Site-specific Work Research Articles

The Affective Engagement of Dancers: The Case of Kitt Johnson and Her Site-Specific Work

The article investigates how dancers can actively shape and handle the ways they are affected throughout their artistic practices. To do so, we adopt a phenomenological-ethnographic approach, analysing the dance-artist Kitt Johnson's site-specific performance production called Mellemrum ('the space between spaces'). We put ethnographically based interview data in a dialectical interaction with the existing notions of affectivity and affective scaffolding — showing their usefulness, while also noting the need for the further notion of what we call affective engagement. This notion, we argue, is needed to account for how artists actively handle their affective involvements. Specifically, as we show, in Mellemrum the dancers deliberately and strategically juggle between (i) a self-affective engagement, (ii) an affective engagement with the environment (space and people), and(iii) an affective-aesthetic engagement with the choreography and artistic ideas of the performance.

Serra and Us

Abstract Yve-Alain Bois discusses and describes the many essays that October editors and contributors have written about Richard Serra, particularly Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Yve-Alain himself, Leah Dickerman (most recently), and Hal Foster (most abundantly). The article begins: “I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that no artist can be more immediately identified with October than Richard Serra, particularly during the journal's first decades. Several of its editors or editors-to-be wrote repeatedly about his work, in the journal and elsewhere, and he himself participated directly in the life of the publication via a lengthy interview, not to mention his unwavering financial support since issue 39 (Winter 1986). “In 1991, The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents appeared in the October book series; edited by Clara Weyergraf-Serra and Martha Buskirk, it offered nearly three hundred pages of documentation concerning the legal battle waged (and lost) by the artist to prevent the destruction by the American government of the site-specific work it had commissioned for Federal Plaza in New York City (installed in 1981, it was dismantled in 1989). Needless to say, the October gang came en bloc to defend the work at the public hearing (the testimonies of Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, Douglas Crimp, Benjamin Buchloh, and regular contributor Abigail Solomon-Godeau figure in the book). “In 2000, the first volume of the October Files appeared; edited by Hal Foster, it took Serra as its subject. Memorial tributes are an awkward genre in that they are almost inevitably nostalgic and take a narcissistic turn (“me and the great man”). But what if one were simply to commemorate the prolonged interaction of the journal's editors with Serra's work by chronologically recapitulating the various instances of their engagement? This will be done with pride, for sure, but also as a duty to forestall amnesia.”

Immersive Environment as a Tool for Changing Human-Centric Optic

The article is devoted to the scientific problem of theoretical elaboration and contextualization of an immersive environment implemented in the physical space of a gallery or museum, as well as a site-specific work, or in VR and AR, which work to change anthropocentric optics. The aim of the research is to identify the peculiarities of the formation of an immersive environment and the practice of creating VR and AR projects in Ukrainian contemporary art, to identify the work of Ukrainian artists, which takes place outside the country at the intersection of the latest ideas in European culture with a focus on the relationship between human and nature. The task is to study the theoretical foundations of the subjectivity of nature and the development of immersive environments, review and analysis of projects that use digital technologies to create immersion. The methodology of the study consists in theoretical and field researches at the intersection of eco-topics and immersive technologies and the development of author's experiments as part of the research "Analytical Instruments for Audio-Visual Translation of Metabolomics" merging genotype and environment regarding climate changes at Iméra — the Institute of Advanced Studies in Marseille. The main method is a comprehensive approach to highlight issues of the development of deep ecology, the theory of symbiosis, visual and photometric methods, analysis of concepts, spatial structure and artistic works. The peculiarities of creating an immersive environment in physical space were explored in the projects "Cosmogony", "Homage to Leonardo", "Garden of Divine Songs" after Hryhorii Skovoroda, "Homage to Matisse", "Gaia", "The Ocean", "Espace Ocean: Waters Come Into My Soul", "Ecocide", which analyzes the impact of the ongoing war on ecology, in order to be included into the national art discourse. The concept of "non-human agency" is concidered as an imperative of nature's subjectivity. The possibilities of molecular sonification in metabolomics were analyzed. A brief overview of the VR projects "Invasions 1.2.3", "Atmospheric Forest" and "First Day" and AR "Vegetable Kingdom, Vegetable Anarchy" is provided. Festivals OVNi in Nice, Scientifica #2 in Marseille, Ars Electronica in Linz, RIXC in Riga, UNESCO Media Art City in Karlsruhe and Venice Immersive are considered as platforms for the construction of "future civilization". The instrumentality of immersive environments for changing anthropocentric optics has been revealed.

