(Re)Positioning Site Dance: Local Acts, Global Perspectives

By Karen Barbour and Melanie Kloetzel

Site-based dance performance and sited movement explorations implicate dance makers, performers and audience members in a number of dialogical processes between body, site and environment. This book aims to articulate international approaches to the making, performing and theorising of site-based dance. Drawing on perspectives from three practitioner-academics based in three distinct world regions – Europe, North America and Oceania – the authors explore a range of practices that engage with sociocultural, political, ecological and economic discourses, and demonstrate how these discourses both frame and inform processes of site dance making as well as shape the ways in which such interventions are conceived and evaluated.

Intended for artists, scholars and students, (Re)Positioning Site Dance is an important addition to the theoretical discourse on place and performance in an era of global sociopolitical and ecological transformation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jul 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789380132

Book preview

First published in the UK in 2019 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2019 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2019 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copy-editor: MPS Technologies

Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas

Production manager: Mareike Wehner

Typesetting: Contentra Technologies

Cover image: Site-based exploration of West Wittering beach, 2018, West Sussex, UK. Image: Victoria Hunter. Dancer: Yuquing Han.

Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-998-9

ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78938-014-9

ePub ISBN: 978-1-78938-013-2

Printed and bound by TJ International, UK.

This is a peer-reviewed publication.

This book is dedicated to our students, our individual dance communities and to the global community of movers. With special thank you to our families – Arana and Tahukiterangi; Scott, Finlay and Molly; Andy, Camas and Day – who have tolerated our global collaboration (and Skype calls) at all sorts of inconvenient hours and generously accepted our need to write this book.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: (Re)positioning site dance: Local acts, global perspectives Karen Barbour, Victoria Hunter, Melanie Kloetzel

Section One: Historical lineages and contemporary concerns: Tactics, encounters and contexts

Chapter 1: From recontextualization to protest: 50 years of site dance practice in North America

Melanie Kloetzel

Chapter 2: Activism, land contestation and place responsiveness

Karen Barbour

Chapter 3: Sited English folk dance as a form of site dance: Heritage, tradition and resistance

Victoria Hunter

Section Two: Practice into theory: Materials, dialogues and affect

Chapter 4: Dancing gardens: Phenomenology and affective practices

Karen Barbour

Chapter 5: Material touchstones: Weaving histories through site-specific dance performance

Victoria Hunter

Chapter 6: Lend me an ear: Dialogism and the vocalizing site

Melanie Kloetzel

Section Three: Moving towards the global: Ethics, mobility and marginalization

Chapter 7: Performing parks and squares

Victoria Hunter

Chapter 8: Site-specific dance and environmental ethics: Relational fields in the Anthropocene

Melanie Kloetzel

Chapter 9: Dancing in foreign places: Practices of place and tropophilia

Karen Barbour

Conclusion

References

Index

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Introduction

(Re)positioning site dance: Local acts, global perspectives

Karen Barbour, Victoria Hunter, Melanie Kloetzel

Look around and situate yourself, here in this place, at this time, in front of the computer screen, in the studio, at the table with book in hand. Where and how are you situated, in relation to whom and what, to where and when?

Where are you located, what is this local site, can you map the grid coordinates, identify your position in metres above sea level, the distance to and from points x and y?

What, where and how is the space above, below and around your body? Can you shift your body imperceptibly in the space, what ripple effects occur here and now?

What surrounds, controls, defines and demarcates this space, this site? How is this somewhere different, distinct from or similar to somewhere else?

What makes this your place – what memories, emotions and sensations embed you physically here, what ties you to or repels you from this place?

Who else is here, how close or distant are they, how are they situated or oriented towards your location?

What or who is not here? Who else is situated in other, similar sites and places across town, across the world?

How might you move, move off, move into, move across and traverse the space from your current location?

What impressions, disturbances and interventions will your actions make on this site, this place and this world?

What imprint will you leave behind?

