Site Dance

Strikingly attuned to scholarship that depends upon historical details, Ingrid Brainard was always very much in the present moment. She was keenly aware of her body and the space around it-she loved the sun, her garden, and feeling her bare feet upon the earth. I saw her gleeful, mischievous smile grow upon hearing the first few bars of raucous medieval music in rehearsal. In pure enjoyment she began to move her shoulders, hips, and knees with the looseness of an African dancer, completely contrary to the pulled-up, noble Renaissance postures she taught so well. Ingrid relished watching others in their moments, too: from Margaret Daniels' lightness and ease practicing pas de passacaille on the sandy Massachusetts beach near Castle Hill, to Madeleine Nichols' industrious, focused handspinning during a Society for Dance History Scholars conference members' luncheon in Albuquerque. As I remember the encounters I shared with her, I realize only now that I've lost the opportunity to learn more about Ingrid's own past-her years growing up in Germany, her choice of musicology as a field, how she came to study dance, mime, and gesture, and how it must have felt to be so close on the heels of the monumental German musicologists of the early twentieth century. I am left with only a few brief comments she made during our conversations spanning over twenty years. Ingrid was astonished and excited in 1961 to have come upon the Giorgio manuscript of Guglielmo Ebreo's treatise through a New York Public Library exhibit. The manuscript, soon to be housed at The New York Public Library's Dance Division, was on display for the International Musicological Society meetings and Ingrid hoped to produce an edition of it following the completion of her work on Domenico. She offered an early workshop at the Dance Notation Bureau in 1969, some twelve years before I was to arrive there as librarian. She gave numerous workshops, papers, and panel presentations, and regularly attended and contributed to the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. Ingrid was concerned that her reconstructions became too "fixed" when set down in Labanotation, and that those texts would not reflect the latest changes she incorporated based on her continuous study and re-studying of the manuscripts themselves. She was further concerned that the integrity of her work would be threatened by careless students, who might cavalierly learn her reconstructions at a two-hour workshop and subsequently perform them without permission and far below her standards. I remember once telling her, frustrated, that working with early dances was like seeing part of a painting, and she firmly told me that was all right-that there is a place in this world for parts of paintings. Ingrid mused frequently about the stagnation inherent in codified, unchanging approaches to the material, likening some (admittedly pioneering) practitioners "across the pond" to mother hens, settling smothering feathers over young chicks in their nests who had begun to chirp, "Treatise! Treatise!" She was perhaps most pleased at discoveries in the treatises themselves that opened her eyes and body to the translation of words into movement. One of her favorites was a continenza based on a description in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nurnberg [Nuremberg] Ms. 8842 (Hie Innen sindt geschriben die wellschen tenntz, 1517) of treading organ bellows. I was grateful that she clambered up the stairs to the stage to demonstrate it at last year's Society of Dance History Scholars roundtable on the II Papa manuscript. Her writings have been an inspiration to me, as has she herself. The next issue of Dance Research Journal will offer a preliminary bibliography with additional memories of Ingrid from her extended family of colleagues. If you would like to contribute, please e-mail [email protected]. or send regular mail to Patricia W.

RESUMO Objetivo: descrever os métodos usados para analisar as associações entre variáveis do serviço, da enfermagem e da documentação do processo de enfermagem nas instituições da Secretaria de Estado da Saúde de São Paulo. Método: estudo analítico multinível, com dados obtidos nos âmbitos da instituição, dos setores da instituição e dos profissionais de enfermagem que neles atuam, por meio de instrumentos padronizados. As análises tiveram como eixo o grau de completude da documentação do processo de enfermagem nos setores ou nas instituições e suas associações com variáveis do pessoal de enfermagem, das unidades e das instituições. Conclusão: este estudo empírico fornecerá importantes evidências sobre os fatores envolvidos na documentação do processo de enfermagem. Descritores: Processos de Enfermagem; Pesquisa Metodológica em Enfermagem; Pesquisa em Enfermagem.

