Site Dance

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.

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.

This co-authored book aims to articulate international approaches to making, performing and theorizing site-based dance. Intended for artists, scholars, and students, the approaches discussed are informed by interdisciplinary engagements with socio-cultural, political, economic and ecological perspectives.

Moving Sites explores site-specific dance practice through a combination of analytical essays and practitioner accounts of their working processes. In offering this joint effort of theory and practice, it aims to provide dance academics, students and practitioners with a series of discussions that shed light both on approaches to making this type of dance practice, and evaluating and reflecting on it. The edited volume combines critical thinking from a range of perspectives including commentary and observation from the fields of dance studies, human geography and spatial theory in order to present interdisciplinary discourse and a range of critical and practice-led lenses through which this type of work can be considered and explored. In so doing, this book addresses the following questions: · How do choreographers make site-specific dance performance? · What occurs when a moving body engages with site, place and environment? · How might we interpret, analyse and evaluate this type of dance practice through a range of theoretical lenses? · How can this type of practice inform wider discussions of embodiment, site, space, place and environment? This innovative and exciting book seeks to move beyond description and discussion of site-specific dance as a spectacle or novelty and considers site-dance as a valid and vital form of contemporary dance practice that explores, reflects, disrupts, contests and develops understandings and practices of inhabiting and engaging with a range of sites and environments. Dr Victoria Hunter is Senior Lecturer in Dance at the University of Chichester.

The exciting follow-up to Brothers in Arms. Miles Vorkosigan is in trouble. His brother, a cloned stranger formed from tissue stolen from Miles when he was a child, wants to murder and replace him. Unfortunately, Mark has learned that without Miles, he is . . . nothing.

Moving Sites explores site-specific dance practice through a combination of analytical essays and practitioner accounts of their working processes. In offering this joint effort of theory and practice, it aims to provide dance academics, students and practitioners with a series of discussions that shed light both on approaches to making this type of dance practice, and evaluating and reflecting on it. The edited volume combines critical thinking from a range of perspectives including commentary and observation from the fields of dance studies, human geography and spatial theory in order to present interdisciplinary discourse and a range of critical and practice-led lenses through which this type of work can be considered and explored. In so doing, this book addresses the following questions: · How do choreographers make site-specific dance performance? · What occurs when a moving body engages with site, place and environment? · How might we interpret, analyse and evaluate this type of dance practice through a range of theoretical lenses? · How can this type of practice inform wider discussions of embodiment, site, space, place and environment? This innovative and exciting book seeks to move beyond description and discussion of site-specific dance as a spectacle or novelty and considers site-dance as a valid and vital form of contemporary dance practice that explores, reflects, disrupts, contests and develops understandings and practices of inhabiting and engaging with a range of sites and environments. Dr Victoria Hunter is Senior Lecturer in Dance at the University of Chichester.

Aerial Dance: A Guide to Dance with Rope and Harness provides an introduction for the beginning aerialist. It covers rigging, equipment, advice on optimal conditioning, and a step-by-step guide to technique, including anatomical references, space and time considerations, and elements of force when working with and against gravity. Specific movements and choreography are framed anatomically and together reflect the pattern and order of an aerial technique class. Challenges inherent to this type of dancing are discussed, as well as wellness instruction and methods of altering these techniques for intermediate and advanced dancing. A companion website hosts video that corresponds with the technique and phrasing in the book.

This market-leading practical text helps student teachers develop their confidence, understanding and skills to effectively and authentically teach arts. With a strong balance between theory and practice, Delivering Authentic Arts Education outlines the true nature of the key learning area of arts education and its importance in the curriculum, emphasising the arts as forms of creative activity, meaning-making and expression in a cultural context. Initial chapters discuss how to recognise and build on existing artistic abilities and pedagogical skills, how to encourage children’s creativity, how to lead arts appreciation experiences, and the general principles of planning and assessment. Part 2 specifically examines the five arts areas: dance, drama, media arts, music and visual arts. The final part of the text, Units of Inquiry, contains valuable sample learning activities and resources that demonstrate how to plan an effective lesson within a unit of inquiry.