Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces

Explore dance outside the theater with the world's most innovative choreographers

"Kloetzel and Pavlik have created a valuable resource, documenting a wide range of site-specific dance events through a combination of interviews, practitioners' accounts, and stunning images. This volume raises useful questions about the politics of art's interventions into the public realm and gives insight into the pragmatic challenges of making site dance."--Fiona Wilkie, Roehampton University

In recent years, site-specific dance has grown in popularity. In the wake of groundbreaking work by choreographers who left traditional performance spaces for other venues, more and more performances are cropping up on skyscrapers, in alleyways, on trains, on the decks of aircraft carriers, and in a myriad of other unexpected locations worldwide.
In Site Dance, the first anthology to examine site-specific dance, editors Melanie Kloetzel and Carolyn Pavlik explore the work that choreographers create for nontraditional performance spaces and the thinking behind their creative choices. Combining interviews with and essays by some of the most prominent and influential practitioners of site dance, they look at the challenges and rewards of embracing alternative spaces.

The close examinations of the work of artists like Meredith Monk, Joanna Haigood, Stephan Koplowitz, Heidi Duckler, Ann Carlson, and Eiko Otake provide important insights into why choreographers leave the theatre to embrace the challenges of unconventional venues.

Site Dance also includes more than 80 photographs of site-specific performances, revealing how the arts, and movement in particular, can become part of and speak to our everyday lives. Celebrating the often unexpected beauty and juxtapositions created by site dance, the book is essential reading for anyone curious about the way that these choreographers are changing our experience of the world one step at a time.

Melanie Kloetzel is associate professor of dance at the University of Calgary. Carolyn Pavlik is associate professor of dance at Western Michigan University.

Melanie Kloetzel is associate professor of dance at the University of Calgary. Carolyn Pavlik is associate professor of dance at Western Michigan University.