(Re)Positioning Site Dance

Local Acts, Global Perspectives

Karen Barbour, Victoria Hunter, Melanie Kloetzel, Karen Barbour, Victoria Hunter, Melanie Kloetzel

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789380132
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

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.

Section Three

Moving towards the global: Ethics, mobility and marginalization

Chapter 7

Performing parks and squares

Victoria Hunter

Dressed in black, 400 dancers aged between 14 and 86 slowly raise their arms and turn their faces to the sky. From the soundtrack, an intake of breath triggers a unison flick of the hands, leading the bodies to perform rising and falling actions of the torso as they whip their arms into the air in an arc of rippling motion. Arranged in uniform lines of 10–15 people, the undulating bodies present a stark contrast to the solidity of Nelson’s Column rising above. London’s Trafalgar Square becomes the site of mass, rhythmic motion, choreographed and syncopated to produce an extra-daily spectacle, the commonplace meanderings of tourists and commuters are temporarily replaced by a sea of dancing bodies. Gradually, the performance evolves, crescendos and then subsides as the dancers exit, leaving a solo female in the centre of the square signalling the end of the work. The surrounding audience applauds. Acknowledging the completion of the event with a nod of her head, the dancer exits the site.

This passage describes a Big Dance performance event choreographed by Akram Khan, presented in London’s Trafalgar Square, June 2016.¹ Big Dance is a participatory dance initiative held annually in the United Kingdom that aims to animate dance activity through a nationwide series of events that converge on one day.²

This performance is not, of course site-specific dance as the content, intention and theme of the work bears no relation to the site(s) in which it is performed. It does, however, provide a useful example of an outdoor dance spectacle performed en masse in the non-theatre space of a public square. As such it achieves its remit as a Big Dance event; to generate dance activity, animate public spaces and foster a shared sense of well-being through participation in and observation of a highly visible and accessible dance performance.

This work raises the profile of dance nationally by generating activity, encouraging participation and developing future dance audiences at a grass-roots level. The staging in public spaces provides a valuable promotional platform for the art form through its engagement with high-profile locations and, at a basic level presents a form of dialogue between dance, body and site. However, the term site-specific is often applied to this and other work presented in non-theatre spaces. The erroneous use of the term in this context is, I argue, problematic – this is dance placed in a site as opposed to significantly engaging with it and as such it fails to address key aspects of sited dance practice.

The acknowledgement and (where possible) integration of site elements such as form, identity, context and composition (architectural, historical and thematic for example) is key to rationalizing why dance work is placed in such spaces. Presenting this argument however, I am also mindful of evolved site-specific dance and performance discourses that challenge notions of specificity and site-determinism per se (Richardson 2015; Wilkie 2012; Hunter 2015a).³ Notions of sites as mobile, porous and unfixed in terms of any one singular meaning or definition illustrate the complex nature of space and place and highlight the many resonances between localized acts and global conditions that inform interpretive or interventionist creative acts such as site dance work. However, these assertions of mobility and multiplicity do not negate the presence of formal site features such as architectural design, monuments, thematic and functional components or more subjectively experienced elements, loosely defined as atmospheres, material affordances and affects. To simply place or situate dance work within such rich and complicated sites could be construed as an act of colonization that overlooks key contextual components and features defining certain sites as significant urban places. Alternatively, a more symbiotic relationship between the site and the dance work might be conceived, as architecture and dance researcher Rachel Sara observes, ‘perhaps we should understand the building and the people, the walls and the bodies, the architecture and the dance as mutually constitutive’ (cited in Hunter 2015: 64 italics in original).

