1st Edition

Moving Sites Investigating Site-Specific Dance Performance

Edited By Victoria Hunter Copyright 2015
    510 Pages
    by Routledge

    510 Pages
    by Routledge

    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

    Biography

    Victoria Hunter is a Senior Lecturer in Dance at the University of Chichester, UK.