PLACE/MAKING is a site-specific choreography and performance workshop that introduces skills and practices for site-responsive and site-responsible dance. As methodology, creative placemaking is applied artmaking in which process and production aims to build awareness, understanding, connection, and community amongst artists and audiences with the immediate landscape and its lineages and legacies, past and present. It is a practice of putting place, people, and story on the record. The renaissance of site-specific, site-adaptable, installation, immersive, participatory, and interventional dance is real, and it dually challenges and engages existing models and meanings for dance-making and directing, as well as for the very training of the professional and pre-professional performer.

What is the practice, purpose, and potential of performance beyond the traditional proscenium? How does the meaning of choreography operate and expand as its format alters and transforms? How does the performer properly exercise and prepare themselves to address their work in new and different surroundings and durations? What are the ethics of place-based performance? Who and what greater, underlying social narratives and commentaries are being amplified and told? Should be told? How?

This workshop series will engage participants in the very fundamentals of site-sympathetic movement invention alongside site-specific research and responsibilities, and direction for professional-level strategic planning as the workshop will culminate in the self-made production of a site-specific public performance to take place in Lucca.