[Eng] Vernacular Mapping: Site-Dance and Embodied Urban Cartographies 民間製圖：環境舞蹈與具現化城市製圖學

Text: Victoria Hunter

*This article was originally published in the Choreographic Practises. Hunter, V. (2019),‘Vernacular mapping: Site dance and embodied urban cartographies’, Choreographic Practices, 10:1, pp. 127–44, doi: 10.1386/chor.10.1.127_1

All photos are of Bodies in Urban Spaces, choreographed by Willi Dorner (Macau, 2025).

Photos: Gonçalo Lobo Pinheiro (Provided by Babel Cultural Organization)

Introduction

In this article I explore the potential of site-based dance and performance to influence and inform subjective, cartographic processes of connecting and situating oneself in urban locations. ‘Vernacular Mapping’ is explored as a process by which subjective urban experiences, trajectories and associations are mapped by individuals and retained and developed as cartographic tools through which we navigate and negotiate lived environments. The concept stems from critical geography and non-representational theory and proposes a progressive, contemporary approach in which individual routes, trajectories and vectors of mobility challenge the ‘representational certitude of cartography’ (Gerlach 2013:1). From this perspective I consider how encounters with site-based dance and performance might inform vernacular mapping processes and impact subjective-site relations.

Through habitual, repetitive and embodied movement patterns, our quotidian interactions with everyday materiality, geography and the spatial flow of urban landscapes develop over time. Progressively, an embodied sense of cartography is fostered. Through lived experience we become attuned to and immersed within particular cityscapes, forging a sense of connection between self and site in which urban landmarks, preferred routes, memories and associations are embedded. Tim Etchells observes, ‘...the city is a model of dynamic relativism, a space where everything means more than one thing – a nondescript doorway, invisible for some, is for others the gate to a magical garden, a place of work, worship or otherwise’ (in Harvie 2009: xii). This perspective illustrates how concrete sites laid out by urban planners and regulated by civic and social systems can be interpreted and conceived in a myriad of ways and navigated according to individual desires and needs.

I am interested here both in site dance and also the embodied ‘mapping’ of urban space accrued through everyday choreographies comprised of repeated movement patterns and pathways that metaphorically ‘wear a groove’ into perceptions of the urban landscape. As choreographer and urban walker Megan Nicely writes:

…the city presents structural limitations that invoke a multitude of small choices, redirections, manipulations, modulations, and at times a sense of liberation. The overall environment through which my paths chart a unique map is a choreography not just through the city but a process by which both my body and that of the city provisionally take form. The materiality of the physical body and the city’s architecture work together to contain, make sense of, and think beyond what is initially apparent.

(2015:1)

Reflecting on how such embodied mapping processes are amplified and applied in site-specific performance I draw on a number of site dance examples that enact the concept of vernacular mapping through performative means. My observation of these works is informed by Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis (2004) as I consider processes through which site-specific performance might expose and reinforce existing subjective connections to place invoked through repetition and rhythmic experiences of everyday life whilst proposing new associations along the way.

Vernacular Mapping

Academic discourse on vernacular mapping has emerged through developments in the area of critical cartography. As an approach to mapping, it shares some characteristics with narrative cartography or ‘story mapping’, which encompasses ‘forms of spatial expressions that embody our personal experiences of the environment and contribute to creating a deep understanding of places’ (Caquard 2011: 136).

In practical terms, vernacular mapping relates to the often democratic, home-grown use of web-based Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools such as Open Street Maps in which volunteered geographic information produces an alternative mapping of a particular place, location or territory. Often associated with terms such as ‘fuzzy’ or ‘vague’ (Hollenstein and Purves 2010) vernacular geography also encompasses the processual, everyday geographical terminology used by individuals and groups to relationally designate and describe areas, places and landmarks through terms such as ‘down town’, going ‘into town’, ‘up North’ or other such labels. Waters and Evans observe:

These vernacular geographical terms are not simply indicative – they often represent psychogeographical areas in which we constrain our activities, and they convey to members of our socio-linguistic community that this constraint should be added to their shared knowledge and acted upon.