‘It’s Not Because It’s Not There, That It Isn’t There’: Visibility and invisibility within Black flamenco performance

Since flamenco's inception, the art form has served as an act of resilience and resistance for marginalized peoples, and now, more than ever before, Black flamenco artists are gaining greater visibility, engaging with the form as embodied activism and interrogation of present and historical injustices. Pointing to the various techniques Black flamenco artists employ to interrogate notions of visibility and invisibility within their performances, this article draws from performance studies, dance studies and Africana studies to analyse the four short films that were created as work-in-progress investigations for London-born Black flamenco artist Yinka Esi Graves's The Disappearing Act (2023). Employing Tavia Nyong'o's theory of afro-fabulation, I examine the myriad ways the piece negotiates Black presence and camouflage within spaces haunted by Spain's role in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and looks to the archive to reach into the past, collapse time and imagine futures. In framing The Disappearing Act as an act of afro-fabulation that negotiates Black presence and visibility within flamenco through a trans-temporal engagement with archival information, I argue that the work refuses the invisibilization of Blackness and Black bodies in flamenco's past, present and future. Choreographic analysis and analytical movement description allow me to examine the ways Graves's site-specific work negotiates truth and untruth within what GerShun Avilez terms spatial justice as her physical body serves as trans-temporal marker of the violence associated with histories of chattel slavery. Finally, I highlight the recently formed Black Flamenco Network – Flamencos Unidos Africanos y Afro Descendientes (BFN – FUAAD) to illustrate how contemporary Black flamenco artists are seeking greater representation via community support and online, intergenerational collaboration.

On Site: Methods for Site-Specific Performance Creation by Stephan Koplowitz

Reviewed by: On Site: Methods for Site-Specific Performance Creation by Stephan Koplowitz KT Shorb They/Them On Site: Methods for Site-Specific Performance Creation. Stephan Koplowitz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022; pp. xvii + 303. Written by veteran site-specific dancer and choreographer Stephan Koplowitz, On Site: Methods for Site-Specific Performance Creation is part of a proliferation of books published in the last five years on live performance created site-specifically. With COVID-19 shutting down traditional theatres and recital halls, many artists and organizations pivoted to site-specific performance to keep artists and audiences safe while addressing a hunger for live and in-person cultural experiences. During quarantine, we saw a wide range of approaches to site-specificity, with varied levels of success. While the desire to maintain some kind of normalcy by continuing the ritual of in-person attendance has shown audiences to be exceedingly patient with technical and creative glitches, the ability to work adeptly with "site" has revealed itself to be a unique creative muscle—one that requires cultivation. Despite most traditional venues reopening, site-specific work addresses more needs now than ever. For many performing artists, to work "on site" is no longer an idiosyncratic approach limited to a select experimental few. It is now a skill required of every director, choreographer, and performance artist. On Site is a timely and detailed manual to guide those seeking to hone such a skill. A practical handbook for artists, On Site draws heavily from Koplowitz's three-decade long career as a choreographer, director, and producer. In addition, it includes information Koplowitz drew from his interviews with twenty-four artists, producers, and writers of site-specific work, including: Joanna Haigood, Debby Kajiyama, Noémie Lafrance, José Ome Navarrete Mazatl, Jennifer Monson, and Amara Tabor-Smith. Their words and documentation of their creative work appear in the book seamlessly alongside the author's. Koplowitz makes an argument for the heightened need for well-considered site-specific work in our current sociohistorical moment. He also notes that the history of site-specific work has been dominated by white practitioners and explicitly states one goal of the book is to provide tools for practitioners to diversify the field. Structured in six parts, On Site follows a loose production calendar, starting with conceptual definitions of "site-specific" through developing an idea, securing a site, preproduction, content generation, rehearsal, and concluding with performance and postproduction. Two parts explicate business considerations for producer-artists. Sections covering the actual genesis and process of creating content for site work are practice-as-research case studies from Koplowitz's most well-known works. Unlike a few other books that provide exercises for developing work (Phil Smith's Making Site-Specific Theatre and Performance and Mike Pearson's Site-Specific Performance, for example), Koplowitz instead offers examples with reflections and questions for artists to contemplate in relation to their own creative processes. A chapter on collaboration incorporates the voices of his interviewees and explores multiple modes of engaging with designers and design elements. Several chapters address various "challenges" that include performer and audience safety as well as ways to expand accessibility for collaborators and audiences who are both disabled and nondisabled. On Site is a strongly written, well-organized reference manual for the early to mid-career creator-producer. Koplowitz's clarity of prose interwoven with other well-respected artists' observations and advice makes On Site well poised to become a foundational practical text for future site-specific choreographers and directors. It offers concise information on potential pitfalls and ethical considerations for the artist. In addition, Koplowitz includes many philosophical and thoughtful asides on important contemporary subjects such as land use in colonized Indigenous territory, capacious notions of accessibility, and reflections on the democratizing and politically engaged effects of site work. Parts I and II offer introductory information on site work that could be useful in studio and criticism classes wishing to impart some basic concepts to students. Parts III and VI cover business and documentation issues valuable to all independent artists, not only those creating site-specific work. These parts could be assigned in arts management courses. Parts IV and V are useful to...

