ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |21 pages

Introduction

part I|92 pages

Approaching the site

chapter 1|15 pages

Experiencing space

The implications for site-specific dance performance

chapter 2|22 pages

Sited conversations

chapter 3|17 pages

Between dance and architecture

chapter 5|20 pages

Embodying the site

The here and now in site-specific dance performance 1

part II|82 pages

Experiencing site

chapter 6|14 pages

Homemade circus

Investigating embodiment in academic spaces

chapter 7|16 pages

Sharing occasions at a distance

The different dimensions of comobility

chapter 8|15 pages

Video space

A site for choreography

chapter 9|16 pages

Placing the body in mixed reality

part III|96 pages

Engaging with the built environment and urban practice

chapter 11|24 pages

City of lovers

chapter 13|16 pages

Site-specific dance in a corporate landscape

Space, place, and non-place 1

chapter 15|19 pages

Witnessing dance in the streets

Go! Taste the City

part IV|92 pages

Environmental and rural practice

chapter 16|15 pages

Dancing the beach

In between land, sea and sky

chapter 17|18 pages

‘Moving beyond inscription to incorporation’

The four dynamics of ecological movement in site-specific performance

chapter 18|14 pages

Strategies of interruption

Slowing down and becoming sensate in site-responsive dance

chapter 19|22 pages

Diving into the wild

Ecologies of performance in Devon and Cornwall

chapter 20|21 pages

Spectacle, world, environment, void

Understanding nature through rural site-specific dance

part V|91 pages

Sharing the site

chapter 21|20 pages

From urban cities and the tropics to site-dance in the world heritage setting of Melaka

An Australian practitioner's journey

chapter 22|16 pages

Dancing in place

Site-specific work

chapter 24|19 pages

Site of the Nama Stap Dance

chapter 25|17 pages

Moving sites

Transformation and re-location in site-specific dance performance