(2003: 1)

In a similar manner, Jen Southern and Chris Speed’s discussion of their Comob Net mobile phone app provides a useful example of a simple form of Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking device. In their chapter Sharing Occasions at a Distance: the different dimensions of comobility (2015) they discuss the communicative app that enables groups or family members to map their respective journeys across space and time. The Comob Net app produces a live form of mapping in which participants can see in real time where members are situated, thereby producing a form of co-presence – and ‘comobility’ as Southern (2012) calls it – in which members may feel a sense of connectivity and proximity despite being miles apart:

Comobility uses a geographical location and a mutual sense of emplacement to produce a sense of live and imagined connection at a distance, and is related to the traditional postcard in which the image, the postmark and the address indicate the specific locations of sender and receiver, and are used for reciprocal imagining of another person at a distance.

(Southern and Speed in Hunter, 2015: 137)

Mobile apps such as this facilitate vernacular mapping by enabling subjective mapping processes to emerge and evolve according to the needs and interests of the user. Considered here as an extended form of site-based choreographic practice, such applications enable us to consider the movement of bodies in relation to one another across both virtual and real time space and raise questions about the fixity or stability of locations or sites. Hierarchical processes and cartographic ‘truths’ are challenged through such contemporary approaches that move away from ‘a representational to a processual understanding of maps’ (Kitchin, Gleeson and Dodds, 2013:495). These approaches facilitate improvised, spontaneous and subjective mappings to occur in ways that valorise individual autonomy and authorship over metanarratives and nation-state building approaches to cartographic representation.

Urban traversals, route-takings and personalised orientation strategies are rarely published or shared overtly (aside from, perhaps when we are asked for directions); instead, they reside in the body-self of the experiencer in a purely ontological domain. This form of mapping is, in a sense, informed by a porous map informed by our movement over, through and around a particular place or locale. It is subject to change as we accrue information, memories and experiences as we move along through time and space. Through repeated practice and habitual action, such strategies translate into intra-subjective dialogues in which we name, claim, traverse and rehearse pathways and routes and inhabit space and place (processes which are closely aligned to those outlined in the work of De Certeau, 1984 and Bachelard 1994, for example). These intra-subjective dialogues – in which the body-self communicates and processes spatial information and locational awareness informed by a myriad of architectural, environmental, sensory and material affordances – contributes to the construction of a number of vernacular maps that we hold within us and employ when required.

Yet, the term ‘vernacular’ and its etymological route is somewhat problematic, exacerbated through its application in certain academic discourses that subordinate the customs, languages and traditions of indigenous or localised cultures. Discussing the historicised positioning of vernacular architecture and its subsequent re-evaluation within academic discourse Henry Glassie observes;

The term, I repeat, marks the transition from the unknown to the known: we call buildings “vernacular” because they embody values alien to those cherished in the academy. When we called buildings “folk,” the implication was that they countered in commonness and tradition the pretense and progress that dominate simple academic schemes. Folk buildings contained a different virtue. The study of vernacular architecture, through its urge toward the comprehensive, accommodates cultural diversity. It welcomes the neglected into study in order to acknowledge the reality of difference and conflict.

(2000:20)

Glassie’s remarks point to a type of vernacular perspective arising from embodied practices encompassed within personalised, self-selected or self-identified groupings (i.e. cyclists, pedestrians and parkourists). These groups generate their own conditions of use for their vernacular mapping systems as they decide what is important or significant to their needs and design their collaborative maps accordingly. From this perspective, the term vernacular is positioned as one that denotes autonomous and mildly subversive processes that facilitate individual processes of urban engagement and navigation. In this sense, the term vernacular facilitates the valorizing of localized, self-organised and subjectively constructed knowledges and experience. As opposed to a subordinated perspective, it encompasses and empowers a set of practices that resist dominant modes of mapping and demarcation and creates a discursive and pragmatic space in which subjective cartographies can be shared. The significant features, routes and flows of particular places and spaces may, as a result become many and varied as different versions of familiar terrains become dispersed through word of mouth and through online platforms and apps that enable vernacular maps to be shared more widely.

Practices and metaphors of mapping and navigating terrains are frequently employed in site-based dance and performance discourse and often feature as key creative and discursive strategies in the making and dissemination of such work. The mixed-media dance project 50 Steps, Dancing the Pennine Way (2015), for example, produced a re-mapping of the Pennine-Way walk through a series of performance responses that occurred along the route and reflected the artists’ impressions of their journeys and experiences.[1] Carol Brown’s discussion of her ambulatory site-dance work 1000 Lovers (2013), performed around Auckland’s waterfront in Aotearoa New Zealand, provides an in-depth account of her research and creative process in which notions of mapping, land contestation and the negation of indigenous perspectives informed the developing performance work.[2] Discussing the creative process she describes a task that responded to the stories, histories and myths gathered from waterfront workers and local residents:

Movement research began with a corporeal mapping, starting with the eyes and a sense of the fish spine. What do eels’ eyes see? How do they look as they probe the shady banks of the local streams?

