When an art work is described as site-specific it means that it couldn’t be transferred to another place: the space it belongs to is a part of the overall experience. In site-specific work, the content of the art and its location work together to tell a story, and improvisation is often used to generate initial ideas.
Creative landforms © swam-scot, flickr.com
Several companies now specialise in site-specific art. Roam a collaboration between National Theatre of Scotland and Grid Iron, was performed in Edinburgh’s airport and Solstice River was a dance celebration of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis by Marylee Hardenbergh.
Inspire your pupils
Creating site-specific work encourages pupils to engage with spaces at a detailed level and is a great way to celebrate a place. Pupils can find this new way of working very inspiring, because the location offers starting-points for their imaginations.
With drama and dance the traditional distance between audience and performer will not exist in a site-specific performance, so pupils should consider how to use the audience as a part of the work itself. However, sometimes sites are not amenable to an audience. If this is the case then videoing performances can work well as an alternative.
Site-specific drama
If you’re working in school ask your pupils to think about places where certain events might happen. For example the toilets might be the location for some bullying or a car park could be the setting for an illicit meeting. The students need to spend time in their chosen places considering what features of the environment could influence the direction of their drama. Maybe a noisy door could alert a character to action going on elsewhere or the positioning of windows could allow a character to see something they weren’t meant to see.
The creation of the drama needs to happen within the space. After their initial thinking, pupils can script a short piece which uses the location it is performed in to help tell the story.
Human kinetics, New York © chashama, inc, flickr.com
Site-specific dance
The symbolic nature of dance lends itself well to site-specific work, where the place becomes part of the way the story is told. If you are able to take pupils out of the school grounds it is possible to really experiment with the way they perform. For example, large spaces such as parks can be used to inspire feelings of freedom, or perhaps loneliness. Street furniture – and everything used to divide or organise spaces – can become props or tools in creating dances. Venues with interesting histories and unusual layouts can form the basis for really exciting work. The key is to encourage the students to apply their imaginations to the possibilities offered by the particular site.
Site-specific art
With site-specific art work it’s possible for pupils to experiment with incorporating aspects of the real world into their art. For example, the way light falls on an area at particular times of the day could be used to great effect to create mood. Pupils could also be encouraged to consider how the materials and textures found in a particular place could form an intrinsic part of a design, or as in the case of Jim Lambie’s Zobop Stairs, pupils could use the shapes of buildings to help them create something unique.
