Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces (review)

In the past decade, discourses that examine site-based art practices have developed in nuance, scope, and urgency. These critical discussions are increasingly sophisticated and provocative. They take as their premise the idea that art, when placed outside of sanctioned gallery spaces, raises questions about definitions of space, place, access, democracy, community, and participation. Common to many of these discussions is a slippage between “site-based” and “public” art—a terminological slide that reveals an underlying set of social interests in discussions of site-based creative practices: sub-tending much of this work is an investigation of the power of site-based art practices to challenge normative social and spatial interactions.

But despite the expansion of this interdisciplinary body of work, its focus has been largely restricted to the material arts: sculpture, architecture, and painting. Public performance has only begun to inch into the scholarly debate over the past few years. Quite quickly, rather complex discourses have sprung up that tease out issues of economic, geographical, sexual, gendered, and racial privilege; the flux or fixed nature of site; and also the problems inherent in concepts of “equal” access to public performances. But even this performative turn in site art studies tends to take as its subject site-based theater practices.

The situation is starting to change, but a textual basis for burgeoning discussions about site-based dance has been most conspicuous by its absence. Melanie Kloetzel and Carolyn Pavlik, the coeditors of Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces, note the dearth of critical analysis on the form as motivation for their project (16). As Elise Bernhardt asserts in the book’s Foreword: “Finally someone has begun to capture the voices, stories, observations, successes, theories, and working methods of the pioneering artists who have embarked on this integrated civic and artistic adventure” (xi).¹ Site Dance, then, arrives at a crucial time in the development of this branch of dance studies.

Kloetzel and Pavlik prioritize primary source documentation, and they begin with the artists themselves—sixteen in all. Although their focus is limited to site dance practices in the United States—an understandable (if restrictive) choice in terms of scope, and one that the editors acknowledge—they manage to feature artists from across the country: Meredith Monk to Joanna Haigood, Stephan Koplowitz to Eiko Otake. The text brings together pieces from the late 1960s through works-in-progress at the time of publication. A short introductory section, which consists mostly of a brief history of site dance practices and only a modest amount of theoretical pondering, establishes some of the key issues at play. The body of the book is made up of four sections (memory and history, site and the senses, place and beauty, and community access and involvement), each of which opens with a short preamble that sets up the featured artists. Interviews conducted by either Pavlik or Kloetzel address some of the central themes and memes explored by site practitioners. Essays written by the artists interviewed—most often reflections on a specific site-based choreographic process—round out the treatment of each choreographer. The bulk of the text, then, is made up of interview transcripts and artist essays.

In their interviews, Pavlik and Kloetzel carefully draw out the spectrum of approaches of site-based choreographic processes. The pieces described in Site Dance are variously sited in homes, empty warehouses, and museums, and on riverbanks, sidewalks, and the sides of buildings. Some pieces are created in a controlled studio setting and translocated to the performance site; most are created in the performance site itself; others are re-sited—moved from site to site and adapted to the new surroundings. By documenting these different approaches, Kloetzel and Pavlik succeed in opening a discussion of terminology: what, they ask, does it mean for a work to...