Grounding the Field: Mobility and Site-Specificity

It would be impossible to discuss site performances that move from site to site without addressing the concept of mobility. Although it is currently a popular mode of analysis, it has in fact been a conceptual talking point since site-specific art's inception. As Fiona Wilkie neatly describes it in her article, “Site-Specific Performance and the Mobility Turn,” when Richard Serra made his grand statement, “To move the work is to destroy the work” in 1985, mobility had already been haunting the genre (Kaye, as cited in Wilkie Reference Wilkie2012, 204). In fact, although Serra and other site-specific visual artists clung to the idea that mobility and site-specificity were two concepts that dangled at opposite ends of a spectrum, such false divisions had been undermined almost since the first experiments on site and certainly since performance began forays into the form in the late 1960s and 70s.

That said, scholars did not significantly dismantle this opposition until Miwon Kwon's Reference Kwon1997 article, “One Place After Another” (which blossomed into a full-length text by the same name in 2002) began to break it down. As she chronicled the development of site-specific art from the 1960s to the 1990s, Kwon observed that it went through three phases: an initial one, where site-specific art focused on the physical and phenomenological readings of a site; a second phase, where it addressed a site's social construction and the possibilities of reinserting agency for its occupants; and a third phase, where the site itself became “unfixed” or mobile—it transformed into a discursive location (Kwon Reference Kwon1997).Footnote ⁴ In discussing this third phase, Kwon notes, “while site-specific art once defied commodification by insisting on immobility, it now seems to espouse fluid mobility and nomadism for the same purpose” (1997, 96). This “mobile” work as well as Kwon's discussion of it helped set the stage for the site-specificity/mobility dialogue. By the time Nick Kaye offered his larger analysis of site-specific art and performance in 2000 noting that “the site is mobile, always in a process of appearance or disappearance” (Kaye Reference Kaye2000, 96), mobility was no longer considered an antithetical notion in the site-specific art world. Rather, it had been embraced as a viable framework for analyzing (and perhaps creating) site-specific work.

In an attempt to push this dialogue further and to interrogate it through the lens of individual performance experiences, Contemporary Theatre Review published a special issue in 2012 to address the mobility turn in site-specific performance. The issue included examinations of fluidity and mobility in relation to mumming (Peter Harrop) and to performances along waterways (Minty Donald) as well as an article by Victoria Hunter in which she attempted to reframe the idea of singularity in site-specific dance by focusing on the inherent mobility of audience perspectives of a particular site. Hunter, who analyzed her own site-specific group dance for the Leeds Central Library, found that mobility is a profound factor even in performances where travel is not a dominant theme. As she contemplated her work, Hunter developed the following query, “What happens to our located identity when a place becomes ‘mobile,’ transformed by the site-specific performance event, when ‘here’ becomes (momentarily) somewhere else?” (Hunter Reference Hunter2012, 265). In pondering this during the creative process and performance, Hunter determined that the identity of the dancers, the audience members, and the place itself became fluid, rather than fixed; further, in analyzing the evidence from questionnaires and interviews taken during the pre- and postproduction time periods, she found that individual perceptions of the site often varied markedly as a result of viewing or being involved in the performance. This led her to the conclusion that “performed” sites do not conform to a fixed notion of place; rather, “the site is metaphorically freed from its everyday, normative meanings and associations and its identity becomes mobilised through the individual's processes of experiencing and perceiving the site in a different manner” (2012, 259). Such mobilization of a “stable” material site rings true with both Kaye's version of a fluid site and Kwon's discursive location.

