Site-specific dance: Moving People

A monograph about site-specific dance, a contested term that describes dance that takes generally takes place away from the theatre stage. This genre has its roots in the postmodern movement in the 1960s and 1970s and has grown exponentially over the past 40 years, but has received limited critical attention to date. There exist currently three edited collections on the subject: Kloetzel and Pavlik eds (2009) Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces, Hunter V., ed. (2015) Moving Sites: Investigating Site-Specific Dance Performance, and Schiller and Rubidge eds (2014), Choreograhic Dwellings: Practising Place. The former was published in North America, the latter two, in the UK. All three bring together very valuable essays from a wide range of practioners and scholars. This book is aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students of dance, performing arts and theatre primarily, providing a critical analysis of the genre with reference to international case studies. This book signals a shift from a primary concern with the locations of performance, to the people (public, audiences, performers) that inhabit those spaces, and how they move through them. Several choreographic steps are charted: moving away from the theatre; moving audiences into new spaces; moving the public (physically and emotionally); dancers moving in new and often challenging environments and dancers and public moving together, in the same spaces. All these ‘moves’ or agitations have disrupted standard modes of public engagement with dance; it is this shifting landscape and the cultural, political, sociological and aesthetic contexts of these moves that is examined in this book. The author undertakes a pioneering and extended critical journey to explore and analyse different strategies of making dance work in unconventional places and how dancers and public rub shoulders, leading the reader through train stations and abandoned buildings, into forests and onto beaches, down crowded streets and the walls of buildings.

The book will draw upon a range of case studies drawn from the UK, Europe, North America and Australia. These include Seven Sisters Group, Motionhouse, Punchdrunk, Rosemary Lee (UK), Willi Dorner (Austria), Il Posto (Italy), Retouramont (France), Histeria Nova (Croatia), Aeriosa (Canada), Cheryl Stock (Australia), Meredith Monk, Trisha Brown, Ann Carlson and Heidi Duckler ( all from USA) as well as some of the author’s own choreography. The author, Lawrence has developed and taught undergraduate and postgraduate modules in site-specific dance between 2000 and 2018 alongside her career as a choreographer and has published four articles in this field 2007 (2), 2010 and 2015).

The research methodology applied is mixed. It includes analysis of literature in dance, performance, theatre, and visual arts and internet resources including company websites, performance videos and reviews. In Chapter 6 I use first person description of my own experiences of watching and performing in site-specific work. This is to give readers, perhaps students, an insight into ways of writing from a practitioner perspective and provides a different register of information of a more phenomenological nature. Questionnaires will be used to gain more information about the ‘state of the art’ for the historical chapter to provide a practitioner viewpoint. Structured interviews with specific practitioners around a specific set of questions will also be used to gain further information about their relationship with site-specific choreography. These will not be published as interviews, but will used to support and develop the analytical arguments by providing an insight into the intentions and creative processes of these artists. These serve to inject different voices into the debate.