How to make site-specific art when sites themselves have histories

The term “site-specific” is generally used to describe art self-consciously made to exist in a certain place, effectively making the site a static background for the dynamism of art. If we accept this definition, then how are we to account for the fact that sites themselves have histories? This paper addresses this question by analyzing four performances by the Chicano/a collective Asco: Stations of the Cross, First Supper (After a Major Riot), Walking Mural, and Instant Mural. Whittier Boulevard carries a portion of El Camino Real, which once connected the Catholic missions of Alta California. We know Asco was aware of this fact because a member of Asco once “used the phrase ‘el camino surreal’…to describe Whittier Boulevard as the setting where everyday reality could quickly devolve into absurdist, excessive action.” Contextualizing these performances within the geography of colonial California challenges interpretations of Asco as merely opposing contemporaneous events like the Vietnam War and gentrification, whereas Asco had a more nuanced and expansive understanding of oppression linking the Latin American diaspora. Together, these performances show us how a group contests domesticating and folklorizing stereotypes. Although preexisting scholarship explains these gestures as “protest art,” situating them against Whittier Boulevard allows us to appreciate the radicality of Asco. By engaging with Catholic and muralist imagery, Asco draws parallels between their experience as racial minorities and the history of Latin American colonialism, which highlights both the composite nature of Chicano/a identity and how artists might make site-specific work when sites themselves have histories.

Applying Commemorative Museum Pedagogy to Public Music Studies

Applying Commemorative Museum Pedagogy to Public Music Studies

Leave Your Psychopathic Behaviour Outside the Playground

‘Leave your psychopathic behaviour outside this playground, there are small children here’, screamed a furious father at Malki Tesler, an Israeli artist staging a public intervention in the center of Tel Aviv’s Meir Park, where she peacefully sat, physically blocking the playground’s slide and preventing children from using the amenity. Tesler’s site-specific work is an antagonistic act that evolved into a participatory event, thereby blurring the lines between public art, performance, and activism. Predicated on a determined refusal to play and a public presentation of a vulnerable body, this act instigated an incredibly violent reaction by children and chaperones alike, and therefore exposed the fragility of the so-called Israeli social bond and the exclusionary practices that sustain it.

Our Land, Our People: reconsidering site-specificity in exile

ABSTRACT In 2011, artist Tenzing Rigdol transported over twenty-four tons of soil from Tibet into the exile Tibetan community of Dharamsala, India, for a temporary installation—a site-specific work—titled Our Land, Our People. The exile community walked on, held, and sometimes ingested the soil (a clear marker of the importance of this work to this particular audience), the soil signaling the would-be permanent home of the audience. Despite the increase in global site-specific works over the past decades, few of these projects have navigated the issue of temporality as it relates to audiences in exile communities. By evaluating Rigdol’s contribution through the lens of site-specificity as theorized by Miwon Kwon, this essay shows how Our Land, Our People expands the site-specific paradigm as it challenges notions of what makes art site specific; it proposes diasporic communities—communities with implied temporality and often tenuous relationships to their current homes—can serve as the foremost component of the work. I also propose Rigdol’s Our Land, Our People breaks with the conventional label “contemporary Tibetan art,” the phrase currently used to describe art created in Tibet and in exile spaces. Our Land, Our People is primarily in dialogue with one audience in particular—the exile community in Dharamsala.

