Site-Specific Dances, led by Michael Spencer Phillips and Dino Kiratzidis, is a new type of interdisciplinary performing arts collective of artists, choreographers, musicians and designers, that activates sites with performances featuring local community members. Our work is at the intersection of performance and place and, much like architecture, each project emerges from a direct engagement with a site. Set to original music by living composers, the performances live on as immersive video installations, shown with live musicians and/or live dance.

Site-Specific Dances began its location-based work during the pandemic and launched in April 2023 with a series of sold out media-performances at the Paul Taylor Dance Studios in New York City . More recent projects include site-specific performances engaging with Frederic Church’s Olana landscape in 2023, a performance in the summer of 2024 at the David Rockefeller Creative Arts Center at Pocantico, and most recently, a collaboration with MASS Design Group’s Fringe Cities Design Lab to activate a decommissioned water cistern in Poughkeepsie, as part of their broader urban initiative.

S-SD’s performance works are inspired by the theatricality inherent in the designed environment as well as the natural world, the growing awareness of pressing environmental issues, the desire to push the limits of interdisciplinary performance, and the belief that performance, when liberated from the confines of the conventional stage, can affect positive change in communities and places.

S-SD’s projects hope to foster a diverse and ever-expanding network of interdisciplinary collaborators around the world.

Site-Specific Dances is a registered 501(c)(3).