Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces

Part 4. Civic Interventions: Accessing Community

4 Civic Interventions Accessing Community Figure 69. Martha Bowers’s Safe Harbour/CORK (2001). Photo courtesy of Dance Theatre Etcetera. Because of its placement in public spaces, site-specific dance is an accessible art form. People who might never frequent a theater or who do not conceive of dance as part of their daily lives may come across site-specific dances on the side of a building, or in a community garden, or even in a local waterway. Almost all site choreographers interact with the general public in some way; yet certain site choreographers seek such interactions as the fundamental basis for their work. For them, site art is, above all, a means to create and affect communities and their quality of life. The three choreographers included in this section, Jo Kreiter, Tamar Rogoff, and Martha Bowers, are heavily invested in the intersections between site art and the community. For these women, community involvement in key issues is vital and their work attempts to portray the community as an active player, not only in cultural events but also in decisions that affect their lives from politics to real estate to crime. Jo Kreiter’s background in political science sometimes seems as important as her interest in athleticism in dance. The artistic director of San Francisco–based Flyaway Productions, Kreiter has been making aerial site dances since the mid-1990s. These site pieces demonstrate the power of women, as audiences watch her women’s-only group flip and spin overhead on billboards, murals, and fire escapes. The company goes further still in championing women’s empowerment by hosting and performing for the 10 Women Campaign each year in San Francisco to highlight women in activism and the arts. Kreiter enjoys interacting with community members around all kinds of critical issues from workers’ rights to homelessness. When an old industrial crane was going to be torn down, Kreiter joined with neighborhood labor and environmental organizations to draw attention to the crane through a performance. Her piece How to Be a Citizen (2004) celebrated the importance of San Francisco’s Market Street as a place of peaceful protest, and Mission Wall Dances (2002) dealt directly with people who had been displaced in the Mission area of San Francisco due to arson. For Kreiter, sites that expose a conflict within a community entice her. “[T]he site holds a quandary in its ‘hands,’” she explains in her interview in chapter 12. In particular, these controversial spaces inspire her to create works that spark a civic dialogue, one in which she is eager to participate. 236 Part 4 In her article, “Making Sparrow’s End,” Kreiter chronicles her difficulties in reclaiming a public space riddled with fear and urban blight. In her account of the creation of Sparrow’s End (1997), process balances product as drug exchanges, bodily neglect, and community wonder pervade their attempts at creation. At the close of the article, Kreiter contemplates the aftereffects of site work, wrestling with the reactions of the audience and the inevitable ephemerality of what she has made. As Kreiter zeroes in on social and political dilemmas of our time, we can see how site-specific dance can actively intersect with the civic dialogues that develop around place. While Kreiter was swinging off buildings in San Francisco, Tamar Rogoff was exploring her father’s home country of Belarus. In the mid1990s , for her first major site project, Rogoff decided to examine the effects of the Holocaust on her father’s hometown of Ivye. Yet, even as The Ivye Project (1994) raised the specter of the Jewish massacre by Nazis in a forest near the town, Rogoff found herself comforted by the love and friendships that developed among the residents of Ivye and the surrounding area. Rogoff incorporated community members including children and Holocaust survivors into the performance, and she was pleased to discover that, just after the piece, the Jews in the town celebrated their first Seder in over fifty years. Rogoff has become even more communityfocused in recent years. When her daughter left for college, Rogoff created a piece in her own Lower East Side neighborhood in New York in order to foster a sense of community among her neighbors. Young children, teenagers, and elderly people from the area all had roles in the piece and Rogoff centered the work around an endangered community garden. Rogoff ’s ethnically diverse neighborhood came together in a...