1st Edition

The Routledge Companion to Site-Specific Performance

Edited By Victoria Hunter, Cathy Turner Copyright 2025
526 Pages 25 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

526 Pages 25 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

526 Pages 25 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This collection comprises a comprehensive overview of key themes, arguments, and practices central to the study and understanding of site-specific performance. Its collected essays, case studies, and practitioner accounts represent a must-have resource that engages with established and emergent ideas, themes, and practices central to this performance sub-discipline. Acknowledging the... Read more

List of Illustrations

Contributors

Acknowledgements

 

 

Introduction: Terminology, Thematic Structure, Lineages and Contemporary Concerns

                        Victoria Hunter and Cathy Turner

 

 

PART I

Approaching Places: Locating Performance

 

1.       Specific Places/Global Spaces: Arrival – Neoliberal Placemaking in East London’s Royal Docks

Katie Beswick

2.       Hemispheric Dialogues: Site Specificity and Indigenous perforMAGICAL ACTivations in Pe ataju jumali/Hot Air

Laura Levin and Juma Pariri

3.       Field Works

Karen Barbour

4.       Three-Dimensional Metaphor: After ‘Site’

Phil Smith

5.       Method Disorder: Three Questions Raised by Site Dance to Dance Aesthetic Studies

Julie Perrin

6.       Digital Off Sites: Screening Stages and Theatre’s Aura

Bertie Ferdman

 

PART II

Bodies: Politics, Activism, and Resistance

 

7.       Anti-Colonial Approaches to Site-Based Dance Performance

Rainy Demerson

8.       WalkCreate: Walking Together as Site-Specific Performance

Morag Rose, Clare Qualmann, Deirdre Heddon, Harry Wilson, and Maggie O’Neill

9.       Siting Dance in the Protests of Political Subjectivities

 Ayrin Ersöz

10.   Women Walking: Site Relational Movements

Deirdre Heddon and Cathy Turner

11.   Ange Aoussou’s Un Pas Vers L’avant: Site-Adaptive Improvisation and Community Engagement in Urban Africa

Celia Weiss Bambara

 

 

 

PART III

Histories

 

12.   Place, Event, Memory: Jhandapur and Jana Natya Manch

Aparna Mahiyaria

13.   What Makes a Trauma Site-Specific?: The Performative Culture of Memorials

Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson

14.   Expanding the Notion of Monument through Performance

Anna Birch

15.   Jay Pather: The Politics of Site in South Africa

Ketu H. Katrak

16.   Braiding, A Fluid Dramaturgy

Carol Brown

 

PART IV

Architectures and Landscapes

 

17.   Choreography and Architecture: Compositions in This Place

Adesola Akinleye

18.   In Exile: Staging Epic Journeys across Continents of Land and Water

Dorita Hannah

19.   Activating ‘Rasa’ with Dance-Architecture

Shinjita Roy

20.   ‘Listening to the Land’: A Field of Wheat: Arts and Agriculture Project

Susan Haedicke

21.   Employing Metaphor in Site-Specific Vertical Dance Choreography

Kate Lawrence

PART V

Ecologies

 

22.   Folding One Place Within Another: Re-thinking Site-Specificity in the Anthropocene via Simone Forti’s 5 Dance Constructions and Some Other Things

Carl Lavery and Simon Whitehead

23.   Trees as Experts in Site-Specificity

Annette Arlander

24.   Site Performance, Coloniality and the Climate Crisis

Melanie Kloetzel

25.   Walking Out of Our Bodies and Into the Mountain: Dancing, Mountaineering and Embodied Interconnections through Place-Relational Performance

Simone Kenyon

26.   ‘A Holding Space’: Emergence and Entanglement in Tree Spaces

Victoria Hunter

 

 

PART VI

Technologies: Media and Transmission

 

27.    Touching Distant Time and Place: Place-Based Augmented Reality Storytelling

Misha Myers

28.   The Connected Museum

Gabriella Giannacci and Steve Benford

29.   Site-Specificity and Virtual Reality

Julie Holledge and Joanne Tompkins

30.   Wandering with a Camera: Site-Specific Scores for the Making of Somatic Landscape Screendance

Heike Salzer

31.   Practices of Embodied Listening: Audio Choreographies and Event-Making

Ariadne Mikou

 

PART VII

Methods and Structures

 

32.   Dancing Restless Histories

Gretel Taylor

33.   The Making of Breathe

Synne K. Behrndt

34.   ‘On the Rocks’: Two Encounters

Leslie Satin

35.   Dancing Outdoors: Site, Context, and Commons

Rosemary Lee

 

Index

 

 

Biography

Victoria Hunter is a Professor in Site Dance at Bath Spa University, UK.

Cathy Turner is a Professor of Drama at the University of Exeter, UK.