Almost everyone. As an [...]]]> ArtsCross Taipei is coming to an end. The colloquium began this morning; the performances will premiere this evening. Tomorrow night we all start leaving. Of course, in important ways, this weekend is what it has all been about. A crystallizing moment. Almost everyone involved has been working towards these public presentations.

Almost everyone. As an academic with the luxury (if that’s what it is) of not needing closure, of seeing no culmination here, I think this can be a risky moment. It’s the point when whatever finally makes it into the public domain stakes a powerful claim over everything that preceded it. Retrospectively, we are invited to see everything that has happened over the last three weeks as leading inevitably to these outcomes. Of course, these are the outcomes of those processes. But if all the foregoing observation and investigation teaches us anything, it’s the high degree of contingency about so much that is now about to be chiselled into stone.

This is true for the audience, of course, who have little reason to believe otherwise. And in my experience, it is also true for practitioners, since setting the final material often involves channelling the full range of earlier possibilities into the single act or outcome. In so doing, all previous potentiality is dismissed, erased, or brought to heel. Sometimes, it’s simply not possible to perform well without doing that.

Here, though, in the dying hours of the work in all its mess and multiplicity, I’ll reflect a little on the project as a whole. And here may be an apt location, since this blog itself records more – by no means all – of the variety of ArtsCross than ordinarily remains in the public domain once a work stakes its singular right to exist.

The other day, I sat and read the blog through. It’s a lot to absorb, and there’s a remarkable diversity of voices, styles and perspectives, even within this limited sample of the wider ArtsCross workforce. One thing that comes across is how multi-faceted the project is. One has the sense that, while it could not have come about without the immense energy and commitment of certain key individuals, no-one really has a grasp on the whole thing. Even at the institutional level, there is such a range of investments and relationships that one suspects it would be very hard to draw a straight line between any one stated goal and its outcome. Not only do alternative and complementary institutional expectations and operating procedures constantly thicken or bifurcate such intentions, but they are all being realised by individuals who themselves have a huge range of attitudes and abilities, and whose own divergent interrelations further knit, knot or strain all the sayings, doings and knowings that need to happen in order to realise the project.

Moreover, those ‘sayings, doings and knowings’ are more-than-usually complicated by the breadth of the spectrum of activities that ArtsCross entails. Anyone who has made a dance or organised a conference knows it’s a complex process. To make ten dances and a colloquium internationally intensifies this complexity substantially. Consider any one participants’ experience of a day at ArtsCross: one may be interacting with researchers, artists, administrators, translators. One may move from an improvised or process-based rehearsal to an exacting repetition of clearly defined gestures and phrases; from a monolingual to a multi-lingual environment; from selecting what you want for dinner to debating the diverse meanings of ‘modern’ and ‘modernity’. At a strictly material level, it is this combination of variety and intensity (along with the encroaching exhaustion it entails) that defines ArtsCross.

On Tuesday, some of us ‘overseas’ academics spoke with the Beijing academics (through interpreters) about our research interests and methods. The next time we met, Theresa Beattie gave a talk about the UK independent dance sector, and instantly that same group was plunged into an entirely different conversation. It was fascinating to me that, so late in the project, the whole thing could still be turning on a pinhead, scrambling its components in order to take on a different form or face. I began to glimpse the dizzying potential of this intricate arrangement to keep shifting, changing, and to facilitate some genuinely novel relations between ‘sectors’ (to use Theresa’s term) that so often hold themselves at arms-length form each other.

This capacity of this project to change over time is also an important feature of its identity. Reading the earliest posts by Donald, who had already clocked off by the time I arrived, is to encounter a process I can see obliquely sustained into my own experiences. Donald writes, for instance, of one dancer standing out at the audition because, “with his compact body and floppy mop of platinum-blond hair [he] looked like a trend-setting Shetland pony.” As it happens, Ming is amongst the most prominent dancers in Avatara’s 14-strong piece. In interview yesterday, she said she found him amongst the most willing to push himself, to take risks, to engage most directly with the material and developing ideas. One wonders now whether it was only Ming’s hair that drew Donald’s attention all those many days-that-seem-like-months ago, or whether, already there was something more about Ming intruding upon his sensibilities, without his recognising it. Maybe Donald knew unawares what Ming was capable of, but put dancerly insistence down to platinum hair out of convenience, ‘reterritorializing’ the dancer’s deterritorializing potentiality upon his most distinguishing feature.

