Site and Re-Site: Early Efforts to Serialize Site Dance

In recent years, dance on site has become a feature in arts festivals around the globe. From municipal celebrations to Fringe Festivals to Cultural Olympiads, dance now appears in alternative locations to enchant, amuse, amaze, and sometimes provoke audiences with the feats of the moving body. Well-known dance-dedicated presenters and festivals, such as the Canada Dance Festival in Ottawa, ImPulsTanz in Vienna, the Seattle International Dance Festival, Dance Umbrella in London, and Kuopio Dance Festival in Finland, have also grown fond of placing dance outside of theater venues. Some annual festivals, such as Guelph Dance Festival in Canada, Napoli Teatro Festival in Italy, and Abundance International Dance Festival in Sweden, among others, headline site dance as either the or at least a principal mode of presentation. In the belief that such work will enlarge and diversify their audience base due to its physical and often conceptual accessibility, presenters and choreographers have been pushing the boundaries of what is commonly called “site-specific dance.”¹

Although siting dance outside the conventional four walls of a proscenium or black-box theater is hardly new, having been a creative approach in use since the 1960s (Kloetzel and Pavlik 2009), the creation and presentation methods in the site dance genre have increasingly diversified. By 1989, presenters familiar with the genre were noting this diversity. As Elise Bernhardt, the director of Dancing in the Streets (an organization founded in New York City in 1984 that is solely dedicated to producing dance outside of the theater space) expressed to New York Times writer Eleanor Blau, dance on site does not always fit into the site-specific category; although this is a category of work that she “particularly relishes,” Bernhardt notes that “there are finer nuances, like ‘site-appropriate’ and ‘site-adaptive’” (Blau 1989).

Indeed, for the festivals mentioned above, the site dances witnessed do not readily conform to the general understanding of site-specific dance or of dances that are made specifically for a single site with that site acting as both inspiration and venue for the performance. Although the presenters may borrow “site-specific” terminology to classify such work, it is clear from both Bernhardt’s comments as well as from the plethora of site work being produced that the strategies employed in the site dance genre require an expanded lexicon for accurate treatment. Such an expansion has been attempted in various instances with new terminology such as “site-based,” “site-oriented,” “site-inspired,” or “site-sympathetic,” coined to describe a given work or even category of work.²

In this paper, I will focus on one mode of site performance that particularly troubles categorization in the site art field: site dance on tour. Touring site dance is a subset of the site dance genre in which the performance work is set in a series of geographically discrete sites, often at multiple festivals or venues around the world in a given season. The controversy around such touring site performance has been well documented (Wilkie 2002, 149) and has given rise to a deeper examination of the characteristics inherent in site art as a whole. For scholars such as Miwon Kwon (2002) and Fiona Wilkie, who began this in-depth examination, the dominant “spectre” raised by such work involves mobility and the implications of mobility (Wilkie 2012, 204). However, other queries that surface around touring site performance, such as what to do with “that set of work which is not so much toured as re-located, that is, re-worked to fit each new site” (Wilkie 2002, 150), have been left to linger.

What follows is an attempt to explore this lingering query as well as the distinctions suggested by it. I will begin by considering Kwon’s (2002) and Wilkie’s(2012) efforts to apply the mobility discourse to the site performance genre. Then, by adding my own (2013 (2015) and Victoria Hunter’s(2012) practice-as-research findings and by looking at site work by American choreographers from the 1960s onward, I will underscore mobility’s...