Decolonizing Site-Specific Performance Methodologies: Preliminary Steps

Abstract

As viral contagions, pandemic lockdowns and technological innovations transform daily routines, the relationship between art and public space changes as well. Through a long-term investigative and practice-based process that pairs the analytical frames of landscape architecture and site dance praxis, the author reconsiders what it might mean to create place-based performance in urban public spaces today. Beginning with a deconstruction of the earliest anthology addressing site dance, Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces, the article joins findings from recent site-specific performance theory with queer and postcolonial phenomenology to re-examine site-specific performance’s ethical premise of ‘attending to place’ in a decolonizing context. Highly cognizant of the limitations and dangers of her own aspiration to decolonize the field, particularly from her perspective as a White settler, the author charts some preliminary steps through a revised methodological praxis, critical experiential archaeology. Yet, while the author finds the praxis’ two-pronged approach – involving both discursive research (with critical considerations of background and positionality) and phenomenological research (via a process called decolonial flânerie) – helpful as a scaffolding for decolonizing place-based practices, the author cautions that such a scaffolding is inherently inadequate without a more profound diversification of the site performance field.