I, too, have found that questions of mobility can come aggressively to the fore when creating site-specific work. In 2008, as I was creating a site-specific dance film in the Calgary Skywalk system, I found myself struggling with the typical terminology embedded in site-specific discourse. As I attempted to dissect a “singular” site that covered ten miles and that had pedestrian travel and corporate consumerism as its raison d’être, I discovered the need to widen my frame in order to decode a homogenized space—a “non-place” as Marc Augé would categorize it (Augé Reference Augé1995). This led to an embrace of mobility as tied into the very fabric of the site-specific work I was creating, a situation that caused me a certain level of consternation (Kloetzel Reference Kloetzel and Hunter2015). I maintained this focus on mobility as I began to examine the dynamics of creating site works for portable architectural venues in “Have Site, Will Travel :– Container Architecture and Site-Specific Performance” (Kloetzel Reference Kloetzel2013). However, in delving into a project where choreographers made works for repurposed shipping containers that could travel between cities, I began to question the limits of the discussion around mobility and site-specific performance. After viewing (and presenting work) in and around the shipping containers at the 2012 and 2013 Fluid Movement Arts Festivals in Alberta, I found myself disappointed by the cursory connection to site that developed in such a scenario, a result, perhaps, of the overly brief dialogue between the creators/performers and the portable site. In the end, I asked somewhat rhetorically, “Will efforts toward the site-specific merely slip off of these mobile shells as they head out of town in pursuit of their next rendezvous?” (2013, 27).

In 2012, Wilkie, who has been contributing to the discourse on mobility and site-specificity since her first charting of the site performance field (2002), began to examine site works that engaged more directly with mobility, particularly differential mobility. In her contribution to the aforementioned Contemporary Theatre Review issue, Wilkie offered a thorough account of the developing discourse between site-specificity and mobility, in part, through a consideration of the mobility turn in the social sciences, but also through an analysis of the work of Mick Douglas (that takes place in and along trams) and Mike Kelley (that takes the shape of a portable replica of his childhood home). Wilkie argues that the work by Douglas and Kelly is “not unusual or contradictory in its position as a site-specific artwork that only makes sense in relation to contexts of mobility” (2012, 203). Moreover, as she notes, mobility has always been at the heart of site-based performance in the guise of transportation to and from performance sites, tours during the work, and walking performances. Her recent book, Performance, Transport, and Mobility (2015), takes this dialogue deeper as she investigates multiple works—site-specific, performance-based, film, visual arts, etc.—that comment (and sometimes take place) on the various modes of transport available to humans, i.e., by train, plane, boat, car, and on foot. In particular, she analyzes such artworks with a keen eye on the relational aspects of mobility; as she states, “the various scales on which mobility operates, and the vastly different levels of privilege and empowerment in experiences of being mobile, exist not in spite of but in direct relation to one another” (Wilkie 2015, 6). By shining a light on the power implications that exist along the mobility spectrum, Wilkie offers a reminder of how hegemony and personal sovereignty are deeply intertwined with the various modes of mobility.

The mobility turn is now a given in analyses of site performances, and deservedly so. As these scholars illustrate, places do not have a fixed meaning over time or across populations, and performance—particularly dance performance—cannot be detached from a very basic acknowledgment of mobility as the basis of the medium.

Un-Fixing the Field: From Mobility to Serialization

In the site dance community, assumptions of a mobility/site-specificity dipole seemed unfounded from the start. In contrast to Serra's grand statements, site choreographers directly mobilized both performers and audiences from their earliest creations. Meredith Monk, for example, considered one of the founders of the site dance genre, was heavily invested in the notion of the tour. Rather than a static or stationary audience, Monk forced her audiences to travel, either through one particular site, such as the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Tour: Dedicated to Dinosaurs in 1969, or to many sites over a period of time, such as in Juice (1969) or Vessel (1970) where audiences traveled to three separate sites over the course of a week or month.

This idea of encouraging audiences to travel is now a common strategy in the site dance field. From Martha Bowers’ On the Waterfront (1993) in Red Hook where audiences moved from pier to pier along the Brooklyn waterfront, to the Seven Sisters Group's Salomé (1999) where audiences followed a red thread that wound them through the decaying St. Pancras Chambers in London, to Barrowland Ballet's The River (2014) that included an audience jaunt along the River Clyde in Glasgow, almost every site choreographer has employed the tour at some point in his/her career to foster audience movement through a site.

