Melanie Kloetzel – författare

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.

Site-based dance performance and sited movement explorations implicate dance makers, performers and audience members in a number of dialogical processes between body, site and environment. This book aims to articulate international approaches to the making, performing and theorising of site-based dance. Drawing on perspectives from three practitioner-academics based in three distinct world regions – Europe, North America and Oceania – the authors explore a range of practices that engage with sociocultural, political, ecological and economic discourses, and demonstrate how these discourses both frame and inform processes of site dance making as well as shape the ways in which such interventions are conceived and evaluated.

Intended for artists, scholars and students, (Re)Positioning Site Dance is an important addition to the theoretical discourse on place and performance in an era of global sociopolitical and ecological transformation.

Site-based dance performance and sited movement explorations implicate dance makers, performers and audience members in a number of dialogical processes between body, site and environment. This book aims to articulate international approaches to the making, performing and theorising of site-based dance. Drawing on perspectives from three practitioner-academics based in three distinct world regions – Europe, North America and Oceania – the authors explore a range of practices that engage with sociocultural, political, ecological and economic discourses, and demonstrate how these discourses both frame and inform processes of site dance making as well as shape the ways in which such interventions are conceived and evaluated.

Intended for artists, scholars and students, (Re)Positioning Site Dance is an important addition to the theoretical discourse on place and performance in an era of global sociopolitical and ecological transformation.