Ways of doing, ways of thinking, ways of moving together: Considerations for cross-cultural encounters and exchanges in and through dance practice

In each of the encounters that were and continue to be facilitated through the project ArtsCross/Danscross, sets of relational agendas are being instigated, which tie into complex historical and current political as well as cultural entanglements between the countries of origin of the practitioners involved. In integrating dance practitioners from the cities of Beijing, London and Taipei, who work together towards publicly performed choreographic works, the project is set to involve processes of cultural translation between practitioners from specific places that bring with themselves equally specific ways of doing and thinking. In this article I extend my thinking around the issues arising from and within the cross-cultural encounters, building on a previously written chapter published in the co-edited collection Collaboration in Performance Practice: Premises, Workings and Failures (Sachsenmaier in Colin and Sachsenmaier (eds.) 2016). More than bringing practitioners from different localities together to create dance works, the project ArtsCross/Danscross set up spaces of encounter of practitioners as well as practices as such – practices as established in varying ways of doing in different places. I discuss examples of choreographic practice with a focus on issues identified in the related fields of Global and Translation Studies, while arguing that these practices retain their own logic and ways of working, as well as producing ‘new forms of experience’, which are ‘extra-linguistic’.