Or maybe not. It’s a bit of a hair and solo question: which came first? What is the relation between them? How might one produce or sustain the other – and where does Meng’s musculature, stature, campiness, personality come into this? The reason I have titled this posting ‘The ArtsCross Assemblage’, and not the ‘ArtsCross Network’ is because, whereas networks tend to draw our attention to inter-institutional or inter-personal interactions, assemblages exist at all scales, as well as across and between modes and media. Ming’s hair is an assemblage of chemicals and follicles. Ming is an assemblage. The dance he is in is an assemblage. The dancers, Avatara, me watching and Avatara’s mum sitting quietly in the corner is an assemblage. Avatara talking into a microphone giving instructions to the technicians about exactly how to fly in the legs (theatre curtains that normally create ‘wings’) while her dancers familiarise themselves with the space of the stage: this is an assemblage. Me blogging about it and you reading it…well, you get the picture.

Avatara (left, in dark) and team spacing in the theatre. At centre, Ming.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/the-peony-pavilion-festival-theatre-edinburgh-2338139.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/edinburgh-festival-reviews/8702768/Edinburgh-Festival-2011-The-Peony-Pavilion-National-Ballet-of-China-Festival-Theatre-review.html

‘The Remaining Mountain’ is the name given to a section from ‘Dwelling in the Fuchan Mountains,’ an ink landscape painted in 1350 by Huang Gongwang (1269–1354). Apparently, it was separated from the rest of the scroll during the seventeenth century, when the [...]]]>

Reproduction of 'The Remaining Mountain' set alongside the rest of Huang's scroll

‘The Remaining Mountain’ is the name given to a section from ‘Dwelling in the Fuchan Mountains,’ an ink landscape painted in 1350 by Huang Gongwang (1269–1354). Apparently, it was separated from the rest of the scroll during the seventeenth century, when the Qing Emperor Wu Hongyu cast it into the fire on his deathbed. The painting was rescued, but the two sections remained apart until this year, when the Zhejiang Provincial Museum lent ‘The Remaining Mountain’ to the National Palace Museum in Taipei, where the remainder of the scroll is kept.

The resulting exhibition is called ‘Landscape Reunited’, and a foreigner can only guess at the political significance of this act of cultural restitution. Similarly, one wonders about the different meanings that the ArtsCross project may hold for the participants from China and Taiwan. At the same time, one should be cautious not to allow such symbolism to detract from the work itself – either in the case of Huang’s handscroll, or the dances currently being created.

I myself was very struck by this phrase, ‘the remaining mountain’. In English, it can have two quite contrasting meanings: the last mountain standing; or the mountain yet to come. In addition, there’s a gentle tautology to the phrase itself, since if there’s one thing we usually assume about mountains, it’s their durability. Of course, we know they may rise and fall over millennia, that the occasional hill has been razed to meet the needs of developers, or indeed raised to meet the needs of performance artists, as in Zhang Huan’s ‘To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain’ (1995). But by and large, ‘remaining’ is what mountains do. It’s their bread and butter.

Now, I’m no Derridean, but it strikes me that in roaming around the remaining mountain, we have entered the territory of what Derrida called the logic of the supplement: an add-on that is thereby foundational, because it defines the original as such. And as I wandered through the rehearsal studios yesterday, I wondered to myself where the remaining mountain was in each of the rooms, what it was to each of the dances.

The most literal answer is to be found in Studio 6, whose wonderful views of the mountainous landscape surrounding the TNUA are reflected in some of the wall mirrors. This, in turn, draws attention to the visual field of the studios. Normally neutral, we are used to a visual environment that is at once charged (the studio is a site of intense scrutiny, both of self and others), but constrained. Here, the sky, city, landscape, lights invite themselves in – either presenting themselves with panoramic panache to whoever glances out of the window, or, creeping obliquely across the mirrors as one’s own position shifts and the sun proceeds across the sky.

Mountain view (r) and mirror reflection (l)

Publicity material for ‘Landscape Reunited’ describes ‘Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains’ as a ‘landscape of the mind’, which is rendered “in a ‘sketching-ideas’ type of freehand brushwork…The application of the brush is quite calligraphic, at times gentle and serene, while at others free and untrammeled.” We need not resort to clichés about the relationship between dance and calligraphy (thoroughly investigated in any case in ‘Cursive’ by Cloud Gate, whose HQ we visited this morning) to note that this combination is also on display in the rehearsal rooms of TNUA. Different choreographers have different styles, but in all cases, the rehearsals take a ‘sketching-ideas’ approach: the dancers performing against a dramatic backdrop of hills and towns, with the city in the distance: Dancing in the Taipei Mountains.