The concept of mobility also found its way into site-specific performance by way of a pre-determined topic. Again, departing from traditionalist notions of site-specificity espoused by Serra, certain site choreographers find that a particular subject matter sparks their interest, after which they seek out an appropriate site where the issue resonates. This rearranges notions of site-specificity toward considering site in “discursive” terms, as Miwon Kwon (Reference Kwon1997) puts it; a site becomes a lightning rod, rather than a material singularity, for addressing larger social or cultural issues. Joanna Haigood and Jo Kreiter, for example, both based in San Francisco, have tried this approach. As Haigood, who has a long history of making site-specific work, describes it, “Sometimes I'll feel deeply inspired by a place and want to make something there. Sometimes I am moved by an event or by a period in history and then I try to find a place or a site where that history is relevant” (Haigood Reference Haigood, Kloetzel and Pavlik2009, 53). Haigood's works Invisible Wings (1998) and Departure and Arrival (2007) are two examples of this second type of work; for Invisible Wings, Haigood wanted to explore slave narratives and was able to do so when she gained access to a former trail along the Underground Railroad in Massachusetts (this piece, incidentally, also employed the tour strategy), and for Departure and Arrival access to the San Francisco Airport terminal enabled her to have a platform to comment on the forced migration of the African diaspora and its links to current migration narratives. Kreiter, too, observes that she often takes a discursive approach to site. For example, driven by her shock in regard to the issue of water scarcity in communities around the world, she has been attempting to find a place to investigate this topic:

The site artist Ann Carlson enjoys combining all of the above, framing mobility itself as a topic to explore. For example, in her work with Mary Ellen Strom, Geyser Land (2003), the performance took place on a moving train; both performers and audience were able to move freely through the train cars as well as witness from the train windows film projections and reenacted historical images along the route. Geyser Land accessed the area of land between Livingston and Bozeman, Montana, mining it for its specificity (for example, by engaging local cast members for the performance and by using archival photos of the area as source material). But the work also drew on the discursive potential of the site in order to comment on the advent of train travel itself. In contrasting the speed of the traveling train with the still images seen as the train flashed past, Carlson and Strom focused on the mobility-immobility dichotomy, precisely corresponding to performance works Wilkie examines that demonstrate “something about differential mobilities … rather than … simply us[ing] transport settings or themes as backdrops” (Wilkie Reference Wilkie2015, 15). This pairing of the still reenactments and the speeding train left no doubt as to one of the main themes of the Carlson's work—the effects of mobility (and differential mobility) on the human form and psyche. One of the main effects—that of feeling simultaneously overwhelmed by speed while the body was perceptually experienced as at rest—is, curiously, the very depiction of train travel offered by Michel De Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984, 111).Footnote ⁵

It was in her earlier Night Light project (2000) that Carlson first began to explore the strategy of juxtaposing mobilities. In this work, Carlson contrasted a mobile audience with an utterly immobile performing cast, this time by treating audiences to a walking tour along which they could witness a series of historical photographs restaged in exact replica and placement to the original. After the work premiered in New York with the presentation support of Dancing in the Streets, Night Light was restaged in three additional communities. Drawing from archives local to the three new sites—in Chicago, in San Francisco, and at Jacob's Pillow—Carlson created a similar tour structure but with photographs unique to the communities. In doing so, Carlson serialized a site-specific work, relocating the structure of the work but maintaining its “specificity” to a local place.

Can Site Work Tour? Or, How Adaptation Crept into the Picture

The serialization of site work suggests a new dilemma for the mobility project. Wilkie was already aware of this dilemma in 2002, when in her mapping of site work she observed, “the overriding issue of contention arising from the survey turns around the question, ‘Can site-specific performance tour?’” (Wilkie Reference Wilkie2002, 149). After posing this question, Wilkie stayed attuned to questions of mobility, examining the relationship between site work and modes of transportation. However, her question of site work and serialization remained, leaving a new specter to haunt the genre.