(Brown, in Hunter 2015:214).

For the field of site-dance and choreography, I find it useful here to identify two distinct type of mapping process that I view as significant and frequently applied within this form of dance making. The first form of mapping or site-scoping involves a conscious strategy for facilitating body-site engagement. It encompasses strategies such as ‘mapping’ out or identifying significant site features or consciously mapping the body onto the topographical textures, contours and materials of a site’s surfaces and components. In my own site-based movement research I have used this notion of mapping sites onto bodies and bodies onto sites. Working with students or workshop participants I often employ a particular score-based task that aims to increase participants’ awareness of body-site relationships through embodied movement inquiry that concurrently measures and maps site-body dimensions and relations:

Find a site/space that interests you.

Walk around the space, notice its lines, contours, shapes and dimensions.

Take time to acknowledge the proportions of the site

How do the site’s dimensions and proportions resonate with the dimensions of the body?

How might we measure and ‘map’ this space through the body?

How many paces between x and y?

How many arm spans between here and there?

Explore how the measuring potential of arms, legs, torso, fingers, head and rib cage might enable you to cover this space and map it through your physical proportions.

Explore measuring this site through the body, allow a dialogue to develop.

(V. Hunter, Site-Dance workshop score, 2011)[3]

This approach might support the generation of movement content to be formed into choreographed performance material at a later stage, or it might facilitate the exploration of body-site relations in environmentally based dance as exemplified in the work of artists such as Andrea Olsen, Sally-Ann Ness and Paula Kramer.

The second form of mapping involves the application of cartographic systems or conventions as tools to facilitate ambulatory style performance works through urban spaces. This second form, in which audiences and performers discover hidden secrets or are offered a glimpse of sites through new lenses, can be witnessed in Carolyn Deby’s Urbanflows (You Were Here) (2017) that explored prominent sites around Coventry city centre and transported audience members through the streets on foot and in taxis.[4] Ambulatory techniques also feature prominently within the work of Minneapolis based Body Cartography Project; in their work Action Movie (2016), choreographed and performed by Olive Bieringa, audiences were invited to engage in a one-to-one performance tour as Bieringa interacted with the urban environment with the aim to produce a live, improvised action movie experience.

More recently, this type of work has incorporated the use of audio headsets to enhance the mapping and re-mapping process as encountered in Gabriele Reuter and Mattef Kuhlmey’s work Hidden Traces (2016) that explored the histories and associated narratives of the streets and buildings surrounding The Place theatre in London. Charlotte Spencer’s Is This a Waste Land? (London, 2017) helped to extend the scope of headphone performance by introducing tasks into the soundtrack that directed audience members to engage in manual manipulations of objects and materials in abandoned peri-urban wastelands; in this work, individuals re-mapped the sites and constructed the performance through individual and collective acts.

In addition to these forms of mapping I propose a third type of ‘affective mapping’ or re-inscription that emerges from mapping processes embedded within performance works. Arising from our encounter as audience members, this affective mapping re-inscribes our relationship to urban spaces. Through embodied affect, subjective, habitual or imagined mappings of particular (and familiar) sites become overlaid with a palimpsestic resonance that endures beyond the physical and temporal performance encounter. My proposition aligns with Sarah Rubidge and Gretchen Schiller’s discussion of the ‘residual consequences and impact’ of place-based performance experiences conceived as acts of ‘choreographic dwelling’ in which ‘the traces of our movement experiences are processes that linger in a state of continual transformation in our bodies’ (2014: 3). In this type of ‘affective mapping’ pre-existing embodied, vernacular maps become infused with the affective qualities of the performance event and stay with us through echoes and associative traces residing on a corporeal level. These traces potentially emerge during subsequent visits to and engagements with sites and infuse them with past resonances of  performance-derived mappings.