Walking the Names: sensing presences and absences in a contested memory landscape

ABSTRACT Bath (UK) is a designated UNESCO World Heritage site. A National Lottery funded Landscape Partnership, Bathscape, seeks to articulate a vision for the city as a Landscape City. Walking the Names (2019–21) was a cycle of slow participatory walks reading the names of those who had died of poverty in the Bath Union Workhouse. The site-specific work took place in the burial ground of the nineteenth-century institution where the dead were buried in unmarked graves. The paper reviews the project in the context of the emergence of uneasy memories and silenced voices in the contested spaces of Bath’s memory landscape. A walking arts process is presented as slow activism, offering a participatory, corporeal, sensory engagement with landscape, power and memory. Drawing on the vision of the Landscape City, reflecting on the city as ‘wounded’, the essay explores a co-creative process of embodied critical re-memorialisation generating contemporary resonances.

Staging Trauma: Bodies in Shadow

Staging Trauma: Bodies in Shadow

A better Way to care for Long Term Care residents (LTC) in times of medical urgency: improving acute care for LTC residents

A better way to care for Long Term Care residents (LTC) in times of medical urgency: improving acute care for LTC residents. Leanna Wyer, Shawna Reid, Abraham Munene, Eddy Lang, Vivian Ewa, Heather Hair, Greta Cummings, Patrick McLane, Eldon Spackman, Peter Faris, Dominic Alaazi, Marian George, Jayna Holroyd-Leduc Background: Many LTC residents are transferred to Emergency Departments (EDs) with conditions that could be cared for in LTC, perhaps with additional support (e.g. Community Paramedics). Communication between sites and EDs has also been lacking. These lead to long lengths of stay in EDs, unnecessary use of resources, and sub-optimal health outcomes. Two INTERACT tools will support initial management of the concern at the LTC site. Then a Care and Referral Pathway will help facilitate needed conversations and optimal transfers between LTC and ED. Implementation: Beginning in April 2019, standalone LTC sites in Calgary and Central zones have been invited to participate. Using a randomized stepped wedge design, we implement at 4-5 new sites every 3 months, with a total goal of implementing this change in 40 sites in Calgary and 9 sites in the Central zone. Early engagement with site medical directors, LTC and ED physicians, and managers at RAAPID (Referral, Access, Advice, Placement, Information and Destination) call centre and Community Paramedics was instrumental in getting the project initiated. Quarterly meetings with a project steering committee assists with ongoing project details and risk/issues. Operational leads and unit managers meet with our Senior Practice Consultant to be introduced to the project. This is followed by an implementation session at which site staff are given information about the specific tools and pathway, potential barriers are mitigated, and a site implementation plan is developed. Quarterly reports using data from a project Tableau dashboard are prepared by our Research Coordinator and distributed to LTC sites for them to monitor their performance compared to zone averages on a number of performance indicators. Evaluation Methods: The project will be evaluated using both qualitative and quantitative measures. Key Performance Indicators include a reduction in transfers to EDs, improved satisfaction, and increased use of available resources. Residents, families and healthcare providers will participate in interviews or focus groups to assess their experiences with the interventions. Quantitative evaluation includes an economic analysis to determine how the interventions have led to cost savings within the healthcare system, as well as examination of the number transfers to ED, hospital admissions, calls to RAAPID, and visits by Community Paramedics. This will help to determine if the intervention has led to better resource utilization, increased satisfaction among residents and families, and improved patient and health system outcomes. At this stage of the project, no unintended consequences have been identified. Results: Currently, we have implemented at 6 of 11 Cohorts (26 sites). Data from April 2019 (start of project) until December 2020 show a downward trend in number of ED visits and hospital admissions, as well as increased utilization of RAAPID. Formal evaluation will be completed when the project ends in June 2022. Given the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to note that this may have an effect on our current trends and this will further be explored at the end of the project period. Anecdotal evidence is also beginning to indicate success of the right care being provided in the right place. Advice and Lessons Learned:1) Firstly, partnerships with key stakeholders are vital to ensure successful utilization of theLTC-ED Care and Referral pathway. Specifically, RAAPID is key to the facilitation ofcommunication between LTC sites and the EDs, and the services provided by CommunityParamedics allow many residents to remain at their LTC homes. 2) Secondly, good engagement with Site Medical Directors and Operational leads is needed toensure LTC staff and physicians are supported to use the interventions, and to care for theirresidents on site if appropriate. 3) Finally, tailored implementation strategies for each individual LTC site (and units in somecases) help mitigate site specific barriers, leverage strengths, and work within the site culture.

