Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces

7. Leah Stein

7 Leah Stein Leah Stein, the artistic director of the Leah Stein Dance Company, loves to engage with environments in both wild and urban spaces. For the past 15 years, she has made site works in and around her hometown of Philadelphia , as well as in places as varied as a defunct train yard in Poland or a parking lot in British Columbia. She particularly enjoys collaborating with composers, poets, and sculptors and uses these collaborations to create multiple avenues of access to place. She has been awarded grants from Dance Advance, the Leeway Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, as well as a Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She has been in residence at the Yellow Springs Art Institute, the American Dance Festival, and the Winter Pillow. Kloetzel and Stein spoke on July 7, 2005, in a crowded coffee shop in Philadelphia. An Interview with Leah Stein MK: I know that you began to do site-specific work in the 1990s. What attracted you to move outside the theater? LS: A lot of my inspiration for making dances came from the natural environment . The forces of nature and the physics of movement were my impetus at that point—as metaphor, as immediate bodily experience. In the early 1990s, with two good friends, I drove across the country and went to the Southwest for the first time. I was so taken by the landscape that it completely altered my idea of what it meant to be on the earth. It was so wild, so unlike any landscape I had ever imagined, particularly Bryce Canyon and Canyon de Chelley. I know it’s so romanticized and sensationalized, but I was young and impressionable. The different landscapes all across the country—the open space, the prairies, the red rock, the strata, the layers of earth—made such a big impression on me. For example, at Mono Lake in California, there are salt deposits that form below the surface of the water, and they push up from underneath to 143 An Interview/Of Grass and Gravel form these huge salt towers. I was so inspired by these irregularly shaped, figure-like towers that I created a piece called Strata. In the piece, we worked literally with weight and pushing from underneath to create height; we explored the idea of gradual change and the image of piled layers using the walls and floor and beams in the space. MK: Did you perform it on site? LS: No, we did it in an art gallery. It was a 20-minute piece, and we did it three times in a row. It was a very slow piece, and the audience could come and go as they wanted. I was working with geological time. There was a lot of pushing up of bodies against the walls, and it created a whole different feeling of gravity and movement. MK: Would you call that site-specific dance? LS: Partially. It was inspired by a specific landscape, but we made it for a particular room in the art gallery. Later, we did it again in the studio and used the elements that were there—a pole, a wall, etc. Figure 43. Karen McMahon Hedley and Leah Stein improvising at Bryce Canyon. Photo by Sorrel Alburger. 144 Leah Stein MK: So site-specific work has the potential to move away from the original site? LS: There’s an element that’s moveable, and there’s an element that’s specific . So when you move it, it changes to whatever’s specific about the next space. But there are some elements that can be maintained from one place to another. What’s odd is that Strata was site-specific, but it wasn’t inspired by the art gallery in which it was performed. The art gallery was transformed by another site. But eventually I realized that I just needed to do the whole creative process out of the studio. MK: How do you select sites? For example, what drew you to create the piece by the canal in Manayunk near Philadelphia? LS: I remember the day I started looking around for the site for the Manayunk piece, Return. I knew the kind of juxtapositions I wanted of architecture and nature, or wildness and weeds, or maybe remnants of the past. I entered Manayunk along the water, and I just started wandering around. I’m really...