'Dancing the Downward Slide: Spaces of Affective Adjacency in Rian and Bird with Boy'

This chapter examines how the choreography of affect in two dance theatre works creates a space of affective adjacency—a space in which the building of an alternative structure of feeling and an alternative economy of the body can be experienced. Focusing on the choreographic use of repetition in Junk Ensemble’s Bird With Boy (2011) and Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre’s Rian (2011), it shows how the work required to build an alternative affective space can become visible. Although affect is most often viewed as a preconscious, ephemeral phenomenon (a passage of intensities), that can have little or no lasting impact on socio-political action, theorists such as Megan Watkins have argued for a consideration of the ‘cumulative aspects of affect’. Highlighting Spinoza’s distinction between affectus (the capacity for a body to affect and be affected), and affectio (the impact the affecting body leaves on the affected), Watkins points out that affectio can ‘leave a residue’ allowing for the ‘capacity of affect to be retained, to accumulate, to form dispositions and thus shape subjectivities’. The choreography of repetition in Bird With Boy and Rian presents sites for an examination of this accumulation of affect and its capacity not only to form and shape dispositions, but also, as Lauren Berlant suggests, ‘to move along and make worlds, situations, and environments’.

Orbital and strongly orbital spaces

We say that a (countably dimensional) topological vector space X is orbital if there is T∈L(X) and a vector x∈X such that X is the linear span of the orbit {Tnx:n=0,1,…}. We say that X is strongly orbital if, additionally, x can be chosen to be a hypercyclic vector for T. Of course, X can be orbital only if the algebraic dimension of X is finite or infinite countable. We characterize orbital and strongly orbital metrizable locally convex spaces. We also show that every countably dimensional metrizable locally convex space X does not have the invariant subset property. That is, there is T∈L(X) such that every non-zero x∈X is a hypercyclic vector for T. Finally, assuming the Continuum Hypothesis, we construct a complete strongly orbital locally convex space.

As a byproduct of our constructions, we determine the number of isomorphism classes in the set of dense countably dimensional subspaces of any given separable infinite dimensional Fréchet space X. For instance, in X=ℓ2×ω, there are exactly 3 pairwise non-isomorphic (as topological vector spaces) dense countably dimensional subspaces.