Touring the site dance circuit. Such an idea, that site-based art could travel to multiple disparate sites, was anathema to many site artists of the 1970s. Even in 1985, when Richard Serra’s now infamous quote, ‘To move the work is to destroy the work’ entered the mainstream, the sentiments around site work and mobility still caused consternation. Yet, today, we barely blink an eye at such a statement. Rather than presuming that such works are either a one-time occurrence or necessarily coupled to an individual site of performance, we have grown accustomed to the idea of site-based performances appearing at a series of arts festivals. This article adds to the site art/mobility discourse by examining touring site-based dance works that have a methodological premise of adaptability. Specifically, it begins to unpack the evolving creation strategies of the site-adaptive performance genre and analyze these strategies in the context of the Western neoliberal state. Focusing on a particul...

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.

The historic neighbourhood of Raval, in Barcelona presents a multicultural urban landscape. It contains a sense of both tangible and intangible identities influenced by a high level of social mobility arising from migration, tourism and urban gentrification processes. In April 2018 we led an exploratory workshop with neighbourhood residents, our objective was to observe the multisensorial nature of this urban landscape with locally-based participants. Through an arts-based residency we explored body-site relations by drawing attention to the body, human movement in space and its relation to and reflection of the urban landscape. Our methodology involved a five-day movement workshop with 14 participants in site-based movement experimentation through which we explored urban affects, engagement, familiarity, and senses of belonging to space. We focused our attention on the creation of emotional and sensorial landscapes through our bodies, using site-specific movement explorations in space and experimental modes of cartography in which we 'mapped' the neighbourhood according to our experiences, senses and emotions. We considered the communicative role of the body as a producer of non-verbal and non-representative language that expressed experiences of the sites in which we moved. The mapping of urban space through the body enabled us to understand the participants' subjective engagement with space (feelings, emotions, rhythms, movements, intensities, memories, wishes, visions). We explored landscape as an active and predicative creation arising from subjective and vital experience, conscious, cognitive and sensorially filtered and shaped by memories, emotions, narratives and perceptions. Through sharing experiences and "co-mapping" bodies and urban sites we explored the intra-active nature of these engagements through New Materialist lenses, spatial theory and discourses of urban flow and mobility.

The historic neighbourhood of Raval, in Barcelona presents a multicultural urban landscape. It contains a sense of both tangible and intangible identities influenced by a high level of social mobility arising from migration, tourism and urban gentrification processes. In April 2018 we led an exploratory workshop with neighbourhood residents, our objective was to observe the multisensorial nature of this urban landscape with locally-based participants. Through an arts-based residency we explored body-site relations by drawing attention to the body, human movement in space and its relation to and reflection of the urban landscape. Our methodology involved a five-day movement workshop with 14 participants in site-based movement experimentation through which we explored urban affects, engagement, familiarity, and senses of belonging to space. We focused our attention on the creation of emotional and sensorial landscapes through our bodies, using site-specific movement explorations in sp...

Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces (1974) offers the author’s most explicit and extensive meditation on space understood as both everyday reality and source for speculation. The book is organised according to a ‘visualist’ logic and does not address sound as a way of understanding our environment. This article takes Species of Spaces as an invitation to consider ‘species of sonic space’, a variety of related chunks of the sonic environment we share. It asks how we might explore the sonic environment by way of Perec’s text and through consideration of other spaces which Perec does not discuss. It reflects on existing attempts to think of sonic spaces and on the differences between describing sonic, visual and other felt spaces. Aspects of Perec’s text lend themselves to comparison with other writers’ attempts to bring sound and space together: his analysis of domestic spaces can be usefully placed alongside Gaston Bachelard’s work on ‘the poetics of space’; his descriptions of urban r...

This article responds to the interdisciplinary developments that choreography has undergone in the twenty-first century, in terms of a focus on relationships between dance, architecture, site and cultural heritage. It makes a claim for how choreography within the city manifests itself in the form of a public bodily act, as artistic boundary-crosser and socio-political agent. We explore this through the lens of a central case study: artist Anton Mirto’s Scaffolding (2019), a workshop-performance event for seven dancers sited within The Chapel of Many, an architectural installation by architect Sebastian Hicks and set inside the ruins of Coventry Cathedral (UK) as part of the Coventry Welcomes Festival’s Refugee Week. Grounded in an exploration of dance and architecture in terms of spatiotemporal relations following Rachel Sara’s (2015) framework of a transontology of architecture and dance and Rachel Hann’s (2019) concept of fast architecture, we argue for how the choreographic proce...

