Articles by Melanie Kloetzel
Performance Research, 2023
“This is an original manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Performance Resear... more “This is an original manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Performance Research, Volume 8, Issue 3, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2023.2272498.”
The penetration of climate change into our individual and collective consciousness(es) has been a slow process. Using Una Chaudhuri’s (1994) initial demand for a new era of ecological theater and Carl Lavery’s (2018a) follow-up volume that asked ‘what can theatre do ecologically’ as a springboard, Melanie Kloetzel’s contribution to this issue, ‘Ecological Performance and “Settler Creep”: Making space to resist invasion’ explores the intersection of performance research and the ecological and climate crises. Borrowing from Heather Davis-Fisch’s (2017) coining of ‘settler creep’, Kloetzel argues that attempts to create an ‘ecological performance’ have floundered due to the inability to effectually address the modernity/coloniality narrative that undergirds the increasing devastation of the planet. Kloetzel starts by examining the hegemonic grip of this narrative with the support of Indigenous scholar Vanessa Andreotti (2021a, 2021b), after which she charts two speculative pathways through the theoretical stew of contemporary performance research. This charting reveals the slippery invasion of ‘settler creep’ into our efforts, hampering our ability both to reckon with and uproot modernity/coloniality’s ecocidal narratives and to find decolonial and ecologically-grounded counterhegemonic narratives. Yet, by examining tactics forwarded by geographers Sarah de Leeuw and Sarah Hunt (2018), as well as by touching on the embodied practices developed by Kloetzel and Phil Smith (2021), the artist digital residency program created by Vancouver-based Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures collective, and TRAction’s turbulent journey to create the Climate Art Web, Kloetzel shows how efforts to make space for confronting modernity/coloniality’s hegemonic effects may offer a generative method to resist the creep.
Journal of Dance Education, 2023
To date, there has been minimal analysis of the intersections between dance pedagogy and the clim... more To date, there has been minimal analysis of the intersections between dance pedagogy and the climate crisis. Arguing that it is essential to approach the climate crisis via the lens of decolonization and underscoring the indivisible links between modernity, coloniality and the climate emergency, the author considers what it might mean to develop an ethical dance pedagogy for a student population facing the grim consequences of climate change. After highlighting the academy's decolonizing failures, the author applies principles from Indigenous scholars Vanessa Andreotti, Sarah Hunt, and others to offer a pedagogical case study of her own deep dive into her position on stolen land. Arguing that it is critical to model such digging to demonstrate our collective complicity in the hegemonic systems of modernity/coloniality, the author concludes by bringing together emerging methods developing both inside and outside of dance education to propose a scaffolding for an ethical dance pedagogy for the twenty-first century.
Journal of Dance Education, 2023
To date, there has been minimal analysis of the intersections between dance pedagogy and the clim... more To date, there has been minimal analysis of the intersections between dance pedagogy and the climate crisis. Arguing that it is essential to approach the climate crisis via the lens of decolonization and underscoring the indivisible links between modernity, coloniality and the climate emergency, the author considers what it might mean to develop an ethical dance pedagogy for a student population facing the grim consequences of climate change. After highlighting the academy’s decolonizing failures, the author applies principles from Indigenous scholars Vanessa Andreotti, Sarah Hunt, and others to offer a pedagogical case study of her own deep dive into her position on stolen land. Arguing that it is critical to model such digging to demonstrate our collective complicity in the hegemonic systems of modernity/coloniality, the author concludes by bringing together emerging methods developing both inside and outside of dance education to propose a scaffolding for an ethical dance pedagogy for the twenty-first century.
Contemporary Theatre Review: Interventions, 2019
In ‘Playing Politics’, I offer a creative essay examining the development of the site-adaptive pe... more In ‘Playing Politics’, I offer a creative essay examining the development of the site-adaptive performance work, 'It began with watching' (now retitled 'MEN in charge'). Riffing on the current political situation in which democracy is under threat due to the rising power of corporate capitalism and surveillance technologies, 'It began with watching' focuses on how such power manifests in the bodyminds of political actors. In this article, I offer an analysis of how versatility as an operation in performance can question or perhaps even capsize the neoliberal agendas that outwardly embrace versatility as a watchword. In particular, I examine the effects of distilled scoring as a site-versatile creative approach, and demonstrate its potential for complexity, disruption of authorship, and stealthy incursions into public space. As such, I argue that the site-versatile approach may not only support the efficiency mandate of the festival circuit, but rather that it holds the possibility both to check the unfailing surveillance and panoptic power of the present and to regain public space as a place of deliberation, assembly, and protest.
