On a late afternoon in August, the audience for choreographer Mara Ellison's Bend/Root gathered not in a theater but at the base of a Douglas fir in Pine Creek City's Watershed Park. There were no chairs, no stage lights, and no curtain—only the fading sun and the sound of the creek. When her six dancers began to move, bracing their bodies against the tree's massive trunk, it was unclear where the performance ended and the forest began. That ambiguity, Ellison said later, is exactly the point.
Pine Creek City, a valley town of 34,000 best known for logging and, more recently, trail tourism, has developed one of the most concentrated site-specific dance scenes in the Pacific Northwest. Since 2019, at least four professional companies and a dozen independent choreographers have established regular outdoor practices here, drawn by accessible public land, a mild climate, and an unusually collaborative relationship with the city's parks department. What started as pandemic-era necessity—dancers fleeing indoor studios—has hardened into a sustained artistic movement with its own aesthetics, infrastructure, and debates.
From Emergency to Aesthetic
When COVID-19 shuttered performance venues in 2020, Ellison's company, Body/ Land, began rehearsing in the meadows behind her farmhouse on the city's eastern edge. What she discovered was not just a substitute for indoor space but a different choreographic grammar entirely.
"Inside, you control the floor, the temperature, the sight lines," Ellison said. "Outside, you're in negotiation with something alive. The piece changes because the ground is uneven, because a hawk circles overhead, because the dampness in the soil means you slide differently." That negotiation became the subject of her work. Bend/Root, which premiered at the 2023 Pine Creek Dance Festival and will be revived for the 2024 edition this August 8–11, is built around what she calls "rooting scores"—choreographic instructions that require dancers to maintain continuous physical contact with a tree for extended periods.
The festival, now in its seventh year, has become the scene's organizing institution. In 2024 it will present 14 companies across four days, with performances sited in a reclaimed gravel pit, a second-growth cedar grove, and the meadow where Body/ Land first rehearsed. This year's centerpiece is a world premiere by Portland-based choreographer James Okonkwo, whose Silt and Signal uses the creek itself as both stage and percussion source; dancers will perform partially submerged, with microphones capturing the sound of their movement through water.
The Choreography of Place
Other local companies have developed equally distinct relationships to the landscape. Valley Repertory Dance, founded in 2018, specializes in what director Sonia Voss terms "vigil works"—slow, durational performances in a single location that last up to three hours. Her 2022 piece Crown Fire, performed on a hillside scarred by a 2019 wildfire, used repetitive falling and rising motions to echo the regeneration of burned shrubs. The company returns to the same site each June to perform a revised version, documenting changes in both the terrain and the choreography.
"The land is not a backdrop," Voss said. "It's a collaborator that doesn't ask permission. That can be frustrating and expensive and cold. But it also prevents the work from becoming too settled in its own habits."
That philosophy has shaped training as well as performance. Body/ Land and Valley Repertory both offer year-round outdoor classes, and since 2021 the nonprofit Pine Creek Arts Alliance has run "movement rangers"—guided three-hour hikes that combine contemporary dance technique with natural history education. In 2023, the program served 340 participants, roughly 60 percent of them local residents with no prior dance training.
Screens in the Forest
The scene's most contested development is technological. In 2022, the Canadian new-media group Liquid Architecture installed Shadow Flora, an augmented reality work, at three trailheads around Pine Creek City. Visitors using a smartphone app encounter digital dancers—motion-captured performances by Body/ Land members—superimposed on the actual forest. The figures appear to move through trees, disappear behind boulders, and dissolve into particles that scatter with the wind.
The installation has drawn roughly 12,000 users since its launch, according to city tourism data. But opinion among local artists is sharply divided. Okonkwo, whose 2024 festival premiere is entirely analog, called AR "a interesting experiment that risks making the forest into a stage set for something that isn't really there." Ellison, whose dancers were digitized for Shadow Flora, takes a more pragmatic view: "The technology doesn't replace the live encounter. But it does let people who can't hike three miles into a grove still experience what we're doing."
Liquid Architecture is currently developing