Rhythm and Repetition

Expanding on the idea of corporeal and experiential mapping, Henri Lefebvre’s exploration of the production of space provides a useful proposition here as he speaks from an inherently embodied perspective. In Rhythmanalysis (2004), he argues for the increased study of urban rhythms as a key component in understanding how individuals engage with the world. For Lefebvre, the rhythmanalyst is essentially immersed both within her body and the wider world in which she operates.

Through becoming aware of the various rhythms, energies and spatial flows that occur within an urban environment, an understanding of the affect of these elements upon individual experience develops and a sense perhaps of our immersion within a particular rhythmic system emerges:

The interaction of diverse, repetitive and different rhythms animates, as one says, the street and the neighbourhood. The linear which is to say, in short, succession, consists of journeys to and fro: it combines with the cyclical, the moments of long intervals. The cyclical is social organisation manifesting itself. The linear is the daily grind, the routine, therefore the perpetual, made up of chance encounters.

 (Lefebvre, 2004: 30)

In this observation Lefebvre alludes to the different organising systems of rhythmic life and behaviour from the cyclical and socially dictated through to the organisation of the working day. Rush hours and lunch hours relate to the linear and often relentless phenomenon of perpetual movement and motion as people, cars and buses journey between a and b.

Through repetition, practice and refinement, our routes through and around places are often infused with a compulsion for efficiency, the quickest way to…, the shortest route…, the short cut, (desire lines or paths present a pertinent illustration of this). Thus, depending on the context, mapping practices may be inextricably linked to capitalist-informed spatial practices and hegemonic measures of time that demand our presence in a particular place at a specified hour. This conception of the landscape/city-scape in which journeying acts occur with their requirement to get from A to B in a specified time can be equated to Tim Ingold’s notion of taskscape in which he defines a task as a ‘constitutive act of dwelling’ (2000:195). From this perspective, through human agency and practice, individuals become participants within the environment and, through working-away at particular tasks, (i.e. navigating and journeying) foster a sense of physically investing and dwelling in environments. The repetition of urban actions, journeys, rituals and rhythms and the often, relentless nature of individually repeated acts is central to Lefebvre’s conception of rhythmanalysis and emerges as a process through which human-urban connectivity unfolds.

Writing on place, memory and connectivity Elisabeth Roberts observes that a ‘sedimentation of place’ (2012: 99) occurs for the experiencer through repeated acts and consecutive returns to specific places. Referring to the writing of cultural geographer Paul Connerton (1989), Roberts asserts, ‘one way that place and memory are interlaced is through situated ‘bodily repetition and the intensification of every-day acts’ (2012:99). Interestingly however, Lefebvre identifies that, by its very nature, repetition produces difference; for example, we can never accurately repeat an act, event or utterance in exactly the same manner as the initial or previous event. Thus, while repetition of routes, journey and pathways through cityscapes seems the same, what Lefebvre identifies is that the act of repetition operates not as an exact replication but as an act of variance with slight degrees of deviation from the original act and the introduction of difference remains a significant component of the repetition. Habitual and repetitive acts of navigation and journeying though, across and around urban spaces carry value for the individual because of the manifestation of difference. Through repetition we return to and re-encounter space and place and, by imperceptible physical shifts en-route (a few degrees to the left or right perhaps), we encounter something new about the route or the places we encounter en-route. Difference can occur in both mundane and extreme ways; we are surprised, for example, when routes are barred and diverted and relieved and comforted when maintenance work is completed and our route returns to normal. Equally, difference can be invoked through changes in the weather, time of day, and through individual, subjective attitudes and attunements. Through this subtle, habitual process of ‘mapping’ familiar routes and territories invoked through repetition, our map of the urban environment is deepened and developed through each shift of difference; we begin to ‘wear a groove’ into this place and come to know it well.

Site-dance in urban locations can amplify these repetitive acts and draw attention to the rhythms of everyday life and, in doing so mirror subjective acts of vernacular mapping. I draw attention here to three works that employ repetition as a key performance strategy and reflect repetitive practices contained within everyday urban encounters. Making this connection, I consider how, through repetition of content, form, action and structure, site dance might contribute to vernacular mapping processes and embodied accounts of particular sites. The first work, Stephan Koplowitz: Red Line Time was performed in April 2013 in Los Angeles:

Through an ensemble of eight performers, Stephan Koplowitz: Red Line Time utilizes the diverse spaces at each individual station along the METRO Red Line to create a durational, and long distance performance that is in synch with the Metro Red Line itself in both space and time. Following the Metro Red Line trains’ schedule, Stephan Koplowitz: Red Line Time is performed both above ground at the metro entrance level, and underground at various stations’ mezzanine level ticketing plazas. The entire event is designed to match the ebb and flow of the commuting public, and to take place within the strict schedule of the trains. In doing so, Stephan Koplowitz: Red Line Time transforms the Metro Red Line into a long distance performative space and invites the public to discover and re-discover a vital transportation artery of Los Angeles.