Carlson, for one, found a strategy that could maintain specificity and at the same time enable a site work to tour. By accessing historical archives in each city where Night Light was restaged and then using a simple (although challenging for the performers) strategy built of precise costuming, exact placement, and mimetic stillness, she was able to establish a very distinct connection to each site of performance. And although Carlson was not the first to consider moving between sites (as I detail below), her work highlights questions and concerns regarding touring and/or serializing site-specific performance.

Since the 1960s, choreographers have experimented with presenting work in a series of alternative venues. Choreographers such as Twyla Tharp, Gus Solomons Jr., and Marilyn Wood began to toy with these ideas as early as 1968.Footnote ⁶ And later others in different countries did so as well; for example, Lea Anderson and Susanne Thomas in the United Kingdom and Sylvie Bouchard and David Danzon in Canada began experimenting with resiting and/or touring their site-oriented work.Footnote ⁷ Among the first to discuss this effort to serialize site work were Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig of the U.S.-based PearsonWidrig DanceTheater. As they observe in regard to their work Common Ground (1993), economics featured heavily in the drive to serialize. As Pearson explains, “It all began when presenters would invite us to make a site-specific work that they couldn't afford on their own. So they would team up with another presenter who was interested in a completely different site and then ask us to adapt the same choreography for each of them” (2009, 217). After making Common Ground for the bucolic grassy hillsides of Wave Hill in the Bronx, Pearson and Widrig, according to the terms of the contract, had to translate the work to the cement block plaza of Lincoln Center's Damrosch Park. Pearson goes on to explain: “It was a wonderful, terrible assignment that we resisted mightily, but we needed the job, and so we said yes” (217–18). As they note, this project, though extremely challenging and prompted by economic demands, ended up being a learning experience that “opened the door to a whole new world of site-adaptive dance” (218).

Pearson and Widrig have now been making what they call site-adaptive work for several decades. In one of their earlier attempts, Ordinary Festivals (1995), they took an evening-length stage piece and adapted it to the large grassy quad at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. Widrig notes that for the quad performance at Bates, the expansive depth of field allowed for a very different use of space, one that for him was filmic: “This spatial magnifier was incredibly effective in increasing not just the visual but also the emotional impact of the entire work” (Pearson and Widrig Reference Pearson, Widrig, Kloetzel and Pavlik2009, 222).Footnote ⁸ Since this time, Pearson and Widrig have continued their focus on site-adaptive dance, creating a number of works that consist of a set of structured scores that they then adapt to quite diverse sites. The most well-known of these works, A Curious Invasion (1997–2014), has been tailored for nine different sites (and nine different communities of performers) from Slovakia to New Hampshire. As Widrig describes it:

While certain sections of A Curious Invasion may appear wholly specific to one site, the series is linked by a similar aesthetic: large groups of performers clad in bright solids of oranges, yellows, reds, and blues celebrate a landscape by playfully rolling along cement and/or grass surfaces, climbing trees, gesturing out of windows, wrapping themselves around vertical poles, and creating sound using the environment itself. The adaptability of the work comes from an initial attention to detail; in their first iterations of the work, Pearson and Widrig attuned themselves to specific attributes of the sites, crystallizing these characteristics into a fundamental few. Then, in subsequent iterations, they tried to identify similar attributes in order to adapt the template to these new sites. For example, one section of A Curious Invasion is crafted for any two-tiered structure that can be accessed; it was performed on a stone ledge with two levels at Wave Hill but has also appeared on leather couches (using the two levels of the backrest and seat cushions) at the Hopkins Centre for the Arts at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Photo 1. PearsonWidrig DanceTheater, A Curious Invasion, 2001, Wave Hill, The Bronx, NY. Dancers: Lisa Mercer, Jennifer Harmer, Alex Holmes, and Melissa Glasgow. Photographer: James Murphy. Photo courtesy of PearsonWidrig DanceTheater.

