, playing in the backyard. A funnel cloud glimpsed over Lyndale school, a block away. Dad rushed to the cellar doors, hurried us in.

Cardboard boxes, Burger King wrappers, gas station coffee cups swirling.

Huddled in the basement. What did I really see in the sky? Lawn chairs, whole clotheslines of laundry, Toyotas.

Dorothy, witch on a broomstick, E.T.

Dark Clouds

I keep a small notepad on my nightstand for scribbling ideas and dreams I don’t want to forget. But I forget about this notepad for months at a time. One day I opened it and found the phrase “THIS DAY WILL NOT BE GRAY” scribbled in all caps. An uncharacteristic pledge warding off both cloudy skies and depression. I posted a picture of the page to Instagram. Soon an ex-lover double taps the image on her phone from work or unemployment or a highway rest stop and the memory returns. I had confessed to her that cloudy gray skies affect me, keep me in bed, keep me from making phone calls, keep me from writing, working, applying for jobs. The handwriting is hers, not mine. How long ago? A year?

There are times when gray clouds cover the sky for an unending string of days. I keep all the lights on in the apartment at midday, but there is no substitute for the sunlight that the clouds deny.

I prefer dark storm clouds that bring with them the energy of thunder, lightning, torrents. Snowstorms. Good reasons to stay indoors, cozy reasons to focus and write.

The dark of a snowstorm lifts to pristine fields of white to crunch with boots, to gather in to snowballs to throw at your brother, to make forts and tunnels and slides from the piles the snowplow pushes to the end of the cul-de-sac.

Or in summer, a dark storm rolling across the hot prairie in the middle of the afternoon in hot August. Dark clouds spreading over the city. The smell of the earth, smell of trees opening up to the rain, smell of distant farm fields carried by the clouds through screen windows. My brother and I rush outside. T-shirt soaked. Cool down. Bare feet on the hot sidewalk, then toes sinking into the wet grass. Mom and dad inside race to close all the open windows.

But also, a concert with my ex-girlfriend. R.E.M. and The Jayhawks at Midway Stadium. You’d been apart for perhaps a year. The skies overcast, ominous throughout the concert. Someone from off stage whispers in Michael Stipe’s ear between songs. Stipe relays the news, “nasty weather coming in. We don’t want anyone to get hurt so this is going to have to be our last song.” The crowd groans. With the first guitar chord of the frenetic, apocalyptic “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” the crowd jumps up and down. As if on cue, the clouds’ first drip drops turn suddenly into a torrential downpour. We are laughing at the absurdity of it as we dance. Soaked in t-shirt and shorts just as when a kid. Trampling the ballpark’s infield into an unplayable mess. And then it’s over and we walk home hand in hand, singing and wading in the water of flooded streets and for the moment at least, we’ve deleted the “ex” and the “hyphen” from ex-boyfriend and ex-girlfriend.

Over the Ocean

The prairie is an ocean you can walk on. Growing up in the Midwest, the stories I heard as a child were of French trappers who came south from the Great Lakes, Spanish conquistadors who came north from Mexico, and Scandinavian immigrants travelling East on new railroads. These groups surfaced on to the ocean of prairie from below, climbing from sea level, upriver, climbing out of boats and trains that followed the low easy path of water and steel, disembarking and climbing banks until their heads crested in the open air above the tall grass, tufts of white clouds drifting far above in the infinite blue over the infinite green and gold.

But the first people who saw this ocean saw it from above, travelling from the west. Migrating over the unnamed giant western mountains, they might have stood amid Pacific clouds crowding and cresting the high ridges together, human and cloud. Until descending to the ocean of grassland spreading below to the horizon. Step by step, sky and ground, cloud and human, part again on their journey over the prairie.

Flash forward several thousand years to a tenth-floor orthodontist’s office. The view from the chair past an old man’s thick fingers and the sleeves of his white coat is of the 120-year-old prairie colony from above. The neighboring skyscrapers tower above and disappear into the clouds. Blue and gray reflected in the glass.

Outside in the waiting room is a collection of prints depicting sailing ships outfitted with giant wheels to roll across the prairie, fierce god-faced clouds with full cheeks blow on their sails as conquistadors manning cannons look out over the grasslands.

Cloud City

What is a cloud without something to float above? A cloud needs an atmosphere. Needs to have some observable limit.

This is the cloud. This is not the cloud. Step outside on a foggy day and it is impossible to define. Is everything part of this misty water-saturated atmosphere, or just those buildings, streetlights, men in black coats in the distance obscured, disappearing, gone?