This book offers an experiment: engage three quite different site dance practitioner-scholars from three distinct regions, place their experiences and thoughts into a singular text, shake well and observe. Drawing on perspectives from the three global regions in which Victoria Hunter, Melanie Kloetzel and Karen Barbour are located (Europe, North America and South Pacific), this text strives to explore a range of site dance practices that emerge from these regions in order to examine how such practices engage with local and global dialogues and concerns.

Site dance practice has grown substantially over the past half century, with site dance performances now appearing in myriad locations around the globe. From Jay Pather’s CityScapes (2002) in multiple sites around Durban, South Africa, to Angela Liong’s site-specific works that have cropped up in public spaces around Singapore for the past decade, to Anna Källblad and Helena Byström’s City Horses (2017) exploring urban areas of Stockholm in Sweden, site dance can now be found on every continent and in diverse cultural settings. Such increasing popularity has also meant that site dance has grown more fluid, with site-based practices shifting and revealing new directions and new places of exchange. Thus, while site-specific forms continue to be practised the world over, with choreographers interacting with and creating work based on and to be performed in singular sites, other possibilities are also developing due to the growing presence of street arts festivals, the intersection of virtual technology and dance, and a general fascination with the interactions that can occur between a dancing body and the material world (Fraleigh 2018; Haedicke 2013; Hunter 2018; Kloetzel 2015b, 2017a, 2017b, 2019). For the purposes of this book, we are not invested in limiting the discussion of site dance to the site-specific. However, many of the examples explored in this text do focus on this frame as a result of the nature of individual practices and research interests.

As this volume contextualizes site dance practice over the past 50 years as well as examines new trajectories and tactics within the form, it is important to note that these discussions are infused with particular genealogies that arise from the global regions in which we, the authors, are situated. Indeed, the differences between these nuanced, regional genealogies necessarily shape our site dance practices, the topics we address, and our different voices as authors, a scenario that demonstrates our collective interest in valuing local contexts and how they direct our academic and artistic research (Gottschild 1997).

From an American perspective, for example, site dance practice evolved in the 1960s as a form that was both deeply attuned to concepts of being in natural, urban and architectural environments (particularly through the lineage of Anna Halprin in the San Francisco Bay area) and invested in the intellectualized political and aesthetic projects embarked on by Merce Cunningham and the Judson Dance Theater in New York (see Chapter 1 for a detailed discussion of this development). In the United Kingdom, an overtly political emphasis informed the work of early site dance practice produced by the X6 dance collective in the late 1970s and artists such as Lea Anderson and Mark Murphy in the early 1980s. Infused with acts of political unrest and resistance, dance artists such as Emilyn Claid, Jacky Lansley, Rosemary Butcher and Mary Prestidge experimented with site-based practices that resisted dominant, mainstream modes of dance presentation and production. In Aotearoa New Zealand, on the other hand, site dance emerged in the 1990s as a somatically informed and holistic movement practice that connected artists with their environment in grounded, culturally specific and embodied approaches. After well-known works by Susan Jordan in Wellington began to attract public interest in site dance (Bolwell 1991), the practice grew through the influences of indigenous Māori cultural and spiritual relationships with the land, the practices of Butoh originating in Japan (Fraleigh 2010; Stein and Tanaka 1986) and the teachings of artist Alison East (2011).

Alongside these developments, scholarly and practice-based research has evolved significantly over the past fifteen years to address site dance interventions created and performed in non-theatre locations. For more comprehensive perspectives on such developments, both Melanie Kloetzel and Carolyn Pavlik’s anthology Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces (2009) and Victoria Hunter’s edited volume Moving Sites: Investigating Site-Specific Dance Performance (2015a) offer readers useful overviews of site dance practice that have grounded the discussion in this book in significant ways.

