In the past decade, discourses that examine site-based art practices have developed in nuance, scope, and urgency. These critical discussions are increasingly sophisticated and provocative. They take as their premise the idea that art, when placed outside of sanctioned gallery spaces, raises questions about definitions of space, place, access, democracy, community, and participation. Common to many of these discussions is a slippage between “site-based” and “public” art—a terminological slide that reveals an underlying set of social interests in discussions of site-based creative practices: subtending much of this work is an investigation of the power of site-based art practices to challenge normative social and spatial interactions.

But despite the expansion of this interdisciplinary body of work, its focus has been largely restricted to the material arts: sculpture, architecture, and painting. Public performance has only begun to inch into the scholarly debate over the past few years. Quite quickly, rather complex discourses have sprung up that tease out issues of economic, geographical, sexual, gendered, and racial privilege; the flux or fixed nature of site; and also the problems inherent in concepts of “equal” access to public performances. But even this performative turn in site art studies tends to take as its subject site-based theater practices.

The situation is starting to change, but a textual basis for burgeoning discussions about site-based dance has been most conspicuous by its absence. Melanie Kloetzel and Carolyn Pavlik, the coeditors of Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces, note the dearth of critical analysis on the form as motivation for their project (16). As Elise Bernhardt asserts in the book's Foreword: “Finally someone has begun to capture the voices, stories, observations, successes, theories, and working methods of the pioneering artists who have embarked on this integrated civic and artistic adventure” (xi).Footnote ¹Site Dance, then, arrives at a crucial time in the development of this branch of dance studies.

Kloetzel and Pavlik prioritize primary source documentation, and they begin with the artists themselves—sixteen in all. Although their focus is limited to site dance practices in the United States—an understandable (if restrictive) choice in terms of scope, and one that the editors acknowledge—they manage to feature artists from across the country: Meredith Monk to Joanna Haigood, Stephan Koplowitz to Eiko Otake. The text brings together pieces from the late 1960s through works-in-progress at the time of publication. A short introductory section, which consists mostly of a brief history of site dance practices and only a modest amount of theoretical pondering, establishes some of the key issues at play. The body of the book is made up of four sections (memory and history, site and the senses, place and beauty, and community access and involvement), each of which opens with a short preamble that sets up the featured artists. Interviews conducted by either Pavlik or Kloetzel address some of the central themes and memes explored by site practitioners. Essays written by the artists interviewed—most often reflections on a specific site-based choreographic process—round out the treatment of each choreographer. The bulk of the text, then, is made up of interview transcripts and artist essays.

In their interviews, Pavlik and Kloetzel carefully draw out the spectrum of approaches of site-based choreographic processes. The pieces described in Site Dance are variously sited in homes, empty warehouses, and museums, and on riverbanks, sidewalks, and the sides of buildings. Some pieces are created in a controlled studio setting and translocated to the performance site; most are created in the performance site itself; others are re-sited—moved from site to site and adapted to the new surroundings. By documenting these different approaches, Kloetzel and Pavlik succeed in opening a discussion of terminology: what, they ask, does it mean for a work to be site-specific, site-based, site-adaptive, or otherwise sited? Further, Kloetzel and Pavlik contend that critical analyses of site dance have the capacity to unfix the theoretical underpinnings of site art studies. They challenge: “How will the medium of movement change the site-specific discussion?” (18). Similarly, they ask the artists about their motivations for creating site-based works and receive a host of answers: an impulse to reclaim the streets, revive history, revere the outdoors, engage community, and simply to make work despite financial restrictions. Overlapping with common concerns about scale, access, and social change, each interview introduces a new set of experiences that, in turn, prompts a host of questions about the form—some of which are implicit in the contrasts between the featured practices, while others are explicitly expressed.

Site Dance is an important and pioneering contribution to the field, as well as a collection of invaluable primary source documentation that initiates what promises to be a productive discussion. But the issues and questions raised need to be picked up, worked over, complicated, troubled, tangled, and untangled again before site dance will find itself recognized as, to borrow Elise Bernhardt's words, “serious art and social critique” (xi). The book does an impressive job of laying a foundation for further analysis, but it is simply not designed to chart the theoretical contours of, as Kloetzel puts it, “site work's ability to make us reconsider our assumptions about space” (58).

In fact, Site Dance finishes where I want to start. On the final page of the book, Martha Bowers, established site-dance choreographer and community arts coordinator, asks the following pertinent questions: “Can site work shed light on our shrinking public space, our shrinking civic discourse, why only forty percent of Americans vote? Can site work provoke questions that aren't being asked, encouraging us to reawaken our critical analysis of social conditions and move toward action?” (289).Footnote ² Bowers presses further: “Can site work provide, if only briefly, an opportunity to build community by actively engaging in a project with diverse participants? Can it encourage us to actively make art as opposed to simply consuming it?” (289).

