Site-Specific Dances creates time-based artistic experiences that bring people together around places. Through choreography, film, music, public programming, and community collaboration, we invite audiences to see, experience, and understand the built and natural environment in new ways.

Every project begins with a site. The site is our primary source material and becomes a protagonist rather than a backdrop. We engage deeply with its histories, architecture, ecology, communities, and lived experience through research, observation, and partnerships with local organizations and residents. Rather than responding with a permanent object, we respond with experiences. Depending on the site and the questions it raises, a project may become a performance, a film, a workshop, a temporary activation, an exhibition, or another form of public engagement.

Choreography is central to our practice because movement brings empathy, scale, participation, and human presence into dialogue with the places we inhabit. It allows audiences not only to observe a site, but to imagine themselves within it, experiencing it as something living, shared, and continually evolving. Together with film, music, design, and other time-based art forms, choreography becomes a way of researching, interpreting, and experiencing place.

Over the past decade, Site-Specific Dances has evolved from creating site-specific performances into a cultural platform for interpreting place through time-based artistic experiences. By bringing together artists, communities, cultural institutions, and interdisciplinary collaborators, we create projects that strengthen relationships between people and place while expanding the role of the performing arts in shaping how we understand, experience, and care for the places we share.

Site-Specific Dances is directed by Michael Spencer Phillips and Dino Kiratzidis, and is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.