Building on such discourse, this book aims to investigate more specifically how local site dance intersects with or is affected by global discourses, systems and events. Through detailed descriptions and critical examinations of our own and others’ locally based practices and by employing specific ecological, economic, political and sociocultural lenses, we illustrate the critical impact that globalized discourses can have on localized site dance, from inception to performance to evaluation. In short, by focusing on local practices (particular to the world regions we represent) in relation to global themes, we position and (re)position site dance as a critical and investigative practice through which human–world relations can be (re)articulated.

To facilitate this investigation, we adopt a metaphor of conceptual and discursive ‘zooming’ or ‘spiralling’, in which we move in and out of considering the complexities and particularities of our own site dance practices in relation to globally relevant themes and imperatives. Engaging with our own and others’ site dance research, with each ‘spiral turn’ or ‘zoom’ the discourse gathers a sense of momentum, expanding outwards to engage with a range of complex and globally relevant ideas, and then returning to considerations of the local with newly informed perspectives.

In particular, this book arises from a mutual interest in the relevance of site dance in a globalized world. It stems from research that demonstrates the efficacy of site performance as an art form that reflects and responds to issues and themes arising from the many real-world, non-theatre locations with which it engages. Bringing site dance practices into dialogue with global themes and perspectives has begun to emerge in recent site dance scholarship (Ashley 2017; Brown 2015; Kloetzel 2017b); however, there is still further scope to expand this dialogue. The scarcity of such discourse, perhaps, stems from the nature of the genre itself and its intrinsic engagement with and commitment to ‘attending to’ specific (local) sites and environments (Kloetzel and Pavlik 2009: 6–7). However, in this text, we underscore the need for effective critical and creative processes that, while adopting the attention to place emphasized in such local site-specific work, may more overtly address how local places dialogue with, impact and are effectively produced by larger regional, national or global issues and events. Borrowing from discourses that emphasize the importance of changing global flows and the role of the imaginary in our collective social conceptions (Appadurai 1996; Massey 2005; Sassen 1998), we underline how artistic processes can play a significant part in integrating local and localized bodies into globalized processes and exchanges. In particular, we argue for processes that do not condone merely submitting to or waiting for global events to unfold, but rather engage with the pressing nature of the contemporary global milieu in an active manner.

These chapters emerge at a moment in time when significant and seemingly seismic political, economic, ecological and social events permeate the everyday. These events – such as the issuing of draconian executive orders by the Trump administration in the United States; contentious post-Brexit negotiations in the United Kingdom; the disappearance of whole islands in the South Pacific due to rising sea levels; the rise of the far right in European politics; worsening humanitarian crises in parts of North Africa and the Middle East; and, widespread negation of (and increasingly violent interactions around) environmental issues and concerns – reveal an epoch of increasing insecurity, uncertainty and instability, an epoch in which social, political and cultural structures, as well as the planet itself, appear in jeopardy.

Seismic political events and global shifts are, of course, not solely the preserve of the current era; periods of turbulence and tumult are intrinsic features of history and futurity. However, we now live in a world in which news and footage of such events are transmitted in real-time through a myriad of televised, audio, web-based, social media and portable devices, making globalized currents and concerns both permanent and permeable. It is perhaps due to the pervasive nature of such media and technology that we feel particularly attuned to and saturated by the weight of world events on a ‘perma-basis’ and why we, as authors, felt compelled to explore the relationship of our work to such clamouring global themes. The present context has made us ponder what the purpose and reach of site dance is in such a world. How is localized site dance practice implicated in and affected by global events, trends and currents? How might forms of site dance research and practice articulate and/or possibly influence the socio-economic, political and ecological concerns that impact the sites, communities and ecosystems in which it occurs?

In addressing these questions, this co-authored volume positions site dance as a practical and theoretical vehicle through which local enactments, performances and interventions can actively consider and comment on such seismic events and themes. It also (re)positions site dance through a maturing critical analysis that does not solely examine dance-making practices from a modernist or postmodernist choreographic perspective. Instead, by using broader discourses enmeshed with real-time and real-space political, economic, cultural and ecological events, we consider anew how local acts performed in a mediatized and globalized era reinforce, overturn and/or become implicated in preconceived or imperialist notions of power, place and practice.

