WELCOME

When the Covid pandemic brought an end to Michael’s 20-year career as a dancer in a company, we bought a drone and began to experiment with location-based movement in the vast open spaces of Michigan, where we were isolating during the pandemic. Since then, we have collaborated with local casts, participants in locations across the US and in Europe, to make a series of site-specific performance pieces.

Site-Specific Dances was born as an investigation in the synthesis of performance and place - a new type of a ‘realist gesamtkunstwerk’ where the narrative is the site itself. In each location, we collaborate with a local cast of dancers, community leaders, and experts in their field to create a unique project. The process and performances are filmed and edited into a series of multichannel performance installations.

Somehow, all the stars have aligned to allow us to launch the project at the Paul Taylor Dance studios in New York this weekend, April 6-8, 2023. The show includes a 16-musician distributed chamber orchestra, live dance, and immersive video that shows our location-based work - a “performanceexhibition” created in collaboration with an amazing local crew of musicians and dancers.

The young composers we have had the privilege to work with (Darian Donovan Thomas, Polina Nazaykinskaya, Emma O’Halloran, Dmitry Selipanov and Konstantin Soukhovetski) are all rising stars, in their own right.

This program is a ‘proof of concept’ presentation, and showcases the types of projects we are interested in, the methodologies we have developed over the last three years, and a hint at what the future might hold. Thank you for being here to take this first step with us as we launch.

Sincerely

Michael Spencer Phillips + Dino Kiratzidis Co-founders and Directors