Dance performance sited in public parks and squares can be found across the United Kingdom and in parts of Europe,⁴ often throughout the summer months and at other key points across the year.⁵ Examples include Motionhouse Dance Company’s Renaissance (2005), a re-working of a previous version Machine Dance (2004) in which dancers performed with a mechanical digger for London’s Greenwich and Docklands festival, and Elizabeth Streb’s Cultural Olympiad (2012) interventions on London’s South Bank.⁶ Whilst the increasingly frequent presence of dance in the public arena could be construed as a positive development, in this chapter I turn my attention to questions of relationship, ‘fit’⁷ and dance-site connection. Streb’s Daredevil Dances (2012), for example, presented an athletic display of bungee jumping from London’s Millennium Bridge and abseiling down the City Hall building located on the South Bank of the River Thames. This spectacular display took place in an area that, prior to more recent gentrification development, was historically a space for rough sleepers.⁸ Motionhouse’s work was placed in a public site in Greenwich and referenced the commencement of development work for the 2012 Olympics in East London. Described as an ‘epic performance’ in which ‘themes of the security of our home and positive building and development’⁹ were posited as starting points, it explored these ideas in a broad sense but did not engage with (or chose to overlook) environmental issues and concerns regarding urban gentrification practices and community displacement raised by opposition groups associated with the Olympic Park development.¹⁰

In this chapter, I consider what such spectacularized work overlooks and how perhaps it might, unwittingly contribute to more coercive strategies¹¹ that figuratively and practically place less palatable urban actualities such as homelessness and social exclusion at the peripheries of dominant urban (promotional and touristic for example) narratives.¹² To this end, I explore the intrinsically performative nature of urban public spaces and their function as stages for ‘everyday’ performances invoked by design, function and regulatory conditions informed by Paul Makeham’s examination of urban performativity:

[…] the physical spaces, architecture and design of cities comprise myriad performative qualities including tension, irony, intertextuality and self-reflexivity […] Indeed, cities as a whole can be understood as sites upon which an (urban)e citizenry in the ‘practice of everyday life’ performs its collective memory, imagination and aspiration, performing its sense of self both to itself and beyond.

(2005: 152)

Here I consider the everyday performativity of civic parks and squares and their sociopolitical and economic frameworks and draw on dance examples from a range of cultural settings from the United Kingdom and further afield to question: how do parks and squares function in urban life and what level of engagement exists between site and the dance work performed in these spaces? What do such performance experiences tell us regarding the site’s contextual make up and what (whose?) purpose does this work serve? This final question regards the potential for site dance to be, on occasion co-opted to serve broader, municipally and governmentally led agendas, such as civic animation, cultural tourism, well-being, entertainment and festivalization. Through the inclusion of scores and suggestions for independent exploration, I invite readers and practitioners to engage with social, cultural and political themes and perhaps develop their own work in parks and squares.

Parks and squares

Considering the significance and potential impact of site dance work in parks and squares, I firstly explore some histories, economic conditions and design frameworks that surround the development of communal, urban spaces. Whilst this chapter focuses on parks and squares, much of the literature regarding urban communal sites addresses both forms of public space in a generic fashion, and it can be argued that the remit of these spaces, namely to provide areas of leisure, communing and repose in urban areas, share fundamental similarities. Weaving around these commonalities I interlace examples from both public squares and ‘greener’ public park spaces interchangeably. I am mindful here to avoid implying a sense of universality to this discussion and acknowledge my own privileged perspective in shaping and framing the discourse. Cities and their urban spaces and systems are by no means homogenized spaces experienced in the same way by all. Acknowledging the complexities of this type of discourse, Nicholas Whybrow observes,

[t]he tension between a perception of trans-urban homogenisation in an age of globalisation and the actual specificities of local cultures is not one that should be suppressed then, as it might be, by reference to a universal ‘us’. In the same way that it is still a majority of the world’s population that does not in fact have the means to take advantage of digital communication technologies in all their various forms, so it is that there are vast discrepancies of wealth and amenities around the globe. So, yes, most of us live in cities now, but most of ‘us’ are not even indirect beneficiaries of the first order of global finance and power. In fact, most of ‘us’ find ourselves at its mercy, so to speak: condemned as a member of ‘the rest’ or ‘other world’ to serve the interests and merely feed off the scraps of a dominant majority.

