Method Disorder. Three Questions Raised by Site Dance to Dance Aesthetics Studies
Résumé
For a dance historian or a dance critic, site dance choreography represents a number of challenges. If we are previously used to analysing movement, dance forms, or dance compositions on a stage inside the theatre building, the frameworks of our analysis or the critical tools required need to be reconsidered for choreography taking place outside of theatre spaces. First of all, the presumed neutrality of the theatre building (which is off course a subterfuge) is replaced by dance performance work that proposes an overt connection to a particular context. The dance critics who is not a sociologist, an urbanist, nor a geographer is therefore confronted with the difficulty of not only describing a dance form and its abilities to represent or to symbolise, but also to describe the place where the site choreography occurs and to reflect on how it engages with a certain space and its (social, geographic, historical, architectural…) context.
Further difficulties also increase in examples of dance practice in which the choreographic artwork tends towards a scarcity of dance itself. This example is only one of the difficulties the dance critic could encounter. This article will propose and explore some of these questions that Site Dance presents for Dance Analysis.