Another group that has helped push the parameters of site dance on tour is Eiko & Koma. In the 1990s, Eiko & Koma began to experiment with performing at several similar or “generic” sites, and they have continued this focus to the presentFootnote ⁹ ; as Eiko Otake states, “we have somewhat of a ground design. …But we adapt the piece to the space we are in” (Reference Otake, Kloetzel and Pavlik2009a, 179–80). For example, in their first effort, River (1995), Eiko & Koma crafted the work to mesh with the flow of a river. When the time of the performance arrives, they enter the selected river upstream of the audience, float with a driftwood log across the audience's view enacting detailed and deliberate Butoh-based movements in relation to the log and to one another, and finally drift out of sight downstream, ideally as the sun disappears. They have performed this work in eleven different bodies of water across the United States and in Japan.Footnote ¹⁰ Interestingly, Eiko & Koma do not link their interest in serialized site work to economics although it is clear, as I will touch on later, that the support of multiple presenters features prominently in their ability to create the work. Rather, their interest stems from the idea of linking similar sites to underscore the correspondence between geographically separated contexts. As Eiko Otake remarks,

Photo 2. PearsonWidrig DanceTheater, A Curious Invasion, 2003, Darmouth College, NH. Dancers: Bethany Formica, Alex Holmes, and Dartmouth College dancers. Photographer: Margaret Lawrence. Photo courtesy of PearsonWidrig DanceTheater.

Photo 3. PearsonWidrig DanceTheater, A Curious Invasion, 2011, Connecticut College, CT. Dancers: Connecticut College students. Photographer: Patrik Widrig. Photo courtesy of PearsonWidrig DanceTheater.

In 1999, Eiko & Koma decided to try a new approach to touring site work. Purchasing a used trailer that they then modified using cheesecloth, tree branches, and stage lighting, Eiko & Koma crafted a portable site for The Caravan Project (1999). This portable site could be transported from place to place by hitching the trailer to a jeep; at each venue, presenters would merely open the four doors of the trailer to reveal the performance. As Eiko Otake notes, the performance was almost identical at each place although it moved from parks to beaches, to parking lots, and to a backyard. Yet, in writing about this work, Otake's awareness of the larger site translates into her comments. She observes that as people gather intimately around the four sides of the trailer,

Otake is acutely aware of how mobility acts as a theme in this work due to the portable nature of the site. Drawing links to her ancestral sense of place, Otake describes The Caravan Project as a mobile library that dispenses artwork or “an old Japanese bicycle man who delivers illustrated stories” (Reference Otake, Kloetzel and Pavlik2009b, 192). In later projects, Eiko & Koma continue this exploration of portability in site work, consistently testing the boundaries around adaptation and mobility in site performance.

Photo 4. Eiko & Koma, River, 2011, American Dance Festival, NC. Dancers Eiko and Koma Otake, Photographer: Anna Lee Campbell. Photo courtesy of Eiko & Koma.

Embracing Adaptation

Stephan Koplowitz, another choreographer who has welcomed the idea of touring site performance, began toying with the model of Pearson and Widrig's relocated template in his work Off the Walls in 1996, which was created both for the Portland Museum of Art in Maine and for New York's Hudson River Museum. Later, like Eiko & Koma, he became more interested in making work for a series of “generic” sites as evidenced by his Grand Step Project (2004), which was created for grand staircases (at museums, libraries, and the like). In this project, Koplowitz hired fifty dancers to perform at six sets of grand staircases around New York City; at each, they performed a very similar version of the piece, including such activities as rolling down the stairs, sweeping widely with their arms, and leaning precariously across the steps in large accumulations of bodies.