Pharmacopoeia: Illness narratives.

Pharmacopoeia: Illness narratives.

Improvisational Listening:Audiowalk – St Enda’s Park

This article discusses the affordance of headphone listening as a sensory experience within a responsive, interactive and improvisational site-specific audiowalk. The intention here is to elucidate how correlational and dialectic tensions between improvisation and listening have informed an approach to creating the geolocative project:Audiowalk – St Enda’s Park. Initially using the concept of soundwalking, as both a touchstone and a springboard, I explore some of the theoretical and dialogic underpinnings that have grounded this process-orientated work. The discussion is then extended into a phenomenological application of improvisational listening and walking in this form of somatic art, and particularly how this can impact the immersive experience for the participant/performer. The theoretical grounding and telos are explored in terms of the improvisational ‘flow’ state and how this accentuates and engenders an awareness of a soundscape through contextual and ethnographic aural histories. Critical reflection and analysis will be discussed throughout in attaining greater epistemological efficacy dealing with concepts of place and memory within this site-specific work.

A revolutionary monument: Reclaiming the Naṣb al-Ḥurrīyya in Baghdad

The monument that stands in Tahrir Square in Baghdad, known as Naṣb al-Ḥurrīyya (the Freedom Monument), is a site-specific work. Spatial in its conception from the very start, this monument came to exceed both primary historical event and iconographic representation to become the heart of the identity of the protest movement in the city of Baghdad, and to define its terrain. And it has now come to signify people’s rights across all of Iraq today. Commissioned soon after the 1958 revolution that overthrew the Hashemite Dynastic house, the Hurriyya monument has to do with the Event of revolution in the sense of event as defined in the philosophical writings of Alain Badiou, as a moment which emerges outside of, and changes the conditions and the frame of existence of its appearance. Thus, the Hurriyya monument commemorated historically the 14 July 1958 revolution in Iraq (the 14 Tammuz Revolution), yet it exceeded historical commemoration to signify the Evental character of a people’s revolution and its reclaiming of the city space.

Insecurity: Perils and Products of Theatres of the Real by Jenn Stephenson

Reviewed by: Insecurity: Perils and Products of Theatres of the Real by Jenn Stephenson Al Evangelista Insecurity: Perils and Products of Theatres of the Real. By Jenn Stephenson. University of Toronto Press, 2019. Cloth $77.00, eBook $77.00. viii + 286 pages. Jenn Stephenson’s Insecurity: Perils and Products of Theatres of the Real examines constructed boundaries of certainty and uncertainty in types of performances that western theatre and dance practitioners might label as site-specific, documentary, and auto-drama. These are a few of the genres that Stephenson describes as “Theatres of the Real” (7). With Canadian drama as her focus, Stephenson questions how theatrical elements comment on authenticity and make claims about what is real or fake, and how audiences perceive this. The categories themselves are of less concern to Stephenson; her primary question is what ontological and perceptual potential there might be when audiences are asked to encounter what they do not know. In performance, the question of what is “real” is constantly in flux. Therefore, theatrical work that contains “real” [End Page 211] words, “real” people, and “real” places become even more productive spaces for audiences to analyze the process of what “real” is and can be. Stephenson foregrounds her expertise in theatrical form alongside a broad but necessary range of epistemological, feminist, and perceptual underpinnings. Stephenson’s Introduction articulates the book’s core thesis that working with certainty and uncertainty in “Theatres of the Real” provides one way forward in our age of post-reality by building on performance scholars Ulrike Garde and Meg Mumford’s definition of “productive insecurity.” This phrase “describes the results of an affective technique that creates a performance rupture, when real or nonfictional elements are introduced to the theatrical frame, such that the audience experiences acute postdramatic indecidability about whether one is dealing with reality or fiction” (15). “Productive insecurity” thus frames the majority of Stephenson’s analysis of what “indecidability” can offer. The act of being able to evaluate and create meaning is the “productive insecurity” that Stephenson argues Theatres of the Real provide. The book then follows categorically grouped performances to explore a range of theatrical choices that best demonstrate these destabilizing strategies. The first three chapters analyze autobiographical performances, followed by a chapter on site-specific work, and finally, the last two chapters examine immersive theatre. The Coda situates the analyses from the book within our current cultural moment of “fake news.” In chapter 2, Stephenson examines the productive insecurity and autobiographical instability within the production Winners and Losers, James Long and Martin Youssef’s two-person scripted debate with moments of improvisation. By inviting questions of truth, Stephenson’s analysis of Winners and Losers questions the productiveness of uncertainty: if everything is a construction, whose constructed narrative do we, the viewers, trust? How do we determine validity? Living with uncertainty, Stephenson argues, provides a constant questioning of how things are valued, made, and seen. Therefore, performances that blur theatrical constructs with autobiographical constructs can highlight and examine flawed value systems or judgments, potentially teaching us generous and new ways to move forward. Chapter 3 provides three case studies of community-based documentary theatre, 100% Vancouver (Theatre Replacement after Rimini Protokoll), RARE (created by Judith Thompson and the ensemble), and Polyglotte (by Olivier Choinière), along with common pitfalls within the genre. Stephenson argues that “these projects are, as all autobiographical performance is, at some level, always doomed to failure” (89). However, for Stephenson this failure is productive: it highlights how audiences should be wary of believing any one portrayal since performance can easily essentialize identities. The failure, in this case, keeps the question and value making open, especially, and more importantly, when a topic is viewed as unfamiliar by the intended audience. As a practitioner of documentary-based and community-based [End Page 212] performance, it is encouraging to hear Stephenson’s critical consideration of the ethical responsibility in these genres, especially when considering categorization. Identities shift, some identities resist forms of categorization intentionally, and other identities are in constant negotiation with socio-historical constructs. Looking at verbatim and site-specific theatre in chapters 4 and 5, Stephenson explores the potential philosophical and contextual limits of...

