"Hunter offers a series of interpretations for these interactions between bodies and environments from the perspective of the moving body. ... Hunter's admiration for new materialism is a defining characteristic of her book. ... Hunter's wide-ranging analysis marks a welcome contribution to a challenging set of conversations." (Lucy Weir, Studies in Costume & Performance, Vol. 7 (1), 2022)
1 Introduction
2 Material Structures: Bodies and Sites
3 Arterial Routes: Cityscapes and Urban Flows
4 Sites of Impermanence and Endurance: Weathering, Ageing and Decay
5 Home: Interiority and Intimacy
6 Subterranean Spaces: Embodiment, Excavation and Deep Time
7 Wide Open Spaces: Expansion, Projection and Slow Progress
8 Watery Bodies and Watery Sites: Immersion and Porosity
9 Conclusion: Enmeshments and Imaginaries
Victoria Hunter is a Practitioner-Researcher and Reader in Site Dance and Choreography at the University of Chichester, UK. Her work explores site dance, materiality and corporeal engagements with space, place and lived environments. She is co-author of (Re) Positioning Site Dance: Local Acts, Global Themes (2019) with Melanie Kloetzel and Karen Barbour, and editor of Moving Sites: Investigating Site-Specific Dance Performance (2015).
How does the moving, dancing body engage with the materials, textures, atmospheres, and affects of the sites through which we move and in which we live, work and play? How might embodied movement practice explore some of these relations and bring us closer to the complexities of sites and lived environments?
This book brings together perspectives from site dance, phenomenology, and new materialism to explore and develop how ‘site-based body practice’ can be employed to explore synergies between material bodies and material sites. Employing practice-as-research strategies, scores, tasks and exercises the book presents a number of suggestions for engaging with sites through the moving body and offers critical reflection on the potential enmeshments and entanglements that emerge as a result. The theoretical discussions and practical explorations presented will appeal to researchers, movement practitioners, artists, academics and individuals interested in exploring their lived environments through the moving body and the entangled human-nonhuman relations that emerge as a result.