Contemporary Theatre Review, 2019
Over the past thirty years, we have witnessed an explosion of urban arts festivals around the glo... more Over the past thirty years, we have witnessed an explosion of urban arts festivals around the globe, as well as the development and expansion of a neoliberal order that is intent on promoting municipalities as lucrative nodes in a tourist network. One performance form that has flourished under such an arrangement is site-adaptive dance, a type of serialized performance where choreographic work is purposefully created for presentation at multiple, geographically-discrete, non-theatre sites. This article investigates how the drive to serialize is impacting the evolving creation methods in the site-adaptive dance genre. Focusing on a particular creation methodology within the genre, namely the site-versatile approach, the article employs the critical insights of Laura Levin, Fiona Wilkie, and Jen Harvie to explore two works that employ such an approach, Willi Dorner’s Bodies in Urban Spaces and Brandy Leary’s Glaciology. Through these works, I consider how the embedded issues of mobility, adaptation, and labour not only serve to define the increasingly popular genre, but also to influence its trajectory, particularly in relation to the neoliberal state. As such, I will demonstrate how the methodologies of site-based performance can problematize, but also profit from, neoliberal agendas in an age of tourism, migration, and precarity.
Dancing Urbanisms: Choreographic Practices, 2019
This article examines the impact of site dance in urban landscapes on discourses that address lar... more This article examines the impact of site dance in urban landscapes on discourses that address large-scale geo- and socio-political issues. The article specifically explores how a certain site-adaptive project, Rooms (2015–16), works to further public discourse around such issues through the careful honing of methodological process. To realize the aims of advancing political discourse, the article argues that site dance methodologies must work to: empower participants through constructive mechanisms/processes; foster inclusion of diverse publics in both creation and presentation stages of a work; and locate such projects in accessible public civic spaces historically associated with assembly. By endeavouring to methodologically craft site dance practice for spaces that are intended for public assembly and discourse, we may realize the goal of creating a diverse, empowered and engaged public that will address the critical systemic concerns of our time, including neoliberalism, globalization and climate change.
Choreographic Practices: Dancing Urbanisms special issue, 2019
Collectively, the contributions in ‘Dancing Urbanisms’ explore and question how site-based choreo... more Collectively, the contributions in ‘Dancing Urbanisms’ explore and question how site-based choreographic practices in urban locations extend understandings of embodied experiences in and relationships to site and place. This rich palette of perspectives provokes new considerations of ‘dancing urbanisms’ as a critical practice of the twenty-first century.
Dance Research, 2017
In recent years, arts festivals around the globe have become enamoured of touring, site-based per... more In recent years, arts festivals around the globe have become enamoured of touring, site-based performance. Such serialised site work is growing in popularity due to its accessibility, its spectacular characteristics, and its adaptive qualities. Employing practice-as-research methodologies to dissect the basis of such site-adaptive performances, the author highlights her discovery of the crumbling foundation of the adaptation discourse by way of her creative process for the performance work Room. Combining findings from the phenomenological explorations of her dancing body as well as from cultural analyses of the climate change debate by Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009), Claire Colebrook (2011, 2012), and Bruno Latour (2014), the author argues that only by fundamentally shifting the direction of the adaptation discourse – on scales from global to the personal – will we be able to build a site-adaptive performance strategy that resists the neoliberal drive towards ecological and economic precarity.
Dance Research Journal, 2017
In this article, I investigate the historical precedents of site-adaptive dance. After walking th... more In this article, I investigate the historical precedents of site-adaptive dance. After walking through the mobility discourse as applied to site-specific art by such scholars as Miwon Kwon, Fiona Wilkie and Victoria Hunter, I examine the mobile site works of North American choreographers Ann Carlson, PearsonWidrig DanceTheater, Eiko & Koma, and Stephan Koplowitz as exemplary of early attempts to take site dance on tour. Finally, I argue for the value of employing the lens of adaptation to analyze such works, both for the field of site performance and for the larger cross-disciplinary dialogues that could be activated.
This article examines the significance of the performer–place relationship in dances created for ... more This article examines the significance of the performer–place relationship in dances created for the camera. By looking at my own dance films as well as those from Maya Deren to Isabel Rocamora, I uncover the deep import that location has taken on in the dance film genre. Owing to the near absence of spoken text, the filming strategies used in the genre (including frequent use of close-up and long shots) and a keen interest in narrative, place has become not only an essential marker for comprehension of the films, but a partner alongside and in dialog with a responsive, phenomenal body. Employing theories from site-specific performance as well as from the growing scholarship around screendance, I scrutinize what occurs to the performer–place relationship during the filming, editing and viewing processes, in order to demonstrate the direct, kinesthetic impact that a de-hierarchized performer–place partnership can have on viewers across the screen divide.
Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies, 2013
This article explores the interest in portable architecture and how it intersects with site-speci... more This article explores the interest in portable architecture and how it intersects with site-specific dance. In the 'Dancing Spaces' issue of Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies, SDHS, vol XXXIII
EnterText, vol. 5 no. 2, 2005, Dec 2005
A creative, physical, and theoretical exploration of urban planning and geography in southern Cal... more A creative, physical, and theoretical exploration of urban planning and geography in southern California.
Books by Melanie Kloetzel
Covert: A Handbook, 2021
Do you ever feel you live in a world where people see your online presence as more important than... more Do you ever feel you live in a world where people see your online presence as more important than your physical one? That online algorithms are penetrating your deepest fears, loves, or aspirations, or even threatening your dreams? Instead of selling your psyche wholesale to online retailers and information moguls alike, 'Covert: A Handbook' suggests a way to resist this invasion.
Using 30 carefully crafted ‘movement meditations’ – each with an accompanying photo to facilitate it – 'Covert' outlines a straightforward embodied practice to defend and aid inner reflection. Both active and accessible, the 'Covert' practice offers a way to diminish the lure of the screens, sidestep invasive scrutiny, and nurture the dialogue between our conscious and unconscious selves.
By prioritizing introspective interactions with the quirky and complex world around us, 'Covert' proposes that we have the means to cultivate our interior and imaginative selves through a dynamic physical engagement with the wider world.
(Re)Positioning Site Dance: Local acts, global perspectives, 2019
9 7 8 1 7 8 3 2 0 9 9 8 9 ISBN 978-1-78320-998-9 intellect | www.intellectbooks.com Site dance pr... more 9 7 8 1 7 8 3 2 0 9 9 8 9 ISBN 978-1-78320-998-9 intellect | www.intellectbooks.com Site dance practice prioritizes and facilitates exchanges between people and place. While localized experiences remain at the heart of the practice through specific body-site engagements, site dance practice also offers a method for considering how global issues, systems and events intersect with local places and experiences in fundamental ways. This co-authored volume examines local-global interfaces through the lens of site dance practice and draws on perspectives from three practitioner-academics based in three distinct world regions-Europe, North America and Oceania/Pacific-to explore site dance as a form that engages with a range of socio-cultural, political, ecological and economic discourses. Employing an array of methodologies, the authors (re)position site dance as a practical and theoretical vehicle for investigating contemporary concerns in a globalized era.
In recent years, site-specific dance has grown in popularity. In the wake of groundbreaking work ... more 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.
Book Chapters by Melanie Kloetzel
(Re)Positioning Site Dance: Local acts, global perspectives, 2019
In a chapter for '(Re)Positioning Site Dance', I trace the parallel trajectories of two simultane... more In a chapter for '(Re)Positioning Site Dance', I trace the parallel trajectories of two simultaneously emerging fields - site dance and environmental ethics - from the mid-twentieth century to present in order to examine how ecological principles came to bear on both fields. After outlining the fundamentals of the field of environmental ethics, including its foundational and sustaining interest in anthropocentrism, axiology, metaphysics, and wilderness, I compare these premises to site dance practice in the 1960s and 70s that developed specific tactics to foment an ecosystemic awareness of place. This awareness, which embraces the principles of relationality, dehierarchization, and intrinsic value of people and place, shows the ethical possibilities that emerge from meshing environmental justice and agential expansion: a joining, I propose, that could subvert mistreatment of both the planet and its inhabitants.
(Re)Positioning Site Dance: Local acts, global perspectives, 2019
A chapter in '(Re)Positioning Site Dance', 'Lend me an ear' delves into certain site-specific str... more A chapter in '(Re)Positioning Site Dance', 'Lend me an ear' delves into certain site-specific strategies, in particular dialogic practices, that encourage practitioners and audiences alike to create links between local and global scales and occurrences. Employing the practice-as-research approach evident in earlier publications (Kloetzel 2015a, 2017b), this chapter tracks the methodological deployment of Bakhtin’s dialogism in two of kloetzel&co's site-specific works to advance the possibilities of polyspatiality in site performance.
(Re)Positioning Site Dance: Local acts, global perspectives, 2019
Using insights gleaned from previous publications (Kloetzel 2009, 2016), this chapter offers a r... more Using insights gleaned from previous publications (Kloetzel 2009, 2016), this chapter offers a reading of site-specific dance practice in North America as one with activist potential. The chapter argues that specific tactics pursued by site dance practitioners after the 1970s have continued the revolutionary ambitions evident in the Judson Dance Theater era. Adding Canadian choreographers, along with the voices from 'Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces', to round out the North American context, the chapter pinpoints how certain tactics within the site dance genre – recontextualization, perceptual disruption, subversion of place-based cultural norms, and democratization of practice – have advanced clear civic aims and political objectives over the past fifty years.
