This PhD thesis reflects on the choreographic processes employed to investigate interior/exterior landscape dialogues from a practitioner-researcher perspective in the making of five site-situated productions: Tandem Ballet (2012), Everyday Hero (2013), Dances on Street Corners (2016), Children’s Games (2019), Souvenir (2020), and two dance for camera works-in-progress, (Dances with) Clouds, Gate and Tree (2020) and Sketches in Reel Time (2023).

As a collection, these published works demonstrate the evolution of site-dance methods that aim to cultivate embodied connections between dancers’ interior perceptions and exterior urban and rural spaces as an interior/exterior landscape dialogue. The term interior/exterior landscape dialogue is employed throughout the thesis to denote the quality of dialogic exchange that is developed through improvisational, compositional and performative dance processes. These processes are discussed and reflected upon in regard to critical methodologies from a range of theoretical discourses including phenomenology, spatial theory and anthropology; whilst also referencing selected examples from professional dance, visual art and film practices.

A central argument of the thesis is that the published works demonstrate ways to engage and employ the agentive potential of a selected site as a dynamic aspect of choreographic form. To do this, the research develops practical methods for examining, exploring and negotiating the unconditioned, unpredictable, wildness of a site by working with correspondences that de-hierarchise body-site relations. This approach is considered as responsive to the situation of the site at the time of performance, and thus has led me to describe it via the term ‘site-situated’.

The key contribution of the research is made through the development of practical methods that cultivate body-site reciprocity in dancers with varying levels of experience and physicality. The knowledge gained and the creative approaches discussed, are of particular value to site-dance practitioners, contemporary choreographers, and dance researchers and educators. Furthermore, the research offers innovations in the presentation of models of good-practice whilst generating new understandings and readings of space and place that include multiple and more-than-human perspectives. Thus, more broadly, the research contributes new ways of experiencing and perceiving human-environment relations that are also relevant to the fields of human geography, architecture, ecology and environmental studies.