Down in Studio 3, a quirky design feature affords a different kind of ‘Remaining Mountain’ view. Watching Lai Tsui-Shuang work with her dancers to pack ever more gunpowder into her firecracking duet, I overheard the plaintive erhu of Zhang Jianmin’s piece, and realized that a Perspex panel allowed me to see through into his rehearsal, which was being done in full costume. The Perspex is only about a metre wide, so one has a partial view, but turning one’s head through 180?, one is able to block together a fragment of the Chinese dance with the fuller ‘scroll’ of the Taiwanese.

This particular combination has its own qualities – the Mongolian grasslands set alongside a bleary tale of modern break-up. But it also threw into relief how we researchers have been experiencing the process. I bought a concertinaed reproduction of ‘Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains’ at the Museum, and have been periodically leafing through. In the Museum itself, one must take in the painting on the move – right to left is the correct direction, but old habits die hard, and I intuitively went left to right. To think of the works as scrolling by, while we ourselves move from room to room, is to recognize the ways they join up for us, and perhaps for us to see continuities where audience members and indeed the choreographers themselves may see differences.

To see the works as creating a compelling landscape in this way also draws attention to the ways Huang’s trees, rivers and mountains are here replaced by bodies (which figure only minimally in the scroll). I watched so much dancing yesterday (Cloud Gate trip + run-though of all ten pieces), no doubt the ‘landscape’ of my own mind is crowded with torsos and limbs to an unusual degree. But the ‘remaining mountain’ component also draws our attention to the points of intersection between these dancers.

There are countless ways in which the dancers in this project make and break contact with each other. But the other night I was struck by one in particular. Bula had been working quite painstakingly on a solo. Immediately after that, a duet between two men exploded into the space, and it was thrilling. An eye-popping combination of need and rejection, combat and tenderness, masculine posturing and mutual reliance. It’s intricate and the dancers cover the entire space of the stage, dominating it. But the piece crystallizes for me in a relatively simple move: they lean forward, into each other, and one, slightly higher, pushes the other backwards – he slides in his socks, like a sumo wrestler being bulldozed out of the ring. As I watched it, the phrase ‘man mountain’ sprang to mind. Normally, this describes a large man. Here, it took two, and it was on the move. I tried to snap a picture during the run-through. It reminds me that as in dance, so elsewhere, we are all remaining mountains to each other; both supplementary and foundational. Whether we seek or find restitution there is another matter entirely.

Li Shanshan, Studio 4, 3:15–4:15, [...]]]> What role does teaching and learning play in the dance creative process? Presumably, the dancers are learning something. Perhaps the choreographers are also teaching something. Observing Li Shanshan and Lai Tsui-shaung last week, I imagined that these somethings share a common point of reference, but the methods are substantially different.

Li Shanshan, Studio 4, 3:15–4:15, 08.11.2011

The group stops. Shanshan works in close proximity, thumping and clicking, solidifying a tightly constructed section with detailed timing and physical corrections. The quintet executes a rapid series of ever-shifting supports: a boy catches another boy around the legs in a vertical jump-snatch-lift as a girl rolls to the floor, released from an embrace with another boy, as a second girl hops from behind onto his straight back. A moment of breath, the lifted boy slowly opens his arms into a tableau of supplication. Then, BAM: boy down to ground, girl on floor leaps up, second girl hops off. One-two-three and they all shift, rotating like revolving doors into two lines, leaning into one another side-by-side. This section of the composition follows a clear pattern: image, hold, transition, image, hold, transition, image – stillness, sustained, sudden, stillness, sustained, sudden, stillness – a dynamic ten seconds that Shanshan polishes for approximately 10 minutes. Exhorting and demanding, Shanshan works with diligence and care to set cues and clarify order. She is choreographer-cum-captain-cum-cajoler. By design, the dancers take two steps forward and one step back, every movement measured and weighed. It is arduous, technical, slow-going work. The result evinces precision, a powerful display of group coordination and collaboration.