How does the moving, dancing body engage with the materials, textures, atmospheres, and affects of the sites through which we move and in which we live, work and play? How might embodied movement practice explore some of these relations and bring us closer to the complexities of sites and lived environments?
This book brings together perspectives from site dance, phenomenology, and new materialism to explore and develop how ‘site-based body practice’ can be employed to explore synergies between material bodies and material sites. Employing practice-as-research strategies, scores, tasks and exercises the book presents a number of suggestions for engaging with sites through the moving body and offers critical reflection on the potential enmeshments and entanglements that emerge as a result. The theoretical discussions and practical explorations presented will appeal to researchers, movement practitioners, artists, academics and individuals interested in exploring their lived environments through the moving body and the entangled human-nonhuman relations that emerge as a result

In this article I explore the potential of site-based dance and performance to influence and inform subjective, cartographic processes of connecting and situating oneself in urban locations. 'Vernacular mapping' is explored as a process by which subjective urban experiences, trajectories and associations are mapped by individuals and retained and developed as cartographic tools through which we navigate and negotiate lived environments. The concept stems from critical geography and non-representational theory and proposes a progressive, contemporary approach in which individual routes, trajectories and vectors of mobility challenge the 'representational certitude of cartography'. From this perspective I consider how encounters with site-based dance and performance might inform vernacular mapping processes and impact subjective-site relations.

In a critique of contemporary universities, the philosopher and art theorist Gerald Raunig contends that 'wild and transversal writing is tamed and fed into the creativity-destroying apparatuses of disciplining institutions' wherein researchers are required 'to squeeze the last vestiges of their powers of invention into the straitjacket of the essay industry.' At the heart of this 'taming' lies what he describes as researchers' subjection to the 'fetish of method' and a reduction of the modes of expression, forms and styles of writing, which he claims 'have brought about a crass uniformity in the languages in which academics can publish.' In this situation, Georges Perec's generous creative and critical experiments, and his 'inter-in-disciplinarity' (a term coined by Johnnie Grattan and Michael Sheringham) seem to counter some of the circumscriptions upon method within the contemporary academy. Via attention to the investigation of actual sites, and a series of spatial metaphors-of not staying put and crossing borders, of meandering and getting sidetracked, of oscillating or shimmering between positions-I want to reflect upon Perec's passage through conceptual fields, in order to draw out some potential implications for academic research through practice. Perec's willingness 'just to see what happens' offers an invitation to wander beyond our disciplinary boundaries: using the project and essay forms as methodological tools, along with the role of the 'knowing' amateur, I will argue for alternative, more mobile considerations of the intellectual and affective rigour applied to creative and critical work. .

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.

Focusing on three dance works and an autoethnographic account of a site-specific performance in Manchester, UK, this paper explores how contemporary site-specific dance can alter the meaning, practice, and feeling of urban spaces. Philippe Saire's Cartographies (2012) reveals the ludic and sensual potentialities of the city, Wayne Sables's Traffic (2004) foregrounds urban rhythms of place, and a piece by the Guerilla Dance Project (2010) highlights overlooked habitual practices in familiar space. To draw out these themes, we discuss a performance devised by Caitlan in Manchester's Piccadilly Gardens.

Crosswalk is a site-responsive performance conducted in the middle of a pedestrian crossing in the inner streets of Melbourne and exposed in the homonymous video attached to this article. The performance – an experiment with the duet dance form of Argentine tango – emerged out of a practice-based process of inquiry. My failed attempt to find my tango in the city while finding my place in the city through the tango becomes a drive to explore the nexus between learning and the experience of publicness and defuse the rationalist reliance on the isolated cognitive individual as the key pedagogical agent and target. I argue that, in Crosswalk tango worked (or could have worked) as a reverse public pedagogy through somatic connection not only between dance partners but also with the broader environment. Becoming vulnerable to the otherness of the outside world is one way of promoting diversity and fostering plurality.

This paper explores the influence and application of Perec's work within site-specific dance practice. It considers how Perec's methods and prose might encourage creative dance approaches to engaging with and reflecting on subjective encounters with space and place. It

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 chapter reflects on the outcomes of two phenomenological movement workshops that I devised for the Spacing Dance: Dancing Spaces conference in Odense, Denmark in 2011 and Radical Space at the University of East London in October 2013. It questions what the practice might reveal regarding human processes of experiencing and engaging with space and place.

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.