Dances on Street Corners was a performance-journey that travelled with audiences through city streets for thirty minutes.

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The production was created during a residency at ONCA gallery in Brighton[1] and performed by a soloist (myself), wearing a red raincoat and carrying a white plastic, folding chair. The compositional structure of the performance included set and improvised scenes that were organised and configured in response to the topography of the local streets and were punctuated by travelling: walking, dancing, rolling and crawling across roads, down alleyways and in open areas, such as parking lots and wastelands.

 

Investigations into a potential mirroring between internally felt perceptions and external, physical construction of space, led me to consider the ways that dancing might enable me to authentically embody the city in my movement. To do this I first sought to establish choreographic approaches that circumvented my usual, habitual and conditioned responses to it, for example by, exploring the local area on my hands and knees or linking my movement to the rhythm and timing of a pelican crossing. Navigating urban spaces in this way, introduced choice-making as a conscious act that enabled me to deliberately move in alignment with, or against, the norms of the site. This notions was also considered in relation to choreographic methods that invited audiences to participate in the performances as embodied spectators engaged in a shared encounter unfolding between them, the dancer and the site.

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The significance of the practice to site-dance discourse is that it introduces the principle that in order to fully and coequally incorporate outdoor spaces in site-choreography, they must be considered from multiple perspectives and as agentive (Abrams, 1996,2010). Notions of wildness were key to how I negotiated this idea in practice and research into wildness exposed it as a relative term that describes action in the context of the what/where of behaviour and space; as unconditioned perception, untamed landscapes, and unpredictable actions. This was useful because it acknowledged the potential for interior perceptions and exterior (more-than-human) phenomena to be considered agentive to the ways that spaces are experienced and perceived.

 

[1] Dances on Street Corners premiered in Brighton in April 2016 then was performed at: Chichester University, Roehampton University, Bath Spa University, Coventry CDare, and in Portslade, Lewes and London between 2016-2019.