 (Debra Levine 2013, online)

Reviewing the work for the L.A Times, arts critic Laura Bleiberg observed:

Koplowitz’s “Red Line Time” played with reference points of public space and of riding the subway -- a daily activity for some, a totally foreign means of transportation to others. His five minutes of core choreography for eight dancers changed subtly at each of the 14 stations. The playful leaps, weaving patterns and changing geometric shapes became familiar as this nearly four-hour adventure progressed. (The event could be joined or abandoned at any point.)

(2013, online)

Extending the notion of vernacular mapping to a site-dance context, I propose that site-specific performance events of this nature can foster an individual’s connection with places through the performative event in which a relationship of ‘playful familiarity’ is nurtured and urban sites are re-inscribed. Willi Dorner’s Bodies in Urban Spaces (2007 and on-going) provides a second example, this work (pictured) has been successfully received by audiences and arts programmers across the globe and creates a clear dialogue between bodies and urban sites. Carolyn Jenkins for Pavilion Dance Southwest provides a description of the work in a press release for a performance in Bournemouth 2013:

Bodies in Urban Spaces by Austrian choreographer Willi Dorner sees human bodies squeezed into the nooks and crannies of the finest landmarks in Bournemouth. By cramming themselves into doorways, alcoves and any gap they can find, the performers offer different and often hilarious interpretations of urban architecture.

Similar themes of repetition and rhythmic site engagement play throughout the third example; Lone Twin’s The Days of the Sledgehammer Have Gone (2000-2006), described as ‘A series of shows and events, made over six years, variously attempting to merge our bodies with other bodies of water. We cried into rivers, sweated into seas and released clouds of steam’ (online). In their own publication Of Pigs and Lovers: A Lone Twin Research Companion, the company present an instruction ‘score’ for a particular leg of the work performed in Konsvinger, Norway:

Wearing clothes appropriate for a long walk. After the spring thaw in Kongsvinger, Norway, walk across one of the town’s two bridges. On reaching the other side turn and walk back over the bridge. Repeat this action for eighteen hours. Make friends with the people you meet during this time, where appropriate ask questions and share information about the river Glomma beneath you. On completing eighteen hours, leave the bridge and walk towards the ruin of the town’s first bridge. Carefully take your socks off and lower your feet into the Glomma. Try and stay in contact with the friends you make

 (2001, section 31)

Describing this stage of the performance journey, performance theorists Emma Govan, Helen Nicholson and Katie Normington observe:

The artists carried out an 18-hour walk across 2 bridges in Konsvinger in Norway. They were joined by many local people during the duration of the piece, one of whom walked with them all night before going back to work the next day. The artists reflected on the fact that, while they visited the city and carried out the labour of walking for paid employment, they were joined by people who engaged with the activity of walking for leisure time. This reflection acknowledges the complex relationship that is always engendered between performers and audiences but which may be problematized by site-related work where local people may feel a sense of ownership of the site.

(2007: 30)

Through playful engagement invoked through such site-based performance, new associations and connections emerge as sites are effectively put ‘on the map’ in a different manner for individuals. These re-mappings occurring through engagement with the performance work and with the people it engages (performers, fellow audience members, passers by) potentially inform subsequent vernacular ‘mappings’ and encounters with space and place and resonate to inform subsequent encounters with site.  As Cathy Turner observes in her commentary on Lone Twin’s work;

Such activities, as they suggest, provoke encounters with others. A playful current in their work is the childlike plea: ‘Walk with me, walk with me, won’t somebody please walk with me?’ Edges are blurred. New spaces and relationships are produced…within such performances, there is no need to make a distinction (though there may be differences) between what belongs to the site, to the audience, or to the performers.