(2010: 2, original emphasis)

Whybrow warns against a form of intellectualized complacency that, whilst engaged in railing against the perils of globalization and neoliberalist agendas, might result in the erroneous implication that the effects of such systems on urban engagement are experienced in universal manner. Favouring a perspective of mobility over globalized homogeneity, Peter Merriman asserts,

[t]his is a world of flux, change and becoming, a world of mobilization (not globalization) in practice. This is also a highly contingent, relational, and personal world, yet these personal experiences and individual mobilities frequently get erased or generalised in much of the globalization literature.

(Merriman cited in Thrift et al. 2014: 34)

Creative strategies for engaging with urban spaces differently are presented in this chapter. They are considered as a means by which subjective and individuated urban explorations might emerge and, through which, the mobility of body, space and place might be perceived and a myriad of human-place relational strata might be exposed.

Commons and commoning

Common spaces in both urban and rural areas are not arbitrary or neutral zones delineated for the pursuit of leisure, idling or the greater, common good. Contemporary public spaces such as parks and squares in many developed cities bear legacies of broader, often contentious rural ‘commoning’ developments. Such developments have, throughout history, enclosed, demarcated and commodified shared land resources through processes of privatization and gentrification inherent within capitalist, market-led economic systems. Political theorist and Green party member David Wall observes,

[c]ommons can be seen as a particular category of property rights based on collective rather than state or private ownership, although there is some overlap between these three categories. Commons can be unowned and accessed by all or owned by a community and managed collectively.

(2014: 6)¹³

Histories of land use, land ownership, enclosure and access are therefore implicated in broader narratives such as feudalism, industrialisation, class and patrimony. In The Commons in History, Wall (2014) provides a useful historical overview and commentary on commoning practices and legacies from across the globe. From a United Kingdom perspective he discusses well-documented practices of land clearance, annexing and the Scottish Highland clearances that shaped provincial and municipal land usage and informed subsequent industrial development and urbanization. He acknowledges that ‘commons is a concept that is both contested and innately political in nature. Power and access to resources remain essential areas for debate’ (2014: 6).

Whilst notions of commoning originated in rural and pastoral contexts in Britain, historicized practices of industrialization and urbanization have led to the development of urban commons discourses pertinent to the concerns of this chapter. Brigitte Kratzwold relates rural commoning practices to urban, industrial (and post-industrial) contexts:

As the farmers moved to the cities in search of work following the enclosure of their commons by the nobility or the bourgeoise government at the turn of the industrial period, they took the practices of commoning with them.

(cited in Dellenbaugh et.al. 2015: 27)

She explains that such practices morphed to accommodate urban living and incorporated elements such as communal housing cooperatives, workers’ rights movements, market place and artisan trading practices. However, Kratzwold acknowledges that, in the past few decades, neoliberal economic systems, capital development and the ever-increasing demands of globalization have led to an increased spread of exclusionary practices and regulatory controls. These factors limit ‘common’ engagement with urban spaces and, as a result, proletarian rights to the city are increasingly controlled and curtailed:

[…] people stream into cities looking for work, housing and spaces to live. Capital, by contrast expects profitable investment possibilities from cities. Urban administrations are faced with the challenge of serving both requirements; they are however pressured to serve the needs of capital in these times of systematically enforced budget shortfalls. This leads to a situation in which cities are more and more subjected to the logic of exploitation without consideration of the quality of life of the majority of their residents.

(Kratzwold cited in Dellenbaugh et.al. 2015: 27)

In this capital-led, neoliberal landscape, notio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Introduction: (Re)positioning site dance: Local acts, global perspectives Karen Barbour, Victoria Hunter, Melanie Kloetzel
• Section One: Historical lineages and contemporary concerns: Tactics, encounters and contexts
• Section Two: Practice into theory: Materials, dialogues and affect
• Section Three: Moving towards the global: Ethics, mobility and marginalization
• Conclusion
• References
• Index