Reflections on Site Specific Performance as embodied research
Four years after Sol Lewitt's 54 columns sculpture was installed in Atlanta’s Historic Old Fourth Ward, a few ambitious Atlantans sought to return the land it inhabited back to the wild. It was an eyesore in need of greenery. A couple of Dogwoods would fix it. What Fulton County Arts and Culture has called “guerilla gardening” still happens in the space.
The columns, standing immovably tall on the corner of North Highland and Glen Iris, were an inspiration for choreographer Nadya Zeitlin who developed a group work for the space called Body Guarding. She says, “This structure is like parts of buildings for me. Or parts of something else. Something unfinished. A sentence with spaces instead of some words, intentionally left blank.” Zeitlin adapted an existing duet, Arches and Textures, originally performed in a studio, by asking dancers about their perception of the sculpture and its environment during the creative process. “They talked about the feeling of being guarded by soldiers; protected, proudness, unity, standing together, warriors, spirits. Always connected. Evil vibes, too.”
Nadya herself was struck by images of doors and portals, which have been prevalent as imagery, prop, and inspiration in her prior work. As if stepping into one world and exiting out of another, the dancers disappear behind one column and appear out of a completely different one. This is accomplished in part by the frontal experience of the work, which was not intended to be viewed from all sides. The audience sat parallel to the columns, sandwiched in between the dancing bodies on “stage” and the sidewalk along North Highland Avenue.
Some scholars might call Nadya’s process of turning a duet into a group work at a different location site-adaptive or site-influenced. Camille LeFevre’s musings on the waywardness of site-specificity includes a list of variations on the form that are useful in understanding performance in public space, albeit not applicable as a hard and fast rule. Not all public outdoor dance performances are site-specific. Some are dance al fresco or concert dance staged outdoors, like the work of Art on the Atlanta BeltLine After Dark artists City Gate Dance. “Site-influenced, site-based, or site-sensitive dance [is] dance that responds to the physical/structural parameters [and] cultural/environmental characteristics of the site.” Site-specificity, on the other hand, includes not only the acknowledgement of the geographical, structural, and cultural characteristics of the place, but also their use in the development of spatial direction, audience placement, and movement vocabulary, for example. The work cannot be made without that place and cannot exist in any other place. Its creative process cannot begin in one place and be carried on in another. Assumedly, the artist's work could take on a different form, medium, or movement style based on what the place needs. Tricia Hersey’s collective naps, where the movement vocabulary is the same - napping - but the site might have historical and cultural significance that the artist is deeply aware of and influenced by is site-responsive or influenced according to this definition. Iman Person’s Waterlust, part of FLUX: Grant Park in 2018, is described as site-responsive by Flux Projects. The artist chose a soft fabric medium to work with out of all of the mediums Person is known to use (ceramic sculpture, plant matter, performance art). The site and it’s historic, geographic and topographic contexts were factors in her choice in how the work would manifest. At some point, these distinctions in how space and practice intersect become blurry and it is unclear whether any work is site-specific or site-something else (even LeFevre says this in the article). Rather than look only at individual art practices to determine their site-specificity, we might also look at the difference between site-responsive and site-specific as political, ideological or as an attempt to distinguish between contemporary ways of looking at art in public space distinctly from works of the 1960s and 1970s.
One way to blur the lines is to look at how Zeitlin chooses sites that reflect her movement vocabulary. In this case, it is not only the artist building a work based on the site, but also the artist being driven towards a site that fits a particular aesthetic and architectural need. The site is co-choreographer and the duo have similar sensibilities. Zeitlin is inspired by Brutalist architecture, minimalism, and depth of the space. The Bauhaus movement is a major influence on Zeitlin, in part, because of the movement’s alignment with minimalism and the sense of clarity she feels from the structure of colors, lines and shapes. To her, the geometry of the work creates a dynamic, kinesthetic experience of “jumps, stretches, and throws.”
