(Re)Positioning Site Dance makes an important contribution to the discourse on site performance as it sets out not only to build on previous scholarship, but to employ a method of ‘spiralling’ between body, local and world perspectives (p. 5), thus underlining the global resonances revealed through local sited practice–research. This moves sited performance beyond merely staking its territory in opposition to the proscenium stage, to focus directly on the implications of its engagement with real-world places. The authors employ several lenses for considering the embodied, practice-based insights of site dance, including public protest/politics/activism, phenomenology, affect, New Materialism, dialogism, environmental ethics and tropophilia. The authors – respectively based in Aotearoa New Zealand (South Pacific), south-east England (the UK) and Calgary (Canada) – represent three world regions, although the cultural perspective in each case remains largely white, middle-class and English-speaking. The authors unfold their themes in reference to specific practice examples; their own as practice–researchers, and sometimes the work of other site dance artists from around the world, thereby partially achieving a greater diversity of voices. Notably, Karen Barbour includes an indigenous Māori perspective in her writing about ‘activism, land contestation, and place responsiveness’ (pp. 51–75).

The reader is regularly invited to undertake their own site-based investigations in response to side texts entitled ‘Excursions and Explorations’, each of which suggests thematically relevant embodied/observational/practical tasks. These are useful additions to a book that makes urgent claims for the importance of embodied knowledge, as well as increasing its utility as a textbook. None of the suggested tasks requires specialist skills or training and therefore will be relevant beyond vocational dance training contexts.

The book is uneven in its attempt to apply various theoretical lenses. Kloetzel gives a cogent overview of the evolution of North American site dance practice and its development towards political protest and activism. Barbour's contribution to the same section articulates her own practice example as an embodied investigation of Māori, settler and feminist politics, but does not offer the wider context of other site dance practices in Aotearoa New Zealand. Interestingly, Hunter reframes English folk dance practices as site dance but is not entirely convincing in demonstrating how this form is relevant to contemporary approaches to site dance in the UK.

A series of welcome, highly relevant discussions seek to articulate how site dance develops theoretical concepts through a range of site dance strategies. Barbour is at her most articulate when bringing the reader/audiences into visceral relation with ‘sensory, poetic, reflective, embodied experiences’ (p. 129) as she argues for the phenomenological and affective power of site dance. Hunter's discussion of ‘vibrant matter’ in relation to her own site project The Abbots Dances emphasizes matter's vibrancy as produced by human associations and memories attached to it (pp. 135–56). This seems to contradict Hunter's characterization, drawing on Jane Bennett, of ‘vital materialism’ to ‘counter the narcissism of humans in charge of the world’ (p. 139). Subsequently, she makes some reference to other site practice methods of responding to materials, such as the ‘somatically informed practice’ of Paula Kramer, acknowledging that Kramer's approach ‘responds to and tells “of” the site through embodied encounters … the body moves along with the particular resonances, energies and agential affects arising from material entanglements’ (p. 148). Kloetzel's chapter on dialogism, polyphony and polyspatiality in site-specific performance sets out an elegant case for how embodied dialogue with the multiple layers of site can reveal ‘interconnection and integration with regional, national, and global realities’ (p. 162).

Throughout, the book makes bold moves to develop the wider relevance of site dance practices. Some arguments are particularly timely, such as Kloetzel's claim that the ‘ecosystemic awareness of place’ in site dance leads naturally to environmental ethics and activism (pp. 219–46). Hunter highlights the inherent performativity of parks and squares, in a discussion implicating urban planning, private/public space, protest and more: ‘the complexity of issues arising when placing sited dance work in public spaces’ (p. 211). Overall, the book is most effective when grounded in practice-led, embodied ways of knowing, and when highlighting specific site dance strategies that provide ‘ontological and epistemological insights’ (p. 274) into ‘human engagements with lived environments’ (p. 275).