The document discusses place- and space-specific performance practices. It contrasts place-specific performances, which engage with cultural and social meanings of a location, with space-specific performances, which engage more with the formal parameters of a space. The document references phenomenology and Gaston Bachelard's work "The Poetics of Space", which discusses how spaces like corners are experienced and can inspire site-specific performances. Examples are given of how contact improvisation techniques can be adapted for site-specific performances that treat the relationship between body and architecture as a "Pas d'Espace" or dance with space.

1. From Pas de Deux to
Pas d’Espace
Place- and Space-specific Performance Practices.

2. • 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

8. “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

9. “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)

14. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tjQQQO9QXA

25. • model
• journey
• collage

29. photo collage
interior design site-specific performance
• materials • movements
• structures • aesthetics
• lights • additional lights
• atmospheres • atmospheres
• scales • costumes
• sites • people/characters
• themes • themes/subjects
• colors • colors

30. In classical ballet the Pas de Deux
(French, “step/dance together”) is the
term for codified par tner work. In site-
specific performance the Pas d ’Espace
(French, “step/dance with space”) might be
the term for par tner work between body
and architecture?

33. Contact Improvisation
• landscape and explorer • fighting
• blind-folded • ivy
• manipulation • status
• penetrating gazes • zart bis hart (tender to
tough

34. CI techniques
• rolling or jumping point of contact
• counter balances
• giving and taking weight
• lifting and being lifted
• etc.

36. 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)

37. “Inhabited space transcends
geometrical space.” (Gaston Bachelard)

38. Develop a short site specific
performance for one of the
corners of this studio based on
Bachelard’s ideas in the “Poetics
of Space”.