Although Site Dance stops short of providing answers to the questions it poses, the experiences and opinions recorded constitute a multitude of launch points for discussion. What follows is a brief foray into some of the issues that Site Dance so successfully chronicles, but which it is not equipped to develop. Following site art discourse's frequent slippage between “site-specific” and “public,” an obvious place to start in an analysis of the social power of site dance is with a branch of the form that takes its place in public urban spaces—as is the case in a number of the pieces described by Pavlik and Kloetzel. The complex network of social, bureaucratic, and theoretical issues present in all site-based dance practices is crystallized in public spaces.

Public art and performance practices have a long history in North America, but the relationship of public art to the city spaces in which it is set has shifted radically in recent decades with the contraction of public spaces in North American cities. This yields a curious paradox that lies at the heart of site dance: dances in public places are becoming increasingly common, even as the movement of bodies in and through public places is becoming increasingly regimented. In this vein, Olive Bieringa notes in Site Dance that her “work is irrefutably political in its act of reclaiming public space, spaces which are often choked with consumerism, fear, or intimidation” (137).Footnote ³ As Bieringa points out, site dance has the capacity to call attention to the sometimes invisible and sometimes occluded management of public spaces. For example, her experiences dancing on the streets in downtown San Francisco taught her that half of the pavement in the city's core is bank-owned; on that half, lying down, sitting, or performing any other physical gesture that calls up “vagrancy” is forbidden (133). In this light, reimagining and, further, re-embodying the possibilities of movement on city streets are undeniably charged political moves.

But while some practices explicitly attempt to disturb corporate control of public spaces, others make a partner of business by, for example, christening new corporate buildings with commissioned dances. While Pavlik and Kloetzel lack the textual space to draw out the complex relationship between site dance and spatial politics, they manage to ensure that the issue is embedded in their interviews by asking each artist about the degree to which his or her practice “overlaps” with economic development. To an iteration of this question, Martha Bowers candidly responds: “It's not news that pioneering artists are often the vanguard of gentrification” (288). Yet, the relationship between art and urban regeneration is convoluted. With reference to her piece Mother Ditch (1995), Heidi Duckler describes how site performances can introduce privileged art communities into neighborhoods they would not otherwise feel comfortable visiting. Audience members, she explains, were “afraid to cross over [the Los Angeles River] to the east side”; by luring her audience to cross, her piece drew media and public attention to the “cultural divide” delineated by the river (88).Footnote ⁴

Because it can bring people together in new ways, site-based performance is often rightly understood as a powerful community builder. Choreographers often facilitate interactions between people of different walks of life in both the process of creation and in performance. Quoting a letter of endorsement for her work from C. Ray Nagin, then mayor of New Orleans, Marylee Hardenbergh suggests that site dance can “create a sense of interconnectedness that transcends our local community relationships, reminding us that we are all one in a great, eternal whole” (166).Footnote ⁵ The form has the capacity to generate a shared experience of space among those involved and to construct atmospheres in which unexpected social exchanges can take place. That Pavlik and Kloetzel dedicate the final section of their book to site dance's role in the generation of community is telling. Indeed, perhaps one of the form's greatest strengths in a social sense is its ability to forge links between those who would not otherwise cross paths.

But this is not the whole story. Crucially, in its capacity to highlight community, site dance can also function to expose some of the lines that divide us. Thinking past a celebratory model, Olive Bieringa observes that site dance is riven with indicators of privilege. She recounts a comment made by an African-American man at a BodyCartography event, “Man, I just scratch my nuts and they take me to jail. What do you clowns think you're doing?” (138). Public spaces are shaped by numerous axes of exclusion including race, class, and gender; at its best, site dance can call attention to some of these tensions. As Martha Bowers phrases it, the form draws out “literally into public space” the muted frictions and “issues of intolerance” that are too often ignored or dismissed (274).

Different though the choreographers profiled in Site Dance are in their approaches to creating and performing site-based work, they agree that the form has the capacity to prompt contemplation about the design and use of the places in which the dances are situated. Perhaps Bowers phrases it best when she suggests that site dance carves out “a discursive space” for explorations of the dynamics of a given site (275–6).

Like the creative practice itself, Kloetzel and Pavlik's Site Dance wedges itself into an already vibrant discussion of other forms of site-specific art and establishes “a discursive space” for explorations of the various issues that crop up when dance moves out of the theater and into alternative sites. The book provides abundant material for the development of any number of theoretical threads that treat embodiment, movement, public space, spatial politics, and the social relevance of the arts—issues that continue to grow in urgency and consequence.