 (2004:385) 

Whilst seemingly very different in theme and content, Red Line Time, Bodies in Urban Spaces and The Days of The Sledgehammer Have Gone each involve repetition within both the form and content of the work. Koplowitz engages the perambulatory audience in repetitive journeys up and down metro station escalators. These actions echo the work’s form as performance interventions follow a repetitive pattern, appearing in consecutive order across the metro station platforms and concourses. Dorner establishes a formulaic repetition of tableaux across urban spaces through which audiences engage in a rhythmic game of ‘run and hide – find and seek’ with the dancers, fostering familiarity and a sense of collaborative place-making through performance. Lone Twin’s physical repetition of a specific pathway invokes a traversing trajectory that becomes almost meditative through the automatic act of crossing back and forth between points. In each work, repeated movement patterns and pathways habitually encompassed as central components in everyday engagements with city-scapes are amplified and brought to the fore. Repetition emerges as a predominant theme or structuring device that refers to and invokes associations with the rhythms and spatial flows of the urban locations in which the work plays.

Re-Mapping and Re-Viewing

In Mike Pearson’s discussion of his performance work Raindogs sited in Cardiff in 2002, he argues that site-specific performance events provide an opportunity for audiences and witnesses to consider, ‘how we are ourselves creating the archaeological’ (2011:68). He observes:

Through our passage, movements, moments, actions, encounters we constantly mark our material surroundings. They are the authentic marks of the performance of everyday life: the result of routine, tradition, habit, accident, event, social ritual – of long-term evolution and unconnected long-term ruptures and singularities; of nearness; of dwelling.

                                                                                                             (2011:68)

The type of site-based work Pearson describes arises from the artist’s engagement with complex layers of site information that informs the development and production of the final performance work; a process he defines as ‘deep mapping’ (ibid). Red Line Time, Bodies in Urban Spaces and The Days of The Sledgehammer Have Gone potentially engage with and invoke processes of deep mapping in a number of ways. They offer invitations to attend to, re-view or disrupt habitual associations or behaviours assigned to particular places and, in doing so, contribute to the audience/participant’s own process of deep mapping. This potentially emerges for individuals engaging with these works through encountering and physically investing in following the performance, journeying along with the developing event (either on foot or on public transport) and repeating or returning to the roles of viewer, witness or participant according to the demand of the various performance episodes. When encountering this type of work the outcome of the artist’s creative and performative deep mapping becomes imprinted on our own personal site map and creates a deepened cartographic impression of the performance site or sites. It effectively becomes ‘somewhere I know’ or ‘somewhere I know differently’ invoked through the performative event.

Through practising and repeating their interactions with this type of performance work a sense of ‘playful familiarity’ with the sites in which they take place emerges and connections are fostered. Through embodying the sited performance experience and archiving the subsequent memory the physical encounter potentially becomes subsumed within an individual’s corporeal cartography and resonates beyond the temporal performance event.  

Such performance work also engages experiencers with more complex urban issues lying beyond the ephemeral frame of play and challenges to look again or re-view particular sites. Reflecting on the political dimensions of these works I return here to my previous assertion that processes of vernacular mapping constitute mildly subversive acts of urban engagement through which individuals come to experience urban sites in (often) non-prescribed ways. Considered here as acts or facilitators of vernacular mapping, each performance might also be viewed as a vehicle through which urban, socio-economic or cultural themes are incorporated into individual encounters with the work and mapped onto subjective vernacular maps of particular sites. Koplowitz’s Red Line Time, for example, engages with a transport system that is most frequently used by poorer, working class residents of Los Angeles a demographic common to many public transport systems in America’s car-dominated culture, as Garret and Taylor observe:

Outside of a few dense city centers like New York or San Francisco, the majority of local transit riders are poor. Most of these transit users live in the inner-city and many are members of minority groups, while so-called "choice" riders - those with regular access to private vehicles - are more likely to be in the suburbs and are predominantly white.

(1999:7)

In this instance, Red Line Time can be viewed as a provocation, an intervention by an exclusive dance-art form within a public site populated by a demographic for whom accessibility to the arts more broadly is often limited; it also may bring in new users to the Metro system who otherwise might not choose this mode of transport. The provocation, however, can be viewed from a number of perspectives aside from the positivist and patronising ‘bringing art to new audiences’ rhetoric frequently associated with site-based performance work; in other words, questions of race, equality, accessibility and social cohesion also need to be addressed to achieve an informed critique of this work.