Dance film and site-specific dance are two dance genres that are seemingly at odds. Dance film co... more Dance film and site-specific dance are two dance genres that are seemingly at odds. Dance film communicates through a two-dimensional display; site-specific dance pursues tangible, real world connections to three-dimensional sites. Dance film brings audiences up close to both dancing bodies and places without the audience having to move a muscle; site-specific dance expects audiences to physically integrate with the totality of a place. Yet, these ‘divergent’ genres have much more in common than may at first be apparent. Examining the history of these genres as well as looking at each genre’s techniques, processes, and current productions, this essay argues that a feature that helped define both forms—a turning away from the proscenium arch and a turning towards alternative contexts—continues to connect them.
Moving Sites: Investigating Site-Specific Dance Performance
Site-specific performance relies on the terms space and place as markers for discussing a perform... more Site-specific performance relies on the terms space and place as markers for discussing a performance’s engagement with a site. However, practitioners and researchers are often disgruntled by the limitations such terms impose upon site-specific performance. In this chapter, I examine how theorists have defined place and space since the 1970s, and consider how site-specific scholars have taken up these definitions for their own purposes. Delving into the divisions that these scholars have used to categorize site-specific art, I note how perceptions of space and place have shifted over time. Furthermore, I propose that bringing site-specific performance, and more particularly site-specific dance, into the discussion triggers another shift as we are forced to reassess our assumptions about terminology from the perspective of the body.
In the creation of my site-specific dance film, The Sanitastics2 (2011), I confronted head-on the restrictions of terminology (as well as those of security and surveillance) in the Calgary Skywalk System. Begun in 1970 as a series of pedestrian bridges that pass over busy city streets in the downtown core of Calgary, the Skywalk System is a dominating feature in Calgary’s downtown public space. To explore this curiosity, I hired American filmmaker Jeff Curtis to collaborate with my dance company, kloetzel&co., in the creation of a site-specific, sci-fi spoof that follows four surveillance superheroes through the Skywalk System. Following the film’s completion, I contemplated site-specific performance’s ability to bring space, place, and Marc Augé’s (1995) non-place to life. In particular, I discovered that site performance can highlight all three interpretations of site and, in doing so, forefront the choices we make with regard to urban planning. By offering up archaeological examinations, critical commentary, and sensory experiences, and through exposing our fascination with travel and consumerism, I consider how site-specific performance fosters scrutiny of and revelations about the human–environment relationship in sites from the sublime to the mundane.
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Articles by Melanie Kloetzel
The penetration of climate change into our individual and collective consciousness(es) has been a slow process. Using Una Chaudhuri’s (1994) initial demand for a new era of ecological theater and Carl Lavery’s (2018a) follow-up volume that asked ‘what can theatre do ecologically’ as a springboard, Melanie Kloetzel’s contribution to this issue, ‘Ecological Performance and “Settler Creep”: Making space to resist invasion’ explores the intersection of performance research and the ecological and climate crises. Borrowing from Heather Davis-Fisch’s (2017) coining of ‘settler creep’, Kloetzel argues that attempts to create an ‘ecological performance’ have floundered due to the inability to effectually address the modernity/coloniality narrative that undergirds the increasing devastation of the planet. Kloetzel starts by examining the hegemonic grip of this narrative with the support of Indigenous scholar Vanessa Andreotti (2021a, 2021b), after which she charts two speculative pathways through the theoretical stew of contemporary performance research. This charting reveals the slippery invasion of ‘settler creep’ into our efforts, hampering our ability both to reckon with and uproot modernity/coloniality’s ecocidal narratives and to find decolonial and ecologically-grounded counterhegemonic narratives. Yet, by examining tactics forwarded by geographers Sarah de Leeuw and Sarah Hunt (2018), as well as by touching on the embodied practices developed by Kloetzel and Phil Smith (2021), the artist digital residency program created by Vancouver-based Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures collective, and TRAction’s turbulent journey to create the Climate Art Web, Kloetzel shows how efforts to make space for confronting modernity/coloniality’s hegemonic effects may offer a generative method to resist the creep.
