From Pas de Deux

to Pas d’Espace
Place- and Space-specific Performance
Practices.
• place-specific vs. space-specific: “Boxed”
(performance by Sevens Sisters Group)

• Interior Design and Landscape Architecture

as site-specific practices

• Pas d’Espace - Duet with Space

• phenomenology, Gaston Bachelard
• “The Poetics of Space”: Corners
• choreographic task
“What we might call ‘space-
specific’ performances engage
with formal parameters; while
what we might call ‘place-specific’
performances engage with
cultural and social meanings.”
Source: Performance Studies International. Site-Specific Performance
“Space lays down the law
because it implies a certain order
[...] Space commands bodies,
prescribing or proscribing
gestures, routes and distances to
be covered.”
(Henry Lefebvre, The Production of Space)
The Production of Space)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tjQQQO9QXA
• model
• journey
• collage
photo collage
interior design site-specific
performance
site-specific performance
• materials • movements
site-specific performance

• structures • aesthetics
• lights • additional lights
• atmospheres • atmospheres
• scales • costumes
• sites • people/characters
• themes • themes/subjects
• colors • colors
In classical ballet the Pas de Deux
(French, “step/dance together”) is the
term for codified partner work. In site-
specific performance the Pas d’Espace
(French, “step/dance with space”) might
be the term for partner work between
body and architecture?
Contact Improvisation
landscape and explorer
•
blind-folded
•
manipulation
•
penetrating gazes
•
fighting
•
ivy
•
status
•
zart bis hart (tender to tough
•
CI techniques
• rolling or jumping point of contact
• counter balances
• giving and taking weight
• lifting and being lifted
• etc.
The discipline of phenomenology may be defined
initially as the study of structures of experience, or
consciousness. Literally, phenomenology is the
study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or
things as they appear in our experience, or the
ways we experience things, thus the meanings
things have in our experience.
Source: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/ (Retrieved 20/02/2010)

(Retrieved 20/02/2010)

(Retrieved 20/02/2010)
“Inhabited space
transcends geometrical
space.” (Gaston Bachelard)
Develop a short site
specific performance for
one of the corners of this
studio based on
Bachelard’s ideas in the
“Poetics of Space”.