User:Alenmartel/Site-specific dance

Site-specific dance (or site dance) is a genre of dance that is performed in unconventional and often public settings, utilizing creative processes from postmodern dance and other developments in contemporary dance. The genesis of site-specific dance began in the 1950s and was established in the late 1960s and the 1970s as an attempt to supplant the traditional performance modality, including traditional modes of creative processes and the boundaries between art and everyday life and performer and audience.

However, site-specific dance is not just dancing in interesting environments or with disembodied backdrops but rather site-specific dance"produces a relationship between site, performers and audiences in which the embodied, emotional and sensory experiences of those present are engaged with the design, organic and structural features, as well as the social and cultural histories of the site."

History
The history of site-specific dance has its genesis in the mid- to late-20th century experimentations of choreographers such as Merce Cunningham, Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, and Lucinda Childs and became established through the works of Trisha Brown and Meredith Monk. What started as an experiment in supplanting traditional modes of dance-making in the United States has resulted in a genre of dance that is practiced and experimented with around the world.

Early History

A seminal work in the inception of site-specific dance was 1952’s Happenings (originally Theatre Piece No. 1), which was a collaboration between Black Mountain College artists John Cage (composer), Merce Cunningham (choreographer), Charles Olson (poet), Robert Rauschenberg (visual artist), and David Tudor (pianist and composer). In addition to rejecting the formalism of modern dance at the time, Happenings occurred in unconventional venues, such as lofts and stores, and altered the performer-audience relationship by taking place without a clear demarcation between the performance area and the audience area.

Cunningham also experimented with non-authorial tactics in producing dance, such as the use of chance (“chance dance”) to determine the structure of the performance of a work (eg. a dice roll determines the order of the phrases of a dance). When touring, he would sometimes take these chance dances, which he called Events, and present them in non-conventional settings, such as cafeterias, museums, gymnasiums, basketball courts, and more. Events were also presented in traditional theatres, but it was the adaptiveness of these works to be presented in unconventional spaces that contributed to further experimentation in site-specific dance.

Anna Halprin, a choreographer and teacher, was another pivotal figure in the genesis of site-specific dance through her founding of the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop in 1945. Halprin was inspired by the architectural concepts of structure and design (Halprin was married to Lawrence Halprin, d.2009) and “how they played out both in the physical anatomy of the body and in the body’s relation to the environment.” Halprin directly influenced Simone Forti, Trisha Brown, and Meredith Monk all of whom were her students.

Establishment

In the 1960s and 1970s, site-specific dance began to be established as a specific mode of dance-making. In 1960, Simone Forti created two works, See Saw and Roller Boxes (then titled Rollers), that took place in a gallery space and used children’s play equipment. In 1963, Steve Paxton took audiences by bus to a New Jersey forest for his piece, Afternoon, where dancers danced on the recently wetted forest floor and uneven terrain.

The first work noted as being the first truly site-specific dance was Lucinda Childs’ Street Dance (1964). This six-minute performance took place on Broadway in Manhattan where Childs and another performer, James Byars, wore black raincoats and integrated themselves with their surroundings. They would also detail aspects of the site, such as the buildings and window displays. Audiences would watch from lofts across the street and although they could not always see or discern to what Childs and Byars were pointing, a recording of Childs’ voice played from the loft and that was synchronized with their actions, provided the audience with descriptions of the site’s features. This work has only been performed three times.

Trisha Brown

Brown once stated that “I have in the past felt sorry for ceilings and walls. It’s perfectly good space, why doesn’t anyone use it?” This statement would prove prescient when in her work Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970), a man attached to a harness literally walked down the side of a building. Brown’s approach to site-specific work was unique wherein she argued that “I’m not interested in taking a work which was made in a studio and performed in an interior space and placing it outside. I don’t like it at all.” Here, Brown indicated that site is part of the dance-making and not just a backdrop to performance. Likewise, in Walking on the Wall (1971) performed in the Whitney Museum, Brown had dancers dancing on the walls while assuming ordinary postures as if the wall were the ground. In Roof Piece (1971), 12 dancers on 8 New York buildings covering 10 city blocks used imitative gestures that passed from building to building with audiences on a ninth rooftop watching.

Meredith Monk

Meredith Monk also allowed site to influence her work and experimented with the “tour” wherein the audience moved as part of their interaction with her work. In Tour: Dedicated to Dinosaurs (1969) at the National Museum of Natural History, audiences would travel throughout the museum and, as a result, around and past performers who were in slow-moving tableaus that related to various displays of the museum. In Vessel (1971), Monk created three parts to a full work that took place in her New York City loft, the Performing Garage, and a Wooster Street parking lot. Audiences would travel from site to site to see each instalment of the work. In American Archaeology #1: Roosevelt Island (1994), Monk created a work that not only used Roosevelt Island as part of the dance-making but also interacted with its layered history as a prison, a poorhouse, and a hospital. While Monk stood atop a lighthouse singing, 70 performers performed nearly simultaneous activities, such as children playing, pedestrian acts in period costumes, convicts working, and the interaction between doctors and patients. It was shown in two parts with the first in the afternoon where pedestrians would be active in Lighthouse Park and the second in the evening when an eerily light would emanate from the ruins of the Renwick smallpox hospital.

Present Day

Dancing in the Streets (DITS) is the first organization dedicated specifically to site-specific dance. It was started by Elise Bernhardt in 1984 and commissions site-specific dance around the world, having commissioned over 500 works to date around the world.