Lai Tsui-shuang, Studio 6, 4:30–5:30, 08.11.2011

I walk into Tsui-shuang’s rehearsal where a very different kind of slow-going work is under way. “It’s about the initiation and flow, not the position or step,” the translator tells me, “shifting center of weights [sic]”. Tsui-shuang stands akimbo in loose, pedestrian fashion, mimicking in reduced fashion the head and torso movements enacted by the dancers. The movement looks mad: a woman contracted over, arms sent flinging out from the center, seemingly thrown away, crazy and shaky, but not out of control. Tsui-shuang’s is meticulous, very sure of what she wants, focusing on the intention of the movement. Tsui-shuang speaks and the translator tells me, “send the energy out, more out, don’t hold it in, I want crazy. I want your upper body to go up and lower body to go down with more relationship with the ground.” The dancer listens intently. She does not seem to want to please Tsui-shuang, but instead wanting to dig at the movement herself. It is her solo after all and Tsui-shuang is making the movement idea clear, helping the dancer to realize what inner intention will manifest it better, realize it more completely.

Pedagogy of Rehearsal

Together these rehearsals reminded me of something that Renata Celichowska, director of the Harkness Dance Center at the 92^nd Street Y in NYC and author of the book on the Erick Hawkins Modern Dance Technique, once remarked to me about the pedagogy of rehearsal. To my knowledge, this is a rich, largely untapped area of scholarly investigation in dance. It seems to be a practice that exists at the very heart of performance making as research. One tentative hypothesis suggests that these choreographers ultimately work toward similar goals of expression and communication (and self-discovery?) in movement, but approach it from very different personal processes, diverse methods, and multiple directions. In this example, one distinction might be made between coaching, working on the outer form to create the inner feeling, and facilitating, working on the inner feeling to create the outer form. Coach and facilitator may not be the best terms. I wonder if Paul’s distinction between mediation and intermediation might unpack something here? What other terms? Is ‘pedagogy of rehearsal’ a useful conception? At what point does it begin or end?

Interviewed by Lin Yatin

Alexander Whitley (UK)

Q: When you first knew you would be taking part in this, did you have any ideas or expectations of what you would be doing?

A: Well, a little. The first email I received told me a little about TNUA and the [...]]]> Aug. 5, 2011 (Friday, Week One)

Interviewed by Lin Yatin

Alexander Whitley (UK)

Q: When you first knew you would be taking part in this, did you have any ideas or expectations of what you would be doing?

A: Well, a little. The first email I received told me a little about TNUA and the Beijing Dance Academy being involved; I guess it was exciting just to imagine all the opportunities that would come from it. Even until a week or two ago, there was still a lot I didn’t know about how it would all work and come together as a project, so it’s been very nice to finally be here, to see how everything is coming together, and to engage with all the other choreographers and dancers.

Q: It seems from the rehearsals that you and your dancers have been coming together pretty well. Would you like to talk a little about it?

A: Unfortunately I’m only here for two weeks due to other commitments in London, but I’ve tried to take advantage of this opportunity to explore ideas that I might not ordinarily do. A lot of my previous choreographic experience has been in the presence of big companies with lots of other priorities, so I haven’t had very many opportunities to work for long, concentrated periods of time with the same group of dancers. In that respect, this opportunity has been really great for me, because it has given me an intense focus I haven’t had before. This week has been my play week: I’ve been trying lots of different things, making as much as I can, but also giving the dancers an opportunity to create material around the ideas I’ve been giving them, so next week we’ll have the task of putting it all together.

Q: You were saying that you have been playing with ideas. What kind of tasks or goals have you set for them?

A: All of the ideas I’ve been working with are derived from the project’s theme “Uncertain… waiting…” I’ve found this a very useful resource to draw both direct and less direct ideas from, relating not only to the movements but also to the structures organizing the movements. As for the tasks I’ve set out, some of them have been games for them to play: I give them one or two rules to follow, and they play a game, giving me the opportunity to see how a structure could emerge from some simple rules.  Or I might give them more specific tasks: in one of the tasks I gave them, they had to imagine an object they really wanted, and then describe it in space with their bodies. Their movements were generated by the idea of the thing they wanted, but I also tried to get them to focus on the thing in space. The idea behind that task was to keep their attention always on something outside of themselves. It’s been interesting to see how they’ve engaged with the ideas, since that was one of the unknowable aspects before coming here: how easy would it be to work with my usual method of setting out tasks and engage with the dancers in the creative process, rather than making all the material myself and getting them to follow? Sometimes it’s taken a few tries for them to understand exactly what the thing is, but some of my ideas are quite complicated, even for English-speaking dancers; they’ve done very well, and I’ve been very impressed at how easily they engage with my ideas.

