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- Volume 7, Issue 2, 2016
Choreographic Practices - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2016
Volume 7, Issue 2, 2016
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Considering postmodern cultural disconnects and cultural paradigms in Chinese dance creation through the lens of ArtsCross/Danscross
By Xu RuiAbstractArtsCross/Danscross created a visual juxtaposition of dance forms on a shared stage. The project not only reflected the cultural disconnects between Chinese and western dance creation, but also brought to light the hybridization of cultural states which were present within the project. Since we lack an awareness of the roots of western society and culture, the understanding of western modern dance that we have developed remains relatively general and one-sided. While we have sought wholeheartedly to apply modern dance choreography approaches to the creation of Chinese dance, we have not paid attention to, or sought to understand the emergence and spread of western postmodern artistic values, and this is the primary source of the cultural disconnects that were witnessed within the ArtsCross/Danscross project. In recent Chinese history, a hybridized cultural paradigm has evolved, characterized by imitation of the external/foreign and feelings of conflict towards the internal/self. In China’s dance field, the concepts of ‘modern’, ‘contemporary’, and ‘postmodern’ overlap and are difficult to distinguish. In reality, both ‘modern dance’ and ‘contemporary dance’ contain Chinese and western cultural elements, and constitute modern-contemporary ‘cultural hybrids’ of Chinese dance. Thus, there is an urgent need to establish a cultural attitude that witnesses cultural disconnects without misgivings, and which confidently faces up to the present. Postmodernism implies a questioning of, and a resistance towards the uniform ordering and standardization of the world. To some degree, it also represents a reformation of global diversity. Moreover, it creates a space for the development and survival of Chinese dance against the context of this process of reformation of diversity.
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Mask – ArtsCross/Danscross London
By Guo LeiAbstractThe culture of Nuo is a kind of culture symbol, which is also a worldwide ancient folk art. In my hometown in Jiangxi, China, Nuo dance has been handed down for generations. For this reason, I hope to utilize the platform of ArtsCross/Danscross to present the world with this ancient culture. It is truly representative of the view of life and the universe in the minds of Chinese people. This is the creative motivation of Mask, which is based on the elements of Nuo dance. My intention is to ponder the ancient Nuo culture in terms of the creation of Mask – what is the perception of affiliation or the real demand of humanity that lies behind the masks?
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Putting Minzu into perspective: Dance and its relation to the concept of ‘Nation’
By Chen Ya-PingAbstractThe term ‘minzu’ was raised and discussed on several occasions in relation to its meaning in the Chinese language and how it could or could not be translated into English to sufficiently convey the complexity of its connotations. Chinese scholar Jiang Dong presented a paper tracing the term’s usage among the dance practitioners and academics in China since the 1950s. This article is a response to Jiang’s paper from a Taiwanese perspective. It looks at the Minzu Wudao Movement in post-1949 Taiwan historically, tracing its ideological heritage to the nation salvation movements in the early twentieth-century China and contextualizing its body-reformation concept within the nationalist indoctrination policy of the Kuomintang government. In addition to examining the representation of ‘minzu’ (nation) in the Minzu Wudao Movement, the article also discusses the shifting content of minzu qinggan (national sentiment) in the 1970s and the disappearance of the term ‘minzu’ in social media and cultural discourses in today’s Taiwan. It is still widely used in China, however, and a number of choreographers in the ArtsCross/Danscross project, as noted in the Introduction, were specialists in minzu dance and worked from a minzu dance vocabulary.
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Dancing with the sound of birds: Atmospheres and translation in ArtsCross/Danscross
More LessAbstractIn this article I consider three instances of the extra-linguistic translation of embodiment, affect and aesthetics in the context of intercultural performance during the ArtsCross/Danscross project between 2011 and 2013. Drawing on Francois Jullien’s proposition that cultural knowledges might be considered in respect of ‘divergence’ rather than ‘difference’, I draw together Western phenomenologies of atmosphere with Chinese aesthetics to examine movement among bodies as atmospheric currents. Through close readings of instances of translation as it relates to dance practice in rehearsals for Bulareyaung Pagarlava’s Uncertain… Waiting… (2011), Liu Yan’s Say to Him (2012) and Riccardo Buscarini’s No Lander (2013), I argue that attention to the affective aesthetics of atmosphere allows for an understanding of how intercultural performance projects such as ArtsCross/Danscross model modes of ‘feeling together, differently’.
