In recent years, arts festivals around the globe have become enamoured of touring, site-based performance. Such serialised site work is growing in popularity due to its accessibility, its spectacular characteristics, and its adaptive qualities. Employing practice-as-research methodologies to dissect the basis of such site-adaptive performances, the author highlights her discovery of the crumbling foundation of the adaptation discourse by way of her creative process for the performance work Room. Combining findings from the phenomenological explorations of her dancing body as well as from cultural analyses of the climate change debate by Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009), Claire Colebrook (2011, 2012), and Bruno Latour (2014), the author argues that only by fundamentally shifting the direction of the adaptation discourse – on scales from global to the personal – will we be able to build a site-adaptive performance strategy that resists the neoliberal drive towards ecological and economic precarity.
Site-specific performance relies on the terms space and place as markers for discussing a performance's engagement with a site. However, practitioners and researchers are often disgruntled by the limitations such terms impose upon site-specific performance – as was Melanie Kloetzel, in the creation of The Sanitastics, a site-specific dance film created in the Calgary Walkway System. In this article, Kloetzel examines how theorists have struggled with space and place in the last four decades and how bringing in the perspective of the body allows us to reassess our assumptions about these terms. As she analyzes her creative process, she discovers the restrictions as well as possibilities in space and place, but she also notes the need for Marc Augé's idea of non-place to clarify her site-specific efforts in the homogenized, corporate landscape of the Walkway System. Kloetzel is an associate professor at the University of Calgary and the artistic director of kloetzel&co, a dance company founded in New York City in 1997 that has presented work across North America. Her site-specific films have been shown in Brazil, Belgium, Canada, and the United States, and her anthology with Carolyn Pavlik, Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces, was published by the University Press of Florida in 2009.
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