Communicating Heritage Through Contemporary Art Based on Technologies: a Proposal for the Heritage Sites in the WARMEST project

An integrative and innovative communication model to enhance the knowledge, comprehension and delectation of cultural and natural heritage through technology-based contemporary art is described. By relating these two traditionally dissociated fields (heritage and contemporary art), a particular form of dialogue between them occurs and it is transferred to society within an emotional and intellectual discourse away from those merely informative. The heritage sites Alhambra Lions Court in Granada (Spain), Santa Croce’s second cloister in Florence (Italy) and Marzamemi underwater Wreck of Church (Italy) are under study in the framework of the European research and knowledge transfer project, WARMEST3. A strategy of communication based on pieces and actions of contemporary art will be proposed to set up a new frame in the diffusion of the cultural and natural legacy. That will encourage its preservation and, at the same time, will set up a new research line around site specific art work related to heritage sites communication.

Site-specific

Este artigo apresenta uma breve retrospectiva da linguagem artística conhecida como site-specific; também debate questões a respeito do o uso do vídeo e a presença (ou não) do espectador nesse tipo de trabalho; e como a câmera pode ser usada como um dispositivo de mediação entre o artista e o público. São analisados alguns dos trabalhos que considerados precursores desse estilo - surgido em meados da década de 1960 - e a ideia de como a remoção ou mudança de lugar de uma obra site-specific pode transformá-la, ou ainda, alterar o seu sentido. O texto também propõe uma aproximação entre arte e antropologia ao abordar que o lugar onde o trabalho artístico é realizado não necessariamente precisa ser um espaço físico. O artigo tem como ponto de partida o pensamento de autores como Miwon Kwon, Nike Kay, Phillipe Dubois e Hal Foster.

The Crucible

The Crucible

The biggest little ways toward access: thinking with disability in site-specific rhetorical work

ABSTRACTThis essay examines what thinking with disability brings to site-specific rhetorical work, which is work where rhetoricians gather to study location-related texts. Adapting the rhetorical triangle, I suggest that this work is fundamentally about the relationships between communicators, texts, and audiences, and my focus on the importance of including the perspectives of disabled and/or disability activists adds the “angle” of access. This “angle” requires reconsideration of how texts, speakers, and audiences connect and interact, as inaccessibility hinders and/or excludes some communicators, disregards some audiences, and renders some texts illegible. At the same time, thinking with disability in site-specific rhetorical work provides opportunities to support communities of disability scholars and scholarship, to create and implement accessible rhetorical methods, and to imagine inclusion as an iterative and fluid process. To examine these ideas, the essay shifts between articulating general principles and methodologies and offering specific examples from the Disability and Accessibility working group at the 2019 Rhetoric Society of America Project in Power, Place, and Publics at the University of Nevada, Reno.