ABSTRACT
The chapter shows that the Western concept of 'site' is inadequate for opening a dialogue with bicultural practice and indigenous ontologies of place in New Zealand as it undergoes a process of decolonisation. In the context of 'site dance' the performance work emerged through a recognition of the limitations of postmodern discourses that are bound to Western concepts of space and subjectivity. Making urban space speak through performance, it mobilised city architectures constructed by corporate and industrial networks as poetic spaces. If theatrical space is a concentration of space, focusing inwards from an outside, site-responsive dance is concerned with a more open relational space that takes us literally outside. In post-settler cities like Auckland, indigenous understandings of place co-exist with Western conceptions of space and geography although these may be suppressed, under-acknowledged or ignored by the dominant stakeholders in urban development. Alternatively they may be embraced through artistic interventions.