Books by Melanie Kloetzel
Using 30 carefully crafted ‘movement meditations’ – each with an accompanying photo to facilitate it – 'Covert' outlines a straightforward embodied practice to defend and aid inner reflection. Both active and accessible, the 'Covert' practice offers a way to diminish the lure of the screens, sidestep invasive scrutiny, and nurture the dialogue between our conscious and unconscious selves.
By prioritizing introspective interactions with the quirky and complex world around us, 'Covert' proposes that we have the means to cultivate our interior and imaginative selves through a dynamic physical engagement with the wider world.
Book Chapters by Melanie Kloetzel
In the creation of my site-specific dance film, The Sanitastics2 (2011), I confronted head-on the restrictions of terminology (as well as those of security and surveillance) in the Calgary Skywalk System. Begun in 1970 as a series of pedestrian bridges that pass over busy city streets in the downtown core of Calgary, the Skywalk System is a dominating feature in Calgary’s downtown public space. To explore this curiosity, I hired American filmmaker Jeff Curtis to collaborate with my dance company, kloetzel&co., in the creation of a site-specific, sci-fi spoof that follows four surveillance superheroes through the Skywalk System. Following the film’s completion, I contemplated site-specific performance’s ability to bring space, place, and Marc Augé’s (1995) non-place to life. In particular, I discovered that site performance can highlight all three interpretations of site and, in doing so, forefront the choices we make with regard to urban planning. By offering up archaeological examinations, critical commentary, and sensory experiences, and through exposing our fascination with travel and consumerism, I consider how site-specific performance fosters scrutiny of and revelations about the human–environment relationship in sites from the sublime to the mundane.
The penetration of climate change into our individual and collective consciousness(es) has been a slow process. Using Una Chaudhuri’s (1994) initial demand for a new era of ecological theater and Carl Lavery’s (2018a) follow-up volume that asked ‘what can theatre do ecologically’ as a springboard, Melanie Kloetzel’s contribution to this issue, ‘Ecological Performance and “Settler Creep”: Making space to resist invasion’ explores the intersection of performance research and the ecological and climate crises. Borrowing from Heather Davis-Fisch’s (2017) coining of ‘settler creep’, Kloetzel argues that attempts to create an ‘ecological performance’ have floundered due to the inability to effectually address the modernity/coloniality narrative that undergirds the increasing devastation of the planet. Kloetzel starts by examining the hegemonic grip of this narrative with the support of Indigenous scholar Vanessa Andreotti (2021a, 2021b), after which she charts two speculative pathways through the theoretical stew of contemporary performance research. This charting reveals the slippery invasion of ‘settler creep’ into our efforts, hampering our ability both to reckon with and uproot modernity/coloniality’s ecocidal narratives and to find decolonial and ecologically-grounded counterhegemonic narratives. Yet, by examining tactics forwarded by geographers Sarah de Leeuw and Sarah Hunt (2018), as well as by touching on the embodied practices developed by Kloetzel and Phil Smith (2021), the artist digital residency program created by Vancouver-based Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures collective, and TRAction’s turbulent journey to create the Climate Art Web, Kloetzel shows how efforts to make space for confronting modernity/coloniality’s hegemonic effects may offer a generative method to resist the creep.
Using 30 carefully crafted ‘movement meditations’ – each with an accompanying photo to facilitate it – 'Covert' outlines a straightforward embodied practice to defend and aid inner reflection. Both active and accessible, the 'Covert' practice offers a way to diminish the lure of the screens, sidestep invasive scrutiny, and nurture the dialogue between our conscious and unconscious selves.
By prioritizing introspective interactions with the quirky and complex world around us, 'Covert' proposes that we have the means to cultivate our interior and imaginative selves through a dynamic physical engagement with the wider world.
In the creation of my site-specific dance film, The Sanitastics2 (2011), I confronted head-on the restrictions of terminology (as well as those of security and surveillance) in the Calgary Skywalk System. Begun in 1970 as a series of pedestrian bridges that pass over busy city streets in the downtown core of Calgary, the Skywalk System is a dominating feature in Calgary’s downtown public space. To explore this curiosity, I hired American filmmaker Jeff Curtis to collaborate with my dance company, kloetzel&co., in the creation of a site-specific, sci-fi spoof that follows four surveillance superheroes through the Skywalk System. Following the film’s completion, I contemplated site-specific performance’s ability to bring space, place, and Marc Augé’s (1995) non-place to life. In particular, I discovered that site performance can highlight all three interpretations of site and, in doing so, forefront the choices we make with regard to urban planning. By offering up archaeological examinations, critical commentary, and sensory experiences, and through exposing our fascination with travel and consumerism, I consider how site-specific performance fosters scrutiny of and revelations about the human–environment relationship in sites from the sublime to the mundane.