Practice-as-research methodologies, or how theories emerge from practice

This book prioritizes the importance of practice as a way to unearth epistemological insights. Moving beyond current site-based performance scholarship that relies primarily on external disciplinary discourses to validate and evaluate this type of work, we propose that this form of dance practice in and of itself provides a lens through which human–place connections and interactions can be researched. To illustrate this directional flow, this publication describes and draws from the authors’ own and others’ creative practice-as-research to illustrate how lived, experiential methodologies and creative efforts can offer not only a ‘site’ for debate, discourse and resistance, but also a ‘site’ from which knowledge can emerge.

Although as authors we have clearly been inculcated and/or immersed within certain theoretical discourses, we begin here by highlighting the primacy of site dance practice as a way of generating knowledge. We assert that ‘knowing-through-doing’ is a practicable and valuable position for knowledge generation, and that insights engendered from such experiential methods may offer unusual or innovative possibilities for addressing real-world concerns. We also propose that, through a committed engagement to this type of embodied research, an ethnographic disposition can emerge to facilitate such knowledge production. As dancers, we have acquired a corporeal skill set that combines a heightened sense of spatial and kinetic sensibilities along with an understanding of the value of embodied knowledge. This skill set facilitates an awareness that is in line with ethnographic methods of participant observation and offers a valuable base through which to examine knowledge generated through practice.

Undoubtedly, such methodologies fall under the larger practice-as-research mantle (Barrett and Bolt 2013; Kershaw and Nicholson 2011; Nelson 2013; Smith and Dean 2009) where conceptual insights and research outputs are a direct result of practical research, artistic or otherwise. In the case of our own site dance work, these methodologies may borrow from various improvisational techniques, as well as from contemporary experimental, collaborative, choreographic and/or devising strategies. They may include phenomenological movement inquiry, movement score generation or other postmodern creation tactics; they may take the form of varied non-movement-based interactions with a site or community; they may comprise historical or geological research about a place, exchanges with local community and service organizations and/or deep readings of a site through interviews with participants or community members. Such methodologies, which for us have led to a number of performance, film and written outputs, illuminate how action-based investigation into particular sites of performance can offer unusual, expanded or new perspectives on social, cultural and political phenomena and systems.

Lenses and approaches

The theoretical metaphor of ‘the lens’ applied here implies a particular perspectival viewpoint associated with the geographical, political, socio-economic and pedagogical circumstances from which this writing evolves. It highlights ‘from what position’ we, as authors, see the world, including our place within particular regions, socio-economic circumstances and cultural value systems. It underlines what we can see, what we have the means to see and what priorities and judgements we bring to bear on the work we encounter.

We state this to underscore two key points: first, that the ‘lenses’ informing this book stem from particular (academically minded) disciplinary backgrounds, discourses and epistemological models that noticeably frame the knowledge we generate from practice. Although we are committed to the insights emerging from practice, as researchers in the site performance field, we are also defined by, or in dialogue with, specific lineages of thought that have emerged in the fields of performance studies, geography, anthropology, economics, visual art, architecture, globalization and cultural studies, philosophy and critical theory, among others. We outline below some of the most influential of these lineages and critical concepts.

Yet, it is also important to provide such a ‘position’ statement in order to elucidate certain choices made in this text. While we are keen to address as many site dance processes and performances as possible, we cannot access all such practices. For although academies may (or may not) offer the privilege of financial support to travel to and engage with performance work situated in diverse or disparate places, these same academies also place limitations on researchers’ time and resources. Add to this the import we place on practice-led methodologies, as well as the relatively small numbers and geographical range of site works discussed in previous publications, and the restricted breadth of works addressed here becomes clearer. In other words, due to conditions of geography, economics and time, many site dance works are, quite literally, unavailable to us for discussion and, as a result, many perspectives, voices and narratives are omitted. Works and viewpoints from the Global South (beyond Aotearoa New Zealand), although alluded to and/or acknowledged within some of the discourse, do not feature prominently. Dance and movement practices located in Asia, South America and Africa receive minimal attention.