In 2009, these efforts in serial creation inspired Koplowitz to develop a larger analysis of how touring and site work might mesh. In a chapter in Site Dance, where he divides site work into four categories, he asserts that what he terms “site-adaptive” work (category two) consists of two types of touring site work: pieces that utilize a set structure or score with content that adapts to sometimes quite different sites and pieces that are adapted for a series of similar sites and employ similar content. His other categories, site-specific work, reframed work, and work that moves from studio to site fill out his continuum of site art (Koplowitz Reference Koplowitz, Kloetzel and Pavlik2009a, 73–76).

Photo 5. Stephan Koplowitz, Grand Step Project: Flight, 2004, Winter Garden, Manhattan, NY. Photographer: Julie Lemberger. Photo courtesy of Stephan Koplowitz.

Photo 6. Stephan Koplowitz, Grand Step Project: Flight, 2004, St John the Divine, Manhattan, NY. Photographer: Julie Lemberger. Photo courtesy of Stephan Koplowitz.

Photo 7. Stephan Koplowitz, Grand Step Project: Flight, 2004, Borough Hall, Brooklyn, NY. Photographer: Julie Lemberger. Photo courtesy of Stephan Koplowitz.

Prior to Koplowitz's analysis, Pearson and Widrig had already embraced the term “site-adaptive,” and they, along with Koplowitz, are now quite open about the use of it to describe their work. Other site choreographers who have been invested in the field for decades, such as Heidi Duckler and Marylee Hardenbergh, also employ the term “site-adaptive.”Footnote ¹¹ Yet, although the term was, as indicated above, arguably introduced by Elise Bernhardt in 1989 to describe work being presented by Dancing in the Streets (Blau Reference Blau1989),Footnote ¹² it is a term that has not enjoyed significant analysis and is by no means universally adopted to describe a category of site work. Even Eiko & Koma do not readily employ the term in their written materials, often choosing the much more vague “outdoor work” to label their creations.

Pearson and Widrig as well as Koplowitz and others began employing “site-adaptive” as an applicable term only after creating serialized site works themselves. In short, they embraced the concept of adaptation as the key principle to emphasize after analyzing their processes in a series of sites; to put it another way, after noting the adaptive labor required at each new place, the verb “adapt” appeared as a pertinent and accurate descriptor. As Koplowitz observed, although a piece would emerge in direct conversation with one site, from the beginning of the creation process, a choreographer would stay cognizant of how it needed to “easily adapt[] to” the particulars of another site (Reference Koplowitz, Kloetzel and Pavlik2009a, 75). In this instance, Koplowitz is discussing work that can adapt to a series of similar sites. But he goes on to claim that work, such as Pearson and Widrig's, where “the structure is the same but the content varies depending on the site” could also fall into the site-adaptive category (Koplowitz Reference Koplowitz, Kloetzel and Pavlik2009a, 75).

Although mobility within site performance has undergone a detailed analysis through the efforts of the theorists mentioned above, this has not been the case with adaptation. Yet, ironically, adaptation as well as mobility stands as one of the fundamental principles of the site dance genre. In preliminary ventures in the field, for example, Anna Halprin in the 1950s was sending dancers into the woods, onto the beach, or into urban environments, encouraging them to acclimatize to these sites and underlining the benefits of adaptation for their training. As she notes, in the early 1960s she became increasingly “preoccupied with movement in relation to environment. I began to feel that we had paid such strict attention to self-awareness, kinesthetic responses, and each other, that we developed a stifling introspection. So we began to extend our focus to adaptive responses in the environment” (Halprin Reference Halprin1965, 146, my emphasis).