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Corporeal translation across borders: Indigenous choreographer Bulareyaung Pagarlava and his Warriors
By Lin YatinAbstractThis article looks into a genealogy of the multiple versions of the work Warriors (2010–2014) choreographed by Bulareyaung Pagarlava (also known as ‘Bula’). I discuss the evolution of the work alongside the search for his indigenous identity over the past few years as a freelance choreographer after having created works for dance companies from Taiwan such as Cloud Gate 2 and LAFA & Artists, then collaborating with performers from various institutions such as his alma mater the Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA), the Martha Graham Dance Company, and the American Dance Festival (ADF), as well as the Formosa Aboriginal Song and Dance Troupe from Taiwan, leading up to the founding of his own Bulareyaung Dance Company (BDC) in 2014. Borrowing from Japanese cultural theorist Naoki Sakai’s concepts of subjectivity and translation, I trace how Bulareyaung gradually developed his indigenous creative voice after years of working with dancers of different ethnicities and nationalities from around the world, and how he chose to return home and set up an ensemble in his rural hometown of Taitung in southeastern Taiwan, gradually developing new movement vocabularies in tune with his indigenous subjects.
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Beijing Bucket Blues: ArtsCross/Danscross
More LessAbstractI had never visited Beijing or China before. This writing is an attempt to convey my experience of the creation of a new work with dancers from the Beijing Dance Academy and Taipei National University of the Arts, attendant translators and my partner and assistant Ben Ash, and takes in both the circumstances of the creation process per say within the context of the wider impact of the cultural shift. The view of China that I had as a performance maker prior to the journey, coupled with the transformation of this view by the given circumstances which in some ways were extreme in cultural difference, created a particular field of practice that impacted on the development of the work. An ability to facilitate nuanced conversation with performers is something I had taken for granted in my creative practice, and so with this sense of isolation and desire for connection I found myself assimilating these feelings and frustrations as well as the excitement I had in relation to my new circumstances into the resultant work performed.
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Analysing body centre weight use by dancers in ArtsCross/Danscross
By Wang YunyuAbstractUsing Laban Movement Analysis1 (LMA) methodologies, in particular the application of the two Weight Efforts, this article provides a comparative analysis of dancers from Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA), where the researcher is based, and dancers from the Beijing Dance Academy (BDA). The article focuses on the use of ‘body centre’ as conceived in LMA’s Effort Element, which is related to gravitational mechanisms. Through observation, it appeared that the training processes within each of these dance groups utilized different centres of weight and unique conceptions of individual space within the movement, despite both groups having a Chinese ethnic background and similar dance training styles in Contemporary Dance and traditional Chinese Dance. This insight is based on sustained observations of the rehearsal processes of these groups in the 2011 and 2012 editions of ArtsCross, as well as visits to classes at BDA during the three-week ArtsCross project held in Beijing, China in October and November of 2012. As a Certified Movement Analyst, with extensive experience in dance in both East Asia and in the United States, the researcher utilized LMA to understand how dancers from each country responded to the requests of choreographers through the intensive rehearsals and through to the final performance. The data provide significant pedagogical information relevant to the development of new programmes to be implemented within TNUA’s dance training regimen.
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Ways of doing, ways of thinking, ways of moving together: Considerations for cross-cultural encounters and exchanges in and through dance practice
More LessAbstractIn 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’.
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Depart: A journey of Light and Water
By Wu Yi-SanAbstractDepart approached aspects of the theme of light and water from the perspective of the real and impressionistic, and interpreted the theme poetically as inspired by extracts from Jimmy Liao’s Love in the Cards (2008), and created associations beyond the text. The author utilized and transformed the languages and understandings of the physical bodies of the dancers drawing on their different backgrounds to exchange concepts and impressions of ‘depart’ expressed through atmosphere, space, props and movements.
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Looking at different cultural contexts in the contemporary dance of ArtsCross/Danscross
By Wang XinAbstractThe ArtsCross/Danscross project aimed to build and strengthen artistic dialogue and interaction, understanding and communication among those from different cultural backgrounds. From observing and discussing nine choreographic processes, we discovered a problem: differences in the understanding of the term ‘contemporary dance’. This article discusses choreographic works from ArtsCross/Danscross, starting with views on and comparisons of Chinese and western contemporary dance. The article analyses the reasons for differences in the awareness of contemporary dance of people from different cultural backgrounds and thereby triggers reflections on the prospects for the development of dance in contemporary China.
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Re-defining the ‘contact zone’: Translation, transformation and the space in-between
More LessAbstractThis article explores the space ‘in-between’ in intercultural arts practice. Drawing on my engagement as an academic participant in the ArtsCross/Danscross project, I unpack Mary Louise Pratt’s term ‘contact zone’. Pratt defined contact zones as ‘social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other’ (Pratt 1991: 4) and in exploring the processes that took place at Beijing Dance Academy and The Place, London in 2012 and 2013, both in the rehearsal studio and in the seminar room, I re-define the idea of the ‘contact zone’. Drawing on theories of translation and pragmatist philosophy as well as ideas from performer training and Chinese aesthetics and etymology, I move towards a more nuanced understanding of the ‘in-between’ as a productive space both for the creation of new artistic works and as a strategy for intercultural working practices.
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Moving Writing
Authors: Jonathan Burrows and Adrian Heathfield
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