There is no denying that Zeitlin, and most of the artists in this research, listen deeply to the spaces and communities in which they inhabit. Nadya describes a humming between the 54 columns, as if the arrangement and number of them signify a holy place. Like the center of the city, where cosmic rituals unfold. By surfacing “temple” out of a sculpture that incites divisive opinions about its beauty, Body Guarding is an example of how performance can shift perspectives about an everyday or contested space. Adeline Maxwell describes this as heterotopic, based on the work of Michel Foucault. Heterotopic means occuring in an abnormal place and heterotopia is a concept developed by Foucault to describe spaces that are other: transforming, contradictory, emitting an intensity. According to Maxwell, dance in public space, especially improvisational dance and other processes that disrupt the status quo of movement making, can turn a quotidian space into a heterotopia through an “ephemeral and symbolic reconstruction offered by [the] dance.”
Artists subvert the way a place was built by orchestrating gestures and developing ideas around the place that are counter to the traditional gestures usually performed there. Marc Auge’s non-place, a transitory space where pedestrians are meant to move through to get to another stop, can be associated with the use of a place for commercial and consumer purposes. The environment itself is depersonalized. Meaning exists in relation to capital and economy and there is a sense of criminalization for any activities that involve pause outside of material consumption. Commercial viability of the place relies on traveling through, going to shops and restaurants. Site-specific work of the 1960s and 1970s was driven by a response to this and was, sometimes, the embodiment or material manifestation of anti-consumerist ideologies. Dance and performance art today is still working in contrast to the corporate environment , asking travelers to stop and “be” for a moment. They exist outside of the speed in which commercial endeavors might take on, like the slow movement of Hollow Bones in Old Fourth Ward, performed by Zeitlin’s company Bautanzt Here. “The gesture of street-space dance constitutes a resistance form, not only by delegitimizing power-related institutions, but also by not contributing to their reproduction, thus generating liberated spaces where the creation has no meaningful debts or burdens.” Through engaging gaze, alternative conceptions of time, and embracing the unknown, performance art and dance in everyday space aims to deconstruct dominant power structures in the long term, and initiate radical social transformation.
Both artist and audience contribute to this reconstruction and transformation in ways of being, knowing, and doing when engaging in public performance. In public space, audiences become participant observers, with agency and autonomy. For Zeitlin, the distance between the columns and the sidewalk in Body Guarding was safe enough for audiences to feel unencumbered by requests to act. They were safe to stop and watch and leave when they wanted to. Audiences participate in varying levels with public art. We can migrate and precess with the artist(s), moving from space to space or traveling towards a destination, like an unexpected pilgrimage. We could build a structure with the performers, dance with them or eat Fruit Loops off a string attached to their nipple clamps. Participation can be the active engagement with the site and performance as witness, the “construction of meanings and interpretation” and “having a greater sense of ownership over the performances” Further, the people who encounter a public performance are likely to be flooded with their own past memories of the space. They have joined a congregation of strangers and they can see each other and look into each other’s eyes and maybe even feel brave enough to speak with one another. As an audience member, this is a much different experience from the metaphorical distance that one might experience in a theater, where the lights are off and there is a sense of invisibility and dare I say, privacy, in your experience of the performance.
an introduction To gaze, time-travel, and the unknown
In this research, I explore audience gaze, as well as how time and the unknown shows up in Atlanta-based public performance through the use of sense-making methodology and archival studies. Gaze, time-travel, and the unknown is given life by letters gathered in exchange with Jessica Caldas, Danielle Deadwyler, Bella Dorado, Brianna Heath, Angela Davis Johnson, Mary Grace Allerdice, and Nadya Zeitlin. Interviews with Spelman College professor Dr. Shay Welch, Flux Projects co-founder Louis Corrigan and Executive Director Anne Dennington, artists Flight of Swallows, Amanda Platner, and Jessica Blinkhorn, Central Atlanta Progress Chief Operating Officer Jennifer Ball, and Program Manager of the Atlanta Downtown Improvement District’s Outreach Team, Nakasha Shoyinka. I observed the works of Brianna Heath, Nadya Zeitlin and Flight of Swallows within this year, and experienced and observed Danielle Deadwyler’s work prior to beginning this research. As dancer, I performed on the lawn of the High Museum in Bella Dorado's work FAEST in 2017. In “notes on methods,” I briefly talk about my use of the term site-specific and my positionality as researcher. I also give background on sensemaking and letter-writing as social art practice, and some background on my employment of the body as archive.
