Energy Made Visible
Energy Made Visible: A Meditation on Musical Dance Performances as a Way of Governance and Healing among the Kel Tamasheq, By Amanda Camenisch
“Music when you posess me, words fail to make you apology.
Everything is so intense in my heart, that your sweet noted irrigate me.
Everything becomes wonders and reasons.
You are peace, rest and serenity.
You are in me, you are everywhere.
Universal chain, my body is your receptacal.
You follow me tirelessly everywhere.
I find you in the hollow and the crest of the waves.
When the wind blows in nature, the murmuring of rocked leaves,
the furrows that zebra the dunes of sand, it is still you.
Thanks to you I know how to listen and understand.
You are respect for difference.
You are love, you are tolerance, tenderness and joy.
You bring people together and unite them.
Music when you hold me by the dance i try to translate you to give you a form.”
Keltoum S. Walet
–––
There are moments in which sound becomes a kind of gravity. An unseen architecture that arranges bodies in motion, gestures in correspondence, time in vibration. To speak of energy made visible is to speak of this invisible ordering: the subtle ways that rhythm gives shape to relation, how movement translates what exceeds language, how performance becomes a form of knowing.
In the histories of nomadic life, energy is not metaphorical. It is the pulse of subsistence and survival, a choreography of adaptation, a lived ethics of attunement. Movement is never only displacement; it is the medium through which knowledge circulates, like wind carrying stories across dunes, like songs rippling through gatherings under a changing sky. The Kel Tamasheq know this: that to move is to remember, to realign the self within a continuum larger than one’s body, to repeat without repetition, to live in correspondence with the invisible.
In such a world, dance is not performance but translation. It translates what cannot be spoken — grief, reverence, resilience — into a visible current. The dancer is not a performer but a vessel through which time passes. In this sense, energy becomes both aesthetic and metaphysical: an expression of vitality, yes, but also of relation, of the constant negotiation between what is felt and what is formed. Every gesture contains an ethics of care, for the community that witnesses, for the ancestors that return through rhythm, for the earth that holds the vibration.
To call this energy “visible” is already a paradox. Visibility in the Western lexicon often implies objecthood, a stable thing to be seen. But the visibility here is not of form, it is of becoming. It flickers, appears and disappears, like breath against the horizon. It cannot be fixed, only encountered. The visibility of energy is relational; it exists only through presence, through participation, through the shared pulse between bodies that listen to one another.
The philosopher Thomas Nail writes of movement as the first reality not as what happens to things, but as what things are. In this sense, performance is not a representation of life, but its continuation by other means. The dance, the song, the drumbeat, these are modes of being in motion, not metaphors for it. They resist the static, the bounded, the possessive. They dissolve the division between self and world, performer and audience, here and elsewhere. What appears as choreography is in fact cosmology.
Across the Sahara, one can still hear the hum of electric guitars, the pulse of tende drums, the ululation of women’s voices rising in praise or critique. In these gatherings, art is not separated from life, nor spirit from governance. A festival is a parliament of energies: a space in which social tensions are released through sound, where wrongs are named and relationships renewed through rhythm. The song is an argument, the dance a resolution, the laughter a law. Through repetition, communities enact their continuity; through improvisation, they affirm their capacity for change.
To dance, then, is to legislate differently, to ground law in affect, to make the communal body the site of articulation. This is not utopian; it is ancient. The Kel Tamasheq understand that beauty and justice are not opposites, but interdependent modes of balance. The one restores the other. The dancer, in their spiralling gestures, does not only entertain but harmonises: mediating between the visible and the invisible, the individual and the collective, the living and the remembered.
There is a humility in this practice, a refusal to claim authorship over movement. Energy, after all, belongs to no one. It merely passes through. In this sense, performance becomes a kind of listening: listening to what the body remembers before the mind explains, listening to the ways land moves through people, to how sound carries emotion into air. To dance is to surrender to that passage, to accept that meaning is transient, that clarity arrives through motion rather than stasis.
This awareness troubles the modernist desire for documentation and preservation. The camera, in this context, cannot “capture” a dance; it can only accompany it. Each frame is already a translation, an echo of something that exceeds its lens. The documentation of movement becomes an ethics of witnessing: an acknowledgment of impermanence rather than an attempt to arrest it. The archive, therefore, must learn to breathe, to shift from a repository of evidence to a living network of relations.
This is what makes the idea of a mobile archive — like a tent that travels — so profound. It embodies the same rhythm as transhumance: the cyclical migration that sustains both life and knowledge. It refuses the binary of centre and periphery, replacing it with circulation, encounter, exchange. Within such a structure, art does not accumulate; it unfolds. Meaning does not solidify; it multiplies. To move is to think otherwise.
In the contemporary world, where borders harden and mobility is often framed as crisis, the wisdom of nomadism offers another measure of belonging. It teaches that stability is not the absence of motion but its rhythm, the ability to remain in relation while moving through change. The body in dance mirrors the planet in orbit: continuous, cyclical, uncontained. The ethics of movement lies not in possession but in participation, not in permanence but in renewal.
The philosopher Édouard Glissant spoke of relation as an oceanic condition, a poetics of interdependence in which each element retains its opacity. Energy, in this sense, is not a universal substance but a shared vibration that holds difference without resolving it. The dance gathers these vibrations, weaving them into temporary constellations of sense. Each movement is a gesture toward connection, an offering to the unseen.
In moments of performance, the boundaries between body, instrument, and environment dissolve. The drumbeat echoes the heartbeat, the voice carries wind, the sand remembers the step. This is the ecology of resonance: a mode of knowing that recognises the interpenetration of all things. Energy made visible is not a spectacle, but a form of attention, an invitation to perceive the invisible correspondences that sustain life.
To speak of energy is also to speak of responsibility. The moment one realises that vitality flows through all beings, ethics ceases to be external. It becomes embodied, a rhythm of reciprocity. To move with awareness is to honour the flow, to resist extraction, to remain in care. The dance becomes a site of repair: not as performance of healing but as its enactment, moment by moment, gesture by gesture.
In this way, art and spirituality converge not as belief systems but as practices of orientation. Both ask: how do we move in the world? How do we listen? How do we give form to the invisible? The answer is never singular. It arises in the in-between. Between languages, between bodies, between histories. Translation, then, is not a technical act but a metaphysical one: to carry meaning across without owning it, to dwell within difference without demanding its resolution.
There is a story that says when the wind crosses the desert, it speaks in many tongues. Each dune becomes a syllable, each grain of sand a memory of movement. To listen is to participate in this conversation, to become porous to its rhythm. The musician, the dancer, the filmmaker, each in their own way, learns to listen differently: to make form from the murmuring, to shape attention into expression.
In this listening, one begins to sense the world as choreography: a ceaseless interplay of forces that exceed comprehension. The role of art, perhaps, is not to make sense of it, but to remain with it, to give shape to wonder without exhausting it. To allow beauty to remain a form of thinking, not a distraction from it.
What is revealed in these movements is a truth about humanity that resists simplification. That we are not defined by what we possess, but by how we move. That meaning does not arise from control, but from relation. That the visible is only ever the threshold of the invisible.
When the dancer steps into the circle, when the music begins, when the air trembles with anticipation. There, for a moment, the world reconfigures itself. The ordinary becomes ceremonial. The human becomes porous to the more-than-human. Energy becomes visible, not as spectacle, but as presence.
And perhaps this is all art ever does: it slows the pulse of experience just enough for us to perceive the invisible work of connection. It reveals the rhythms already there, between us, within us, around us. It teaches us, again and again, that to be alive is to be in motion, that to move is to know, that to know is to listen.