As authors we recognize these exclusions and omissions, and we underscore that we cannot (unfortunately) present here an exhaustive or comprehensive overview of global contemporary site dance practice. One book cannot hope to cover everything – nor should it. While we recognize our own privileged positions as academics, we do not wish to speak for or on behalf of other academics, dance artists or practitioners from globally different perspectives and from unique sites and places; indeed, we do not even claim to represent all practices from our own specified regions – to do so would be presumptuous and misleading. By acknowledging our omissions, we hope to mitigate against any unintentional or inferred attempts to colonize the discourse, and instead encourage more voices to speak from their unique sites and places around the globe.

Power, politics and place

Place is without question the medium and the muse of site dance practitioners. As such, it has been discussed at length in site dance and performance literature (Hunter 2015a; Kaye 2000; Kloetzel 2010, 2015a; Kloetzel and Pavlik 2009; Kwon 2002; Pearson 2010; Schechner 1977, 1995; Wilkie 2002b). Such a discourse has been heavily influenced by, for one, human geography scholars who have noted how definitions and concepts of space and place can be variably related and interwoven. For example, some conceptions of these terms have more romantic and nostalgic understandings of place or space (Bachelard 1958; Calvino 1972; Tuan 1974), often in how it relates to art (Lippard 1998), while other theorists unpack the colonialist ideals embedded in space and place and find new, critical ways of employing these terms (Carter 2015; Massey 2005; Rendell 2006; Seamon and Nordin 1980). Still others have proposed the need for new terminology (Appadurai 1996; Augé 1995; Lefebvre 1991; Soja 1996) to characterize locations in a post-Fordist, globalizing world, or have foregrounded the active experience of the body to comprehend and define space and place (Casey 1997; de Certeau 1984; Thrift 2006). Borrowing from these theories, dance scholars have also examined how space and place are implicated in dance more broadly (Briginshaw 2001; Grau 2012; Ravn and Rouhiainen 2012), and in site dance in particular (Barbour 2016b; Brown 2014; Hunter 2015a; Kloetzel 2010, 2015a; Pine and Kuhlke 2014; Schiller and Rubidge 2014).

What these discourses demonstrate is that place and space are not neutral or ungrounded concepts; rather, they are weighted and inscribed by cultural, political and economic discourses and actions. Thus, in embarking on a site-based process, an artist may find her/himself involved, or even implicated, in questions about land ownership, traditions, access, sovereignty, policy and planning. A work performed on a contested site where indigenous peoples are re-claiming guardianship or ownership, for example, will be quite different than a work sited in a corporate-owned food court, but both have been and will be impacted by power, privilege and political systems. This book is infused with such considerations that explore, for instance, how site dance performances (and the narratives they employ) may be influenced by place-based political decisions that benefit dominant groups while marginalizing others.

In short, as site dance artists experiment with, research and interact with communities in a chosen site, they must step carefully, negotiating these claims and contestations. In dialoguing with and then representing a site through performance, they continually choose whose voice gets prioritized and whose agenda with regard to place registers in the work. In making such choices, site dance artists may consider multiple narratives, both dominant and hidden, noting the slippery and loaded nature of our histories in relation to place. And, as they do so, their own understandings of place, space and site, as well as the narratives inscribed upon such locations, help to (re)position and (re)interpret our surroundings in light of power, politics and economic systems.

