The popularity of vertical dance performance is growing, with companies such as Gravity & Levity and Wired based in the UK, and the creation of the Vertical Dance Forum with its global membership leading the way. While it may be considered to fall within the spectacular, this paper argues for the role of vertical dance as a form of knowledge of space, environment and architecture.

“Humans are inextricably linked by their potential and what the environment affords them to do (Gibson 1966). Environmental textures, structures and patterns are affordances.” Batson & Wilson, 2014:177. This paper argues that vertical dance offers opportunities to engage with these affordances in ways that have not been previously explored. The moving body interacting with and using buildings, walls or structures developing a new sense of the site and its relationships with its surroundings. This process in turn allowing for fresh perspectives and narratives to be introduced to the built environment.

Through an analysis of selected vertical dance performances, interviews with dancers as well as audience responses, this paper explores the potential of vertical dance to impart new knowledge of site through embodied learning and kinesthetic empathy. The role of vision and the haptic will be discussed (Deleuze 1981, Massumi 2002) in relation to the ways in which movement and dance in (or on) site might contribute to a scenographic experience of the built environment. The paper argues that as place orientation (Hann 2018), vertical dance may be considered as a scenographic strategy. The importance of movement to this strategy as a processual way of being in and with the world, is articulated as “co-constitutive entanglements of body and world” (Paterson, 2007:16) resonating with Doreen Massey’s stance that space shouldn’t be considered “static, closed, immobile” (2005:18), instead proposing a way of knowing that is dynamic and full of potential.