the landscape of performance
why we persist in these terrains remains secret.
The artist and the box.
The solid black box.
Where dreams and encounters can become the source of new objects, movements and apparitions.
To make performance, to choreograph is perhaps to form a logic to the system and construction which the body experiences. The experience of place which site specific performance may allow can present a dynamic reinterpretation of location which allows both the performer and the audience to re-calibrate their relationship to the sensitivity of landscape. Performance can act as a social and spatial filter, systematically crafting the conditions in which the choreographer wishes their conceptions of site. In this sense the site specific choreographer becomes a social facillator, creating and crafting specific conditions by which an audience can experience or re-experience the site in question.
The experience of making and watching, enacting and receiving are all quite different affairs, seeking in some way some form of entanglement.
Scrutinising vague commentaries which are notoriously rife as to the ambitious aims of site specific performance to ‘activate’ a site for an audience, one is able to explore explores and critiques both their own practice and extends this commentary to a more theoretical level to create a framework for a specific practice based research methodology which contains key components for direct methods which allow both the audience and performer to become actively engaged in both the context and presence with performance venues, how does performance activate a landscape and how far does performance become activated by landscape? How far is this relationship mutually exclusive and to what extend can these relationship be blurred and re-formed to create different schemes of intentionality.
How far dance can become a valid and logical system for the investigation of various sites in our environment, as perhaps outside of choreographic contexts the dissemination of place and its various strata’s of activity remain too complex for the dancers body to encapsulate in any form of totality; yet one can argue the living, thinking, perceptive body has the ability to narrate the site by means of engaged critical discourse;
How far can a performance subvert or alter the experience and reality of the fabric of a site? As a site performance begins to ‘overtake’ a site and infiltrate the daily realities of its existence; how far does the space and adapt and change to this intervention?
How far it is possible for dance as spatial medium and embodied form of expression of the experience of space to transmit received and gathered information as to the context and history of a site to an audience. The reliance on the body in this process becomes seminal, in order to create a performance experience for an audience which strives to facillate the heightened understanding of a site, the dancer must be confident in their body’s ability to act a viable social transmitter. In this context, the actions and capabilities of the body run in tandem to the perception of site specific performance to create a spatial and psychological experience of space which will allow, for them, to revisit their preconceptions of the space.
Urban re:passages 