This research uses dance and film to investigate the creation and conveyance of a kinesthetic experience of place. The choreographer, dancers, and videographer participating in the study aimed to create a kinesthetic experience of place by engaging the senses in a sensory experience of place and exploring the different feeling states of place. The study utilized choreographic methodologies of site-specific dance and screendance to facilitate a creative process rehearsed, performed, and filmed in the Oregon Dunes National Recreation area at Eel Creek. The footage from this choreographic process was edited into a screendance intended to convey a kinesthetic experience of place to viewers. The pilot study, At Eel Creek, and the final screendance, ensō, can be viewed through supplemental files included with this document. The evaluation of the study has resulted in key discoveries into the components necessary for the creation and conveyance of a kinesthetic experience of place.

For eight years, dancers in the United States performed and taught as employees of the federal government. They were eligible for the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), a Department of Labor program that assisted the unemployed during the recession of the late 1970s. Dance primarily occurred in artistic or leisure contexts, and employing dancers as federal government workers shifted dance to a labor context. CETA dancers performed “public service” in senior centers, hospitals, prisons, public parks, and community centers. Through a combination of archival research, qualitative interviews, and philosophical framing, I address how CETA disrupted public spaces and forced dancers and audiences to reconsider how representation functions in performance. I argue that CETA supported dance as public service while local programs had latitude regarding how they defined dance as public service. Part 1 is entitled Intersections: Dance, Labor, and Public Art and it provides the historical and political context necessary to understand how CETA arts programs came to fruition in the 1970s. It details how CETA arts programs relate to the history of U.S. federal arts funding and labor programs. I highlight how John Kreidler initiated the first CETA arts program in San Francisco, California, and detail the national scope of arts programming. In Part 2 of this dissertation, CETA in the Field: Dancers and Administrators, I focus on case studies from the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and New York, New York CETA arts programs to illustrate the range of how dance was conceived and performed as public service. CETA dancers were called upon to produce “public dance” which entailed federal funding, free performances in public spaces, and imagining a public that would comprise their audiences. By acknowledging artists and performers as workers who could perform public service, CETA was instrumental in shifting artists’ identities from rebellious outsiders to service economy laborers who wanted to be part of society. CETA arts programs reenacted Works Progress Administration (WPA) arts programs from the 1930s and adapted these ideas of artists as public servants into the Post-Fordist, service economy of the 1970s United States. CETA dancers became bureaucrats responsible for negotiating their work environments and this entailed a number of administrative duties. While this made it challenging for dancers to manage their basic schedules and material needs, it also allowed for a degree of flexibility, schedule gaps, and opportunities to create new performance and teaching situations. By funding dance as public service, CETA arts programs staged a macroeconomic intervention into the dance field that redefined dance as public service. / Dance

This thesis is an investigation of the complex processes and relationships between the physical human performer and the technologically manufactured cyber-human counterpart. I acted as both researcher and the physical human performer, deeply engaged in the moment-to-moment creation of events unfolding within a shared virtual reality environment. As the primary instigator and activator of the cyber-human partner, I maintained a balance between the live and technological performance elements, prioritizing the production of content and meaning. By way of using practice as research, this thesis argues that in considering interactions between cyber-human and human performers, it is crucial to move beyond discussions of technology when considering interactions between cyber-humans and human performers to an analysis of emotional content, the powers of poetic imagery, the trust that is developed through sensory perception and the evocation of complex relationships. A theoretical model is constructed to describe the relationship between a cyber-human and a human performer in the five works created specifically for this thesis, which is not substantially different from that between human performers. Technological exploration allows for the observation and analysis of various relationships, furthering an expanded understanding of ‘movement as content’ beyond the electronic connection. Each of the works created for this research used new and innovative technologies, including virtual reality, multiple interactive systems, six generations of wearable computers, motion capture technology, high-end digital lighting projectors, various projection screens, smart electronically charged fabrics, multiple sensory sensitive devices and intelligent sensory charged alternative performance spaces. They were most often collaboratively created in order to augment all aspects of the performance and create the sense of community found in digital live dance performances/events. These works are identified as one continuous line of energy and discovery, each representing a slight variation on the premise that a working, caring, visceral and poetic content occurs beyond the technological tools. Consequently, a shift in the physical human’s psyche overwhelms the act of performance. Scholarship and reflection on the works have been integral to my creative process throughout. The goals of this thesis, the works created and the resulting methodologies are to investigate performance to heighten the multiple ways we experience and interact with the world. This maximizes connection and results in a highly interactive, improvisational, dynamic, non-linear, immediate, accessible, agential, reciprocal, emotional, visceral and transformative experience without boundaries between the virtual and physical for physical humans, cyborgs and cyber-humans alike.