What would this fog look like if it were a mile above us on a clear blue day? What would that puffy cloud look like up close, descended on to fourteenth street?

There are artists now who engineer clouds for their work. Berndnaut Smilde uses smoke and mist to create clouds for his camera.² These are illusions that last a few seconds in reality, but in photography eternally float in ornate rooms and alone in landscapes. The Tokyo Contemporary Art Museum has a glass cube in its garden in which a cloud perpetually floats.³ A staircase allows you to climb through the cloud and view it from above. Other architects have proposed outdoor plazas with special mist machines and fans that could maintain a cloud in place on days when wind is light.

It isn’t hard to find the ingredients for a cloud. Water and ice are plentiful. The hard part is suspending them in the air without the aid of planetary atmospheric forces. My father tells a story of creating a cloud by accident once. He had an apartment in — of all places — Saint Cloud, Minnesota, while he attended the University there. The temperature was extremely cold outside, one of the worst bitter cold days of winter. He built a fire in the fireplace to keep things cozy. Only the apartment was getting too hot for some reason. The most obvious way to cool things off in a hurry was to open a window or two. So he opened one and then walked to another room to open a second. By the time he turned around from the second window, the air of the apartment was instantly thick with water molecules, snow and rain.

I have no few other stories of Saint Cloud. It is a city I knew mainly from television weather maps growing up in Minneapolis. The name conjures images of Lando Calrissian’s Cloud City in the Empire Strikes Back. But with the title of Saint it also conjures images of pearly gates, the city of heaven sitting on big fluffy clouds. In reality, the city is a industrial-agricultural hub that has gradually sprawled in to suburbia.

The name was chosen by French missionaries. Saint Cloud is Clodoald or Clodoaldus, a sixth century prince in line for the throne of Paris. When his uncles undertook a murderous power grab, Clodoald found sanctuary with the church. He became an ascetic hermit following Saint Severin. Reading the story today, I wonder if this was a saintly choice or if hiding in the woods was simply the most practical option for staying away from a tyrant who wants you dead.

“At the age of twenty, Saint Cloud left his hermitage, appeared before the Bishop of Paris surrounded by religious and civic leaders and members of the royal family — his royal family. He clothed himself in royal robes and carried a scissors in one hand and a coarse garment in the other. He offered the coarse garment to the bishop who clothed him with it as a symbol of his preferred “spiritual” rather than “material” riches. With the scissors, the bishop cut Cloud’s long hair, which was a symbol of his royalty. In the silence and solitude of his hermitage, Cloud had established priorities in his life. He had learned the difference between true and false pleasures.”

Cotton Candy

Why do clouds seem so substantial? We can normally only observe clouds from great distances, our eyes telling us everything. Large. Small. White. Gray. Tall. Flat. Lumpy. Puffy. Wispy. Slow moving. Fast moving. But with most things that our eyes observe, we can follow up with our other senses to confirm. An antelope can be followed. It leaves footprints. It can be hunted and touched and tasted. Likewise, a distant mountain can be approached and understood in greater detail step by step. We can stand next to a tree and see another tree far off on the next mountain ridge. We can judge the distance by how tiny that tree is. We can know that the experience of standing next to that distant tree will be similar. In the sky we have no frame of reference. Clouds have no information we can confirm with our other senses directly. What does a cloud sound like? What is it to touch, smell, taste a cloud?

I picture a man selling cotton candy in the aisles of a baseball stadium. Twenty-four bulky clouds of pink and blue held overhead effortlessly. Five dollars and one of the clouds is yours. But as soon as it is, it no longer acts like a cloud as it did from a distance. Once you possess it, it immediately is less dreamlike. It has become finite. Its dimensions are not so vast and immeasurable that it rivals a mountain. And then because it sticks to your fingers and itself and stretches into thin threads. And in your mouth, it collapses. The threads become simple sugar crystals the air pockets they’d enveloped unleash the sour air above the sugar spinning machine. It’s an experience that lacks substance, but not in the way that we hope a cloud does. It reveals nothing of what I dream it might be like to hold a cloud in my hands, to breathe in a cloud, to eat a cloud.

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Choreographed by Clouds

Point of departure

I.

II.

III.

Cycle

I.

II.

III.

Geometry

I.

II.

III.

Dark Clouds

Over the Ocean

Cloud City

Cotton Candy

Autosuggest

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