Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces

12. Jo Kreiter

12 Jo Kreiter Jo Kreiter is the artistic director of Flyaway Productions, a San Francisco– based dance company. Since 1996, Kreiter’s site dances have addressed issues of political relevance to the communities of San Francisco and beyond . Using complex apparatus that launches dancers into the space above alleyways, around industrial cranes, and in front of billboards, Kreiter and her company members demonstrate the physical prowess of women through their site-specific aerial dances. Kreiter/Flyaway is a recipient of a 2006 Creative Work Fund grant, a 2006 Meet the Composer’s Commissioning Music/USA Program grant, a 2005 Irvine Fellowship, and a 2003 Rockefeller/MAP grant. She conversed with Pavlik from her home in San Francisco on April 20, 2003. An Interview with Jo Kreiter CP: How were you introduced to site work, and what about it appealed to you? JK: I was introduced to site-specific work via a long-term company membership in Zaccho Dance Theatre. Joanna Haigood, the director, integrated me into her process and her point of view. She works with an idea called place memory. My own love of site work has to do with bringing an audience to the exact place where an issue, conflict, or need lives. For example, in 1999 my company, Flyaway Productions, danced on a five-story crane in the middle of Islais Creek, which pours into the San Francisco Bay. I chose this site for Copra Dock Dances in part because I fell in love with the architecture of the crane, but also because the Copra Crane Labor Landmark Committee and a neighborhood environmental organization, the Friends of Islais Creek, were working to preserve the crane as a labor landmark. CP: It sounds like site work allows you to address issues critical to a community . 240 Jo Kreiter JK: Yes, I choose to create site-specific dances because I love dance making where the artistic process is in service of a larger political or social goal. I know this is done on the stage as well, because I have done it myself. But there is such power in site work because creating a dance in order to illuminate a place in a new way helps ground artistic ideas. Site work is the most potent artistic expression I know how to make. By that I mean it has such a strong impact because it unfolds at the very place where a conflict lives. The site itself lends validity to the artistic inquiry, because the site holds a quandary in its Figure 70. Dancers suspended off a crane in Copra Dock Dances (1999). Photo by Elizabeth Gorelick. 241 An Interview/Making Sparrow’s End “hands,” or in the bricks or steel I-beams or concrete walls, etc. Sometimes a site holds the possibility of celebration as well. I believe this was accomplished with Copra, but also with Mission Wall Dances. For this piece, I commissioned a three-story, block-long mural in the Mission District of San Francisco that used fantasy and realism to portray the Mission’s history of displacement and renewal. Now the dance is done, but the mural remains. That corner of the mission is permanently marked—in the best of ways, I think—by the energy and thought and passion of a group of interdisciplinary artists—myself as a choreographer, the dancers, the composer (Pamela Z), the set designer, the rigger, etc. CP: Have there been any inspirational people or movements that have sparked your interest in site work? JK: People that have influenced me include Joanna Haigood and Gene Kelly, for his use of site and set in the movies. I’ve also been influenced by the postmodern dance movement, particularly because it introduced pedestrian simplicity into a complicated world of steps and positions. The tradition of political dance brought to me by the Dance Brigade in San Francisco, as well as the Mural Movement in terms of the presence of large-scale visual art in neighborhoods, have also been quite influential. CP: Do you feel your background or your worldview have had an effect on your decision to do site-specific works? JK: Being politically minded and having trained as a political scientist influences my choice to make work that centers on political and feminist themes. I would say that my work is part of a feminist discourse on the body and the transformation of women’s images in the public domain...