Economic systems and their impact

Discourses of neoliberal political and economic practices and their effects on everyday, lived experience present a key theoretical theme running throughout this book. In his pivotal work A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), David Harvey outlines how neoliberal policies and practices began to emerge in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with such agendas expanding the world over beginning in the 1990s until present (Davies and Bansel 2007; Lawn and Prentice 2015; Cahill and Konings 2017; Kotz 2015). By the 1990s, practices of commodification, cost-efficiency and entrepreneurship emerged as key outcomes from neoliberal approaches, with such practices favouring commercial transaction and the establishment of ‘markets’ and privatization over state-controlled and regulated trade models (Steger and Roy 2010).

Artists, too, have been impacted by the neoliberal system, often left scrambling to find new modes of production and methods of promotion to fit into a commodity-oriented market (Harvie 2013; Ridout and Schneider 2012). Indeed, many of us in the arts and education sectors labour to interpret and define the immediate and long-term effects of neoliberal practices on the field, as these practices continue to be a matter of much debate (Whelan 2015) and are often challenging to unpack with confidence. Unwittingly, however, many of us in these sectors have also been seduced by neoliberal agendas, imagining that the pursuit of academic and artistic individualism offers some kind of freedom or expanded opportunities for the field (Kloetzel 2017a; Barbour 2016c; Harvie 2013; Berlant et al. 2012).

As artists and academics, we now find ourselves subjected to the seemingly ‘laissez faire’ meta-narrative of the neoliberal system, where processes of control, regulation and censorship serve ideologies and agendas that advocate for capital gain, economic development and ‘progress’. As such, site dance practitioners who engage with real-world locations cannot help but intersect with the effects of such agendas, including urban processes of regeneration, gentrification and planning, as well as with rural processes surrounding corporatized food production, indigenous land ownership and resource extraction. In urban settings, site artists encounter neoliberal practices that work to replace individualized and improvised modes of spatial construction and engagement with corporatized or homogenized development projects, transforming cityscapes into sanitized municipal zones in which activities are monitored, regulated and controlled. While in rural settings, site artists encounter corporate takeovers of family farms, the loss of public lands and disputes over resource control and methods of extraction both above- and below-ground. Thus, in both urban and rural settings, artists engaged in practice-as-research site projects may find themselves implicated in and impacted by the large-scale land transformations and contestations that have resulted from neoliberal policies.

Ecological concerns

Ecological thinking provides another foundation for discussions in this book, highlighting the relationships between people and place in general, and between dancers and sites in particular. Ecological approaches focus on the dynamic interconnections between organisms within an environment or a system, emphasizing processes, movements, demarcations and exchanges. Within the field of ecology, scientists engage with concepts of biodiversity, interaction, circulation, resilience, adaptation and sustainability, applying these concepts to local contexts where researchers, for example, study the diverse webs of relationship within old growth forests in British Columbia or the precarious position of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, as well as to global contexts where researchers address climate change impacts on the planetary ecosystem as a whole. As insights about cellular, bioregional and global processes emerge from the disciplines of earth sciences, ecology, geography and biology, we have the ability to apply such newfound knowledge to resource management, conservation, community health, economics and, also, to art-making.

Ecology thus offers a holistic perspective that, while including people, does not prioritize the needs of humans over other organisms (Abram 1996; Leopold 1949; Næss 1973; Phillips 2015; Suzuki 1997). Instead, it aims to highlight the ways in which people are inherently immersed in and connected to, rather than separate from, the natural or ‘more-than-human’ world. This ‘more-than-human’ terminology, coined by David Abram in 1996, quickly became a staple in the environmental community (activists, theorists, scholars) to designate all other aspects of a system beyond humanity; it is a term that you will find throughout this text as a key indicator of the ecological mindset that infuses site dance practice. Such a mindset, readily apparent in the localized practices of site-specific and place-responsive dance discussed in this text, is also evident in scholarly analyses of the form, with practical methodologies being informed by environmentalism, deep ecology and ecological feminism.