Q: What do you expect to achieve from this process?

A: I like to think of every piece I make as something new, a chance to try out new ideas. Hopefully this piece will be a reflection of that to some extent: there will be things in this piece that haven’t been in my previous works. Already there are some ideas I’m working with, so the challenge right now is to put it all together. Hopefully, the dancers will be shown in a different light as well: it’s an opportunity for them to show themselves in a way they might not have been seen before. One of the things I’ve found interesting is the best way to work with what their strengths as dancers and my strengths as a choreographer are, finding the middle ground between challenging them enough to do things they haven’t done before, but also not pushing them to far so as to make them feel uncomfortable. I think that’s one of the most important skills for a choreographer, to bring out the best in the dancers, while also putting out a good show.

(transcribed by Kevin Wang)

Interviewed by Lin Yatin

Khamlane Halsackda (UK)

Q: What do you expect to come out of these three weeks of rehearsals?

A: I am very interested to experience the general dance scene in Asia. I’ve been to Bangalore, India this year, and now I’m in Taiwan. My family originally came from Laos, [...]]]> Aug. 4, 2011

Interviewed by Lin Yatin

Khamlane Halsackda (UK)

Q: What do you expect to come out of these three weeks of rehearsals?

A: I am very interested to experience the general dance scene in Asia. I’ve been to Bangalore, India this year, and now I’m in Taiwan. My family originally came from Laos, so it’s good to be able to come to Asia, where I came from, to be able to see how the training is, what kind of works are being shown, and to have an opportunity to input my own vision of choreography.

Q: Your training has been mainly in Western dance techniques?

A: I trained primarily in ballet and contemporary dance, but generally in Europe you need to be quite versatile. I’ve done everything, from pop videos, some more jazz works, to very modern and contemporary works. I’ve also performed in theatre pieces, so versatility is important.

Q: Now that you’ve rehearsed a few times with the dancers, can you share with us your experience?

A: Yes, it’s been wonderful. I think they’re very hungry to experience something else. They’re very strong students, the ones that I have from TNUA, and it’s been very surprising that they’ve already experienced so much and are capable of doing so much. Theiropen-mindednessand physical capabilities have made my job easier.

Q: What do you hope to hope to achieve at the end of the three weeks.

A: Apart from an amazing piece of choreography? Well, just to fully experience my time here, to be involved with all the people I meet, to accumulate contacts. In anything like this, to be in a different country and a different city is to grow, to learn new things, and to push myself further.

(transcribed by Kevin Wang)

Aug. 4–5, 2011 at TNUA

Transcripts Part II: Three UK choreographers by Kevin Wang

Avatâra Ayuso (UK)

Q: What are your expectations of this ArtsCross/DansCross project?

A: I think to learn as much as I can from the dancers, from the people here at the university, even [...]]]> Interviews with ArtsCross 2011 Choreographers
by LIN Yatin

Aug. 4–5, 2011 at TNUA

Transcripts Part II: Three UK choreographers
by Kevin Wang

Avatâra Ayuso (UK)

Q: What are your expectations of this ArtsCross/DansCross project?

A: I think to learn as much as I can from the dancers, from the people here at the university, even the administrators.

Q: I know you’ve been working with the dancers for two rehearsals so far. What has your experience been with them in the studio?

A: Very good. Considering I have 6 dancers from Taiwan, 1 from Hong Kong and 7 from Mainland China, I can see they have different training – it’s very evident – but they’ve been working very well together. Of course, right now they’re just getting to know each other, but I can see that they want to: they really want to learn, and they want to put themselves in unfamiliar situations, which is very good. That’s the main thing, because when you have the dancers try something, it takes many days and weeks to convince that person; but here they already want to. Right now I haven’t set any material; we’re just doing improvisation and contact. I need to know first what they’re good at, what they are and aren’t comfortable with. Once I know who they are as dancers, then I can go into one direction or another. Tomorrow I will start to set material, but up to now it’s been just getting to know each other.

Q: Do you have any specific goals to achieve through this piece?

A: Apart from the practice of choreography, not really. But now that I have 14 dancers, I know that I want to work in very complex structures, because in Europe we usually don’t get that many dancers. I’ve already known for two or three years what I want to do with those relationships, but I never got enough dancers to do it. So, choreographically, I’m going to try to work with complex structures and patterns.

(Aug. 4, 2011)