Aurora Borealis: Choreographies of darkness and light
Introduction
The Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, is a natural display of lights caused by charged solar particles entering the atmosphere, typically observable in the Polar Regions in the High North1. As a natural phenomenon, the Aurora has long been perplexing and mysterious for many people. While scientists have over the past century managed to advance the puzzle of what causes the lights, the dynamics of the Aurora are still not fully explained. The Aurora Borealis continues to astonish people with its variable, mystifying dancing acts. In recent years Northern Lights tourism has significantly grown in the Arctic regions, particularly in Northern Norway, Finland and Iceland (Heimtun, Jóhannesson, & Tuulentie, 2014). The Aurora has been developed into a product that has become a key aspect for developing winter tourism in the Arctic, sold as a mystical and romantic experience that contributes to a particular image of the North as mysterious and magical.
Actually ‘selling’ the Northern Lights remains, however, a rather demanding task, despite the clear fact that they have served as a powerful signifier for the region over a considerable period of time (Friedman, 2010). The Aurora is a flickering and unpredictable phenomenon which poses challenges for providers of Northern Lights tours as well as for tourists who take part in numerous Northern Lights trips, at times without ever actually catching glimpse of the lights. Northern Lights tours can be described as a heterogeneous assemblage of diverse entities, including solar wind, electronic particles, the magnetic poles, vehicles, images, tourists, guides, weather, the celestial sky and darkness itself. The tours can never be fully planned in advance but need to be improvised according to ‘conditions’ on the ground and in the sky and in this sense comprise an interesting case of a tourism experience spun along the web of human and more-than-human agency.
In this paper our aim is to provide insights into the encounter between the Northern Lights and tourism practice. Tourism as encounter denotes an emphasis on embodied engagement and relations (d’Hauteserre, 2015), thus manifesting the “doing of tourism and its entanglement to other things” (Jóhannesson, Ren, & van der Duim, 2015, p. 5). Along these lines and following Franklin (2012), who has likened tourism ordering to improvised choreography, we investigate some of the ways in which Northern Lights tourism is composed and performed by guides, tourists and more-than-human elements. In particular we will focus on the interplay between light and darkness, which are the crucial elements out of which Northern Lights tours are woven and how tourists, tour operators and various more-than-human elements are engaged in and contribute to affective lightscapes (Bille & Sørensen, 2007) of Northern Lights tourism. By following one particular Northern Lights tour we further cast light on the ways in which Northern Lights tours, as a consumable product, revolve around efforts of appropriating and ordering a flickering and dynamic natural phenomenon through improvised choreography and how this process creates various affective lightscapes.
This discussion is not comparative. Rather, it is based on a particular ethnographic example of one touring experience in Northern Norway in order to elicit in detail the way in which Northern Lights tours are ordered in situ, even though different tours and different circumstances naturally create different choreographies and lightscapes. We begin this article by discussing the values of light and darkness and how the interplay between these elements enact affective lightscapes. We then introduce the Aurora Borealis, discussing how it has historically been appropriated and ordered in different ways in different historical eras, contributing to the recent composition of the Aurora as a tourism product. As Northern Lights tours are designed around the potential appearance of the Aurora in the sky, darkness, and more specifically the emergent choreography of light and darkness, becomes a crucial matter. Based on ethnographic reflexion we discuss the performance of Northern Lights tours as a dance dependent on an improvised choreography; a choreography in which various participants, human and more-than-human, take part in, thus creating affective lightscapes of the Aurora Borealis.
Section snippets
The values of light and darkness
Light and darkness, and how their interplay and rhythms affect and condition human experiences of nature and society, has recently received due attention in the social sciences (Bille and Sørensen, 2007, Edensor, 2012, Shaw, 2014). Darkness and light often appear as binaries and as such they have separate registers of values attached to them. Light has often been framed as a natural condition upon which conceptions of our environment have been based. According to Edensor, “it is as if place,
Appropriating the Aurora Borealis
Once darkness falls, the elements of daylight presence are obscured and filtered. Moon and stars and in particular phenomena such as the Northern Lights appear in the night sky in Arctic regions. The name “Aurora Borealis” itself denotes mythical and godlike creatures dancing across the sky, Aurora being the Roman goddess of dawn and Boreas the Greek word for the north wind. Throughout the centuries the Aurora Borealis has been subject to wonder and puzzlement. People have endeavoured to
Choreography of light and darkness
It was about 4.30 in the afternoon that we were standing outside the Post Office in Tromsø, two researchers from Iceland waiting for our tour provider for what had been advertised as a ‘Chase the Lights‘ tour. We were tired and dreading having to go on what had been promised to be a long tour, not least because it was pouring down with rain. It also felt strange that on this gloomy day in March there was still daylight; we felt, therefore, that the Northern Lights were somewhere far away. Three
Participants and rhythms
For all the participants of the tour, chasing the Lights began with Marianne’s Aurora-hunting as we headed into the darkness, although different participants stepped into it from different directions. This was evident as we waited for Marianne by the Post Office. Some participants were tired, others excited. Our different expectations were reflected in how we either walked around or leaned against the wall of the Post Office, seeking shelter from the rain under the eaves of the building. Here,
Conclusions
In this paper we have followed the improvised choreography of one particular Northern Lights tour, describing how it is composed by human and more-than-human bodies and elements. In using an ethnographic example our aim was to demonstrate how affective lightscapes may be choreographed as participants in the tour attempt to appropriate the Northern Lights. The tour takes various rhythms depending on relational configurations of lightscapes. As tour operators and tourists embark on Northern
Acknowledgements
This research was part of an international project entitled: Winter: New Turns in Arctic Winter Tourism, financed by the Research Council of Norway hosted by the The Arctic University of Norway, Alta campus. The project also forms a part of the project Arctic Encounters: Contemporary Travel/Writing in the European High North funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area). We want to thank Seija Tuulentie, Bente Heimtun, Nigel Morgan and Tiina Kivelä for their collaboration during the
Gunnar Thór Jóhannesson is Professor at the Department of Geography and Tourism, University of Iceland.
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2022, Annals of Tourism Research Empirical InsightsCitation Excerpt :The elusiveness of the northern lights, together with partially manipulated pictorial representations, have contributed to tourists' high expectations and subsequent challenges in delivery for the guides (Bertella, 2013a; Højrup, 2016). Guides have thus tuned into the rhythms of the lights, engaged with the tourists' media-induced expectations and levels of excitement, and facilitated potentially long waiting periods in dark and cold Arctic environments (Jóhannesson & Lund, 2017). Improvising has been important on nights with weak or no lights, when the guide has worked hard to maintain the tourists' spirits and interest (Mathisen, 2013).
Gunnar Thór Jóhannesson is Professor at the Department of Geography and Tourism, University of Iceland.
Katrín Anna Lund is an anthropologist and Professor in Geography and Tourism, University of Iceland. Their recent work focuses on destination development and winter tourism.