Environmentalists, scientists and many others have demonstrated that the crises now facing our local and global communities are the result of imbalance within ecological systems (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2017; Carson 1962; Commoner 1971; Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1968; McKibben 1989; Rockström et al. 2009). Loss of biodiversity through species extinction and genetic modification of seeds, disappearance of local habitats through climate change and global warming, and degradation of air, soil and water quality through pollution from intensive industry, farming and mining are all examples in which the needs of people have been prioritized over the health and resilience of natural systems. This collective scenario has led to the emergence of the term ‘Anthropocene’ (Crutzen 2002) to delineate the current geological era, the first of its kind that is anthropogenic, or a result of elevating human economic needs and agendas over ecological systems. For certain site dance choreographers, this scenario has prompted them to employ site performance as a platform for environmental activism (Barbour 2016b; Kloetzel 2017b; East 2011). Conversely, some environmental organizations are using and/or promoting creative and performative methods of activism to effect change (Greenpeace, 350.org, National Resource Defence Council and others). In sum, site dance practitioners, like many others, are responding to ecological crises, offering contexts for discussion, as well as for developing understanding and raising awareness about the effects, adaptations and new directions indicated in an Anthropocenic age.

Phenomenology, New Materialism and embodiment

Often connected to the ecological approaches denoted above, phenomenological perspectives that prioritize embodied experiences as a means of knowing the world also infuse a number of the discussions contained within this book. The work of scholars such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962), Simone de Beauvoir (1953, 2010), Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (1966, 1999) and Sondra Fraleigh (1987, 2015) have informed considerations of body–world relations and situated the lived body and lived experience as central in philosophical understandings. Dancers, particularly, become dynamically attuned to the quality of their own lived embodied experiences and to the quality of movement in the world around them (Sheets-Johnstone 1999). The phenomenological notion of ‘lifeworld’ is a useful inclusive concept for site dance that encompasses relationships between self and world, recognizing humans as part of an interconnected ecological system. In bracketing a lived experience such as dancing in a site, dance phenomenologists attempt to suspend their common interpretations and pay attention to what may be ‘taken-for-granted’.

More recently, New Materialist perspectives have attempted to broaden out from subjective observations embedded in phenomenology into wider considerations of human–world interactions. New Materialism, drawing on and extending indigenous philosophies and earlier theoretical models (Callicott 1985; Capra 1982; Harvey 2005), proposes a fluid model of interaction between body and world in which conventional (human) subject–object hierarchies are inverted, challenging us to consider the possibility of porous exchanges existing between material bodies and the ‘vibrant matter’ of the material world (Bennett 2010). In this process, all bodies become implicated in processes of enmeshment, engagement and ‘intra-action’ (Barad 2007) through which commonalities of experience and exchange might be articulated beyond the subjective realm.

These perspectives are important to site dance discourse as they support viewpoints within site dance praxis that prioritize ‘other’ ways of knowing the world. Such notions challenge epistemological hierarchies and conventions by proposing a form of corporeal ‘knowing-through-doing’ in which the materials of the body engage with the materials of site in an enmeshed and entangled manner. This discourse of embodiment and its processes, affordances and affects runs as a key thread in this volume and is of primary concern for us as we articulate how embodiment processes are conceived, invoked and experienced through site dance practices. As we suggest throughout this introduction, the need to foster the lived or embodied sense of site is critical to the practice; it is a priority that has led us to develop and share certain practical exercises and tasks throughout our chapters that highlight the value of embodied experience.

Gender relations and feminist approaches to spatial engagement

As a final lens, we underscore how feminist perspectives support the site-based processes, methodologies and theories explored in this book. In line with the phenomenological dialogues outlined, the value of personal lived and embodied experience is also highlighted within feminist discourse, a value that is uniquely realized through dance as an embodied practice that prioritizes knowledge of self, others and world.

Feminist critiques of patriarchal societies highlight how the conditions of the wider sociopolitical milieu are inevitably reflected in personal experiences. As such, one method for considering