This was an experiment that Trisha Brown—considered to be one of the founders of site dance—carried out quite strictly in her equipment pieces of the 1970s, where dancers had to adapt the precision of walking on a street to walking on a wall, managing the pull of gravity in a completely altered setup. For Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970), for example, a solo figure in a harness walks the length of a building from roof to ground, allowing the speed of a natural (albeit, a bit slow) pace of walking to determine the length of the work. In many ways, although the adaptation at play in this work is quite obvious, the work has only lately been revealed as a site-adaptive dance when it was restaged, not at the same building in Greenwich Village where it was in 1970, but at the Walker Art Center in 2008, the Whitney Museum in 2010, and at UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance in 2013. At each of these sites, the performers (including, famously, Elizabeth Streb at the Whitney and Amelia Rudolph at UCLA) needed to adapt to the height of the individual building to determine the work's length as opposed to any “original timing” of the 1970 presentation. As such efforts demonstrate, although Bernhardt in 1989 and then Pearson, Widrig, and Koplowitz were the first to introduce the label “site-adaptive dance,” adaptation has been a guiding principle in the field of site dance since its inception.

Joining Forces, or Accessing the Cross-Disciplinary Potential of Adaptation

In addition to the link to the mobility turn within the social sciences as noted above, calling forth a term such as “adaptive” or discussing “adaptation” in relation to site work inevitably sparks a number of connections across disciplines. For some, as I will detail, such connections may come laden with connotation, throwing doubt on the use of the term; for others, the alignments may be surprisingly acute, offering new possibilities for the site performance genre. Overall, I believe the cross-disciplinary associations triggered will serve to strengthen, provoke, and inform our discussion, rather than undermine it.

One area where the term “adaptive” is in frequent use is in relation to disability studies or practices. In this sense, the word “adaptive” is meant to point to how different pedagogical methods, equipment, or technology are adapted to suit the developmental needs of people with disabilities; it may also refer to the adaptive behaviors, skills, or abilities that people with disabilities offer in a developmental context. It is in this arena that “dance” and “adaptive” have already been linked, perhaps casting doubt on its usefulness in the context of site dance. For example, in 2002, the Boston Ballet began to refer to the dance training and opportunities it offered to mixed ability communities as “adaptive dance,” and the presence of such adaptive dance classes has been expanding rapidly in North America.Footnote ¹³ Yet, rather than immediately dismissing the term as already deployed, many in the site dance community would see a sensible link between the use of “adaptive” in both contexts. Ann Carlson, for instance, explicitly notes how dance, on site or not, is inherently multisited: “As choreographers, perhaps the first “site” is the body and all the visual, cultural, and behavioral signs ingrained in the body that impact the work. It circles out … from the site of the body to the context of where the body stands” (Carlson Reference Carlson, Kloetzel and Pavlik2009, 107). To put it another way, I would argue that site choreographers, like those in the adaptive dance community, recognize the body in all its abled uniqueness as the first site in an expanding circle of sites that all require degrees of adaptation (through acquired familiarity and adjustment).Footnote ¹⁴

Bringing up adaptation in relation to performance also inevitably triggers thoughts of theatrical, film, or even gaming adaptations of a variety of texts (Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Euripides, and the like). The application of an “already-made” text (or, in our case, choreography or a score) to a series of sites might be likened to the way that The Tempest has appeared at an endless variety of indoor and outdoor sites over the past hundreds of years. Each version must undergo an adaptive process to facilitate the performance at the new site or with the new cast. Like the site-adaptive dance work described above, these adaptations may involve more or less adaptive labor as an individual production dialogues with the new venue. In the past few decades a turn to adaptation studies has grown within the theater, literature, and media and film studies disciplines, leading to a number of edited volumes and even a journal dedicated to the field.Footnote ¹⁵ In her anthology, Theatre and Adaptation, for example, Margherita Laera describes the numerous and wide-ranging considerations that emerge in theater adaptations by noting that “the process of adaptation implies negotiations of numerous kinds, such as interlingual, intercultural, intersemiotic, intermedial, but also ideological, ethical, aesthetic and political” (Laera Reference Laera2014, 5). But before charting the details of these negotiations (negotiations that, I might add, not only have current parallels in the site-adaptive dance community but could also be fruitful for future site-adaptive projects), she also reaches poetically across the disciplinary aisle: “Theatre repeats … [and in]doing so, it adapts itself to present contingencies and situations, like an animal species struggling to survive through evolution. … Theatre, one could say, never stops adapting its features to the world and the world to its features” (Reference Laera2014, 1). In this way, she nods to the scientific meanings of the term, to the evolutionary adaptation that animals (including humans) must make to survive in a given environment.

