Moving Sites explores site-specific dance practice through a combination of analytical essays and practitioner accounts of their working processes. In offering this joint effort of theory and practice, it aims to provide dance academics, students and practitioners with a series of discussions that shed light both on approaches to making this type of dance practice, and evaluating and reflecting on it.
The edited volume combines critical thinking from a range of perspectives including commentary and observation from the fields of dance studies, human geography and spatial theory in order to present interdisciplinary discourse and a range of critical and practice-led lenses through which this type of work can be considered and explored. In so doing, this book addresses the following questions:
· How do choreographers make site-specific dance performance?
· What occurs when a moving body engages with site, place and environment?
· How might we interpret, analyse and evaluate this type of dance practice through a range of theoretical lenses?
· How can this type of practice inform wider discussions of embodiment, site, space, place and environment?
This innovative and exciting book seeks to move beyond description and discussion of site-specific dance as a spectacle or novelty and considers site-dance as a valid and vital form of contemporary dance practice that explores, reflects, disrupts, contests and develops understandings and practices of inhabiting and engaging with a range of sites and environments.
Dr Victoria Hunter is Senior Lecturer in Dance at the University of Chichester.
Contributors
Acknowledgements
0. Introduction
VICTORIA HUNTER
SECTION 1
Approaching the Site
Section introduction VICTORIA HUNTER
1. Experiencing Space: The Implications for Site-Specific Dance Performance VICTORIA HUNTER
2. Sited Conversations FIONA WILKIE
3. Between Dance and Architecture RACHEL SARA
4. Atmospheric choreographies and air-conditioned bodies DEREK MCCORMACK
5. Embodying The Site: The Here and Now In Site-Specific Dance Performance VICTORIA HUNTER
SECTION 2
Experiencing Site: Locating the Experience
Section introduction VICTORIA HUNTER
6. Homemade Circus: Investigating Embodiment in Academic Spaces CAMILLA DAMKJAER
7. Sharing Occasions at a Distance: The Different Dimensions of Comobility CHRIS SPEED AND JEN SOUTHERN
8. Video Space: A Site For Choreography DOUGLAS ROSENBERG
9. Placing the Body in Mixed Reality SITA POPAT
10. Spatial Translation, Embodiment and the Site-Specific Event VICTORIA HUNTER
SECTION 3
Engaging with the Built Environment and Urban Practice
Section introduction VICTORIA HUNTER
11. City of Lovers CAROL BROWN
12. Dancing the History of Urban Change in the Bay and Beyond CAROLINE WALTHALL
13. Site-Specific Dance in a Corporate Landscape: Space, Place, and Non-Place MELANIE KLOETZEL
14. Stop. Look. Listen. What's going on? KATE LAWRENCE
15. Witnessing Dance in the Streets: Go! Taste the City KATRINKA SOMDAHL-SANDS
SECTION 4
Environmental and Rural Practice
Section introduction VICTORIA HUNTER
16. Dancing the Beach: In-between Land, Sea and Sky VICTORIA HUNTER
17. 'Moving beyond inscription to incorporation': The four dynamics of ecological movement in site-specific performance SANDRA REEVE
18. Strategies of Interruption: Slowing Down and Becoming Sensate in Site Responsive Dance NATALIE GARRET-BROWN
19. Diving Into the Wild: Ecologies of Performance in Devon and Cornwall MALAIKA SARCO-THOMAS
20. Spectacle, World, Environment, Void: Understanding Nature through Rural Site-Specific Dance NIGEL STEWART
SECTION 5
Sharing Site: Community, Impact and Affect
Section introduction VICTORIA HUNTER
21. From urban cities and the tropics to site-dance in the world heritage setting of Melaka: an Australian practitioner's journey CHERYL STOCK
22. Dancing in Place: Site-Specific Work JOSIE METAL-CORBIN
23. Activating Intersubjectivities in Site-Specific Contemporary Dance APRIL NUNES-TUCKER
24. Site of the Nama Stap Dance E. JEAN JOHNSON-JONES
25. Moving Sites: Transformation and Re-location in Site-specific Dance Performance VICTORIA HUNTER
Index
