Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces »

Melanie Kloetzel is associate professor of dance at the University of Calgary. Carolyn Pavlik is assistant professor of dance at Western Michigan University. Both have performed, choreographed, and filmed site dances throughout North America.

"In Site Dance, the first anthology to examine dance performances specifically designed to take place outside of the concert hall, editors Melanie Kloetzel and Carolyn Pavlik explore the work choreographers create for nontraditional performance spaces and the thinking behind their creative choices. Combining interviews with and essays by some of the most prominent and influential practitioners of site dance, Kloetzel and Pavlik raise crucial questions about the site-specific dance genre and provide a portrait of an increasingly relevant cultural practice. The close examinations of the work of such artists as Meredith Monk, Joanna Haigood, Stephan Koplowltz, Heidi Duckler, Ann Carlson, and Eiko Otake offer important insights into what motivates some choreographers to leave the theater and embrace the challenges of unconventional venues." Site Dance also includes more than eighty photographs of site-specific performances, revealing how the arts, and movement in particular, can speak to our everyday lives and the relationship we have with our environments. These engaging images in conjunction with the choreographers' insights allow scholars and practitioners to delve deeper into issues of performance and place. Celebrating the often unexpected beauty and juxtapositions created by site dance, these timely essays and interviews reveal how choreographers and performers can change our experience of the world one step at a time.

List of Illustrations

Pt. 1 Excavating Place: Memory and Spectacle 25

Pt. 2 Environmental Dialogues: Sensing Site 119

Pt. 3 Revering Beauty: The Essence of Place 173

Pt. 4 Civic Interventions: Accessing Community 233

Bibliography 291

Index 309