In “gaze: artists’ adornment practices”, I talk about my impression of Hollow Bones, a performance by Nadya Zeitlin’s company Bautantz Here in Old Fourth Ward Park based on my observation of the work and our letter-writing exchange. I reflect on Jessica Blinkhorn’s use of the spectacle in her public performances around the United States and most recently along the BeltLine with an excerpt from our interview from March 2022. This section highlights these two artists, but it is clear that costuming and nuanced use of the audience's spectatorship is relevant to each artist's practice. In “time travel: performance as embodied mythology”, Danielle Deadwyler, Angela Davis Johnson, and Brianna Heath's works and words are viewed through the lens of myth-making as transgressive use of time, as well as the role of the erotic and pleasure in their creative processes. In “the great mother: debating public and private”, excerpted interviews with Nakasha Shoyinka and Jennifer Ball are used to reflect on the sharing of public space. Natural landscapes and the public and privateness of birthing and motherhood are discussed through the works and writings by Jessica Caldas, Bella Dorado and Mary Grace Allerdice. In “entering the unknown: the role of improvisation”, non-verbal communication and spontaneity as tools to approach challenges and the unexpected are discussed through the works of Amanda Platner and Flight of Swallows.
This work combines the above elements in an attempt to give language to the intangible exchange between Southern landscape, artist, and witness/spectator/audience member. The paper is designed to offer multiple ways in. There are images, transcribed interviews, personal reflections, and reading lists. By keeping some of the work in the artist's own words and adding to these pages regularly, I hope to emphasize a dynamic, chaotic, and ultimately erotic approach to research that involves staying in conversation. Like the embodied archive, this work is ever-evolving.
…that ability to be able to be quiet. I think you see so much in the world and you see so much in people without needing words. You can observe when you're quiet and there's a lot you can learn.
-Amanda Platner
photograph taken on BeltLine before Flight of Swallows performance
1. https://creativeloafing.com/content-170171-public-art-public-outcry
2. Letter from Nadya Zeitlin, February 2022
3. All direct quotes from Nadya in this introduction, as well as understanding of the motivation of her work came from our letter writing exchange.
4. Doors can Dance, 2017, Boiler Room, 2016
5. Victoria Hunter’s Model of Influence, 2015, Camille LeFevre’s variations on site-specificity, 2005, Miwon Kwon on site-responsiveness as meant to distinguish from site-specificity of the 1960s and 1970s.
6. Camille Lefevre, 2005
7. https://art.beltline.org/art/city-gate-dance-theater/
8. Camille Lefevre, 2005
9. I am considering the exchange of the words place and space based on foundational studies by Henri LeFebvre and Michel Foucault who are heavily cited in the works of other scholars I referenced for this research.
10. https://fluxprojects.org/productions/iman-person-waterlust/
11. Miwon, Kwon, 2002
12. Maxwell, pg. 279
13. Hunter, page 28
14. Melanie Kloetzel
15. Miwon, Kwon, 2002
16. Maxwell, page 283
17. From madison moore’s definition of Fabulous, Maxwell’s Street Space as Heterotopic Resistance and Katrinka Somdahl-Sands on the psychogeography of space
18. I, unfortunately, cannot remember the name of this performance or the artists. It was not public/outdoors (it was at Eyedrum Art and Music Gallery), but one of the most memorable participatory works I’ve experienced.
19. Witness as used in conversation with Dr. Shay Welch
20. Maxwell