Willi Dorner’s work on one hand presents a playful and mildly anarchic intervention within a cityscape providing entertainment for those encountering the event. However, considered politically and ethically, it problematizes notions of ‘bodies in urban spaces’ and provokes questions regarding what types of bodies we see and where they are permitted to go in urban environments. Often, the bodies we see squeezed into doorways or sheltering in underpasses and subways are homeless, isolated and displaced. In many ways, Dorner presents a sanitised and privileged version of bodies in urban spaces – collectively working together in a creative endeavour to bring life and colour to the urban realm.  These acts effectively (albeit temporarily) erase more troubling urban realities and, following the display, audiences return to their normative roles and usual environments in which shelter, warmth and comfort prevail.

Lone Twin’s work however, offers a democratised perspective on performance and incorporates the quotidian, everyday act of walking as a performative material from which an enacted event occurs, one that anyone can join in with regardless of age, experience, gender or class.  Interpreted thematically from this perspective the work invokes politics of labour, power and capitalist production distilled through repetition that reveals the ‘cog in the machine’ functionality of the contemporary and historicised wage slave.

Viewed from these political perspectives, such work potentially reveals underlying tensions that emerge through the transformation of urban sites into places of performance that temporarily negate or obscure everyday urban realities. More problematic urban realities such as gentrification, low wages, deteriorating transport systems, social division and political instability become, therefore, conspicuous through their absence.

Conclusion

Vernacular mapping as a contemporary cartographic phenomenon proposes new opportunities for individuals and collectives to ‘re-map’ space and place through a number of embodied and socio-political lenses. The process inevitably speaks to a counter-culture ideology and aesthetic and, as such resonates with the ‘place-hacking’ creed of urban explorers, parkourists, skateboarders and alternative urban movements such as yarn bombers and urban food developers for whom vernacular mapping has a form of activism at its core. Whilst the creators of the performance examples discussed in this article do not purport to enter into such territory I argue that works of this nature also present opportunities to consider, through reflection and analysis, the wider socio-political and ethical implications of performance interventions in urban sites. These reflections provide an additional cartographic resource that works alongside the intra-subjective processes of vernacular mapping and ‘playful familiarity’ invoked through physical and visceral engagement with the immediate performance world. Accordingly, the vernacular map has the potential to grow and develop as embodied experiences and reflective reckonings overlap and overlay to produce a metaphorical, three-dimensional rendering of the site-based performance encounter. Site-based dance and performance can, therefore, be considered as a mechanism for developing subjective connections with urban locations as familiar vernacular maps become re-inscribed, overwritten and overlaid with new impressions and intimate associations invoked through an embodied and reflective sense of ‘being here’ differently.

The notion of vernacular mapping therefore presents an alternative perspective on cartographic authority. Sole-authored, definitive mapping processes infused with histories, traditions and representational techniques are challenged. Homogenised constructions of space and place that, historically, have prioritised certain (dominant) agendas over individual and marginalised perspectives are unsettled. The subjective vernacular mapping perspective explored in this discussion asserts that, through individualised, internalised and autonomous processes of experiential mapping we become the authors and custodians of our own versions of the urban landscapes we inhabit.

When encountering site-based performances that employ systems and metaphors of mapping and traversing terrains in creative and mobile ways we can choose to embark on a voyage through familiar / unfamiliar territory and engage on a journey though the site authored by a particular artist and interpreted subjectively. The affective impact of this engagement on our own, habitual, practised and internalised mapping repository brings with it the potential for disruption and an unsettling of the status quo from which a subtle yet significant process of re-mapping may emerge.

[1] The Pennine Way is a UK national walking trail that traverses 250 miles of mountain pathways in the north of England. The performance collective comprised dancers Ruth Jones, Stacey Johnstone and Natalie Speake, musician/composer David Birchall and videographer Simon Warner, see: https://www.nationaltrail.co.uk/pennine-way/news/50-steps-walking-and-dancing-pennine-way

[2] For a full description and discussion of this work see Brown. C. ‘City of Lovers’ in Hunter, V. (2015) Moving Sites: Investigating Site-Specific Dance Performance, London: Routledge.

[3] This workshop is described in detail in Hunter, V. ‘Revealing the Site through Phenomenological Movement Inquiry’ in Shaw, D., and Humm, M., (2016) (eds.) Radical Space: Exploring Politics and Practice, London: Rowman and Littlefield.

[4] This work was presented as part of the Coventry Biennial 2017.