As Laera insinuates, popular concepts of adaptation typically harken back to the natural and social sciences; for our purposes, its prevalence in human geography, in particular, acts as one of the most intriguing and, perhaps, fertile connection points across disciplines. Borrowing from the biological definition of adaptation, human geographers have been examining human adaptation to environmental conditions for over a century, often with a deep focus on space and place. And scholars of site performance have long appealed to such geographers—Doreen Massey and Yi-Fu Tuan, among others—to facilitate analyses of site performances.Footnote ¹⁶ Referencing human geographers’ history with both the terms “adaptation” and “adaptive” helps once again to cement the interdisciplinary links between site performance and geography. And although adaptation comes with its own controversies within geography,Footnote ¹⁷ geographers’ concern to underscore the process of adaptation, and their sophisticated methodologies for studying how social systems and cultural occurrences—potentially including performance—can affect the human relationship with the environment, bode well for examining the possibilities and pitfalls of adaptive processes in site performance.Footnote ¹⁸

One final alignment that could spur discourse around site-adaptive dance emerges when considering adaptation from an economic perspective. As neoliberalism has made inroads into performance production, a discourse clearly laid out in Jen Harvie's, Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Reference Harvie2013), performers and performance makers have been forced to seek entrepreneurial, efficient, and adaptable approaches for creating and presenting work. Indeed, such adjectives are the hallmarks of neoliberalism, and presenters and artists, forced to keep step with the neoliberal market, have met such demands with a greater focus on serial and/or adaptable formats. Unsurprisingly, site-adaptive dance as both a form and an identifiable genre began to emerge just as neoliberalism's effects intensified in the 1990s, sending artists and presenters scrambling economically.Footnote ¹⁹ To recap Pearson and Widrig from their experiences in 1993, “It all began when presenters would invite us to make a site-specific work that they couldn't afford on their own. So they would team up with another presenter who was interested in a completely different site and then ask us to adapt the same choreography for each of them” (2009, 217). And this push in the 1990s to economize through serialization has continued. For example, all of Eiko & Koma's works have emerged through the support of multiple presenters who banded together to facilitate the initial development of the work. Offering (2002), for example, which took place on a rotating structure covered with dirt that they transported from performance site to performance site, was cocommissioned by Dancing in the Streets, the Walker Art Center, and the University of Arizona; it appeared at multiple sites across New York in 2002 and 2003, with coproduction by neighborhood organizations and park committees, as well as at various sites in Eastern Europe and across the United States.

By the time Koplowitz discussed site-adaptive work in 2009, neoliberalism's focus on efficiency, mobility of goods, and adaptability had been integrated into the choreographers’ rhetoric. As Koplowitz states, he sees site-adaptive work as the “most economical or attractive to make because of the repeatability factor” (Reference Koplowitz, Kloetzel and Pavlik2009a, 75), and by 2009 such work had become his main driver: “At this point in my life I'm interested in site-adaptive works because I'm hopeful that they will be able to travel, they will have more of an artistic life, and they can continue to have an impact” (Reference Koplowitz, Kloetzel and Pavlik2009b, 66). Koplowitz even created a “site-adaptive touring group” called TaskForce, whose aim was to create site work for a series of spaces “on a small, more economical scale” (Reference Koplowitz, Kloetzel and Pavlik2009b, 66).Footnote ²⁰ Pearson and Widrig's comments also demonstrate the drive toward efficiency and site-adaptive work's ability to provide it: