ArtsCross Taipei 2011 begins…

The blog is live, the artists have arrived and dance writer Donald Hutera has been posting his observations of the first hours of ArtsCross Taipei 2011.

In the coming hours, days and weeks the academics will join the artists at the Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA) to undertake the observations, discussions and writing that are an intrinsic part of this exchange. I arrived four days ago to touch base with TNUA colleagues, and to join them in phone calls to the Beijing Dance Academy (BDA), continuing a partnership between ResCen and the BDA that began in 2009 with Danscross: dancing in a shaking world.

In the first entry on the blog for Danscross, (http://rescen.net/blog/) I noted that the preparation period of years, months, weeks and days were distilled into a single moment of palpable anticipation as we gathered in the studios of the Beijing Dance Academy and waited….

On that occasion the task facing the first two choreographers, Zhang Yunfeng (I am following the Chinese convention of placing the family name first) and Shobana Jeyasingh, was to work with the professional dance company of the BDA to create a dance that used up to six performers, was under ten minutes in length and addressed, in some way, the theme ‘dancing in a shaking world.’ These conditions also held true for the other six Danscross choreographers, who worked, two at a time, over consecutivetwo-weekrehearsal periods observed by two or three academics.

By way of contrast, in Taipei there will be ten choreographers (four from Taiwan, three from China, three from the UK); thirty to forty dancers (ten from BDA and twenty to thirty from Taiwan); and twenty academics (from BDA, TNUA and UK/USA) all present in one place at one time. This will add to the possibilities for dialogue and exchange, and will also increase, perhaps exponentially, the intensity of the experience.

We have decided to continue to explore the validity of Stravinsky’s notion that through the imposition of rules the artist finds freedom, and so we have kept the conditions that the choreographers faced in Danscross. There is however, a new theme — selected for its resonance for each partner, a resonance that must be activated in both the English and Chinese languages. While it was agreed some months ago, it seems to have gained in significance and appears especially salient today as we witness continued international turmoil over budgets and currencies, aging populations and health care, the search for safe and sustainable energy sources, questions of media and individual rights, and ecological and human fragility; all playing out in a time of profound geopolitical change and instability, as the balance of economic power shifts to Asia. In 2009 we felt that the world was shaking, but we also thought that by 2011 there would be more stability – now we are not sure, so our theme is simply: ‘uncertain…waiting…’

In spite of the inaction that this theme might imply, ArtsCross has brought together a group of international academics from theatre and dance to observe and reflect on performance over a number of projects, a broadening of focus that instigated the change of name from Danscross to ArtsCross. Taipei 2011 is one edition of a longer term commitment, and we arrived at this moment and place following months of discussion with Xu Rui and Zhang Ping from the BDA; and subsequently with Ping Heng the Dean of Dance at TNUA and her close colleague Wang Yunyu. The addition of TNUA was initiated by Yeh Jih-Wen, director of the agency Step Out Arts (SOA), whose offices are at the University of Bedfordshire and whose mission is to support the work of British East Asian artists. (http://www.stepoutarts.co.uk/) The partnership between ResCen and SOA allows us to see more deeply the resonances for the UK in work and exchanges that are taking place seven time zones away.

This will be a rich and complex experience and the potential strands of investigation for the academics and artists are multiple. A key point of reference for everyone is the focus on process and practice — which means that we can meet and exchange in and through the work. And it is by working together that we grow in understanding, as pointed out by Charles Landry and Phil Wood in The Intercultural City: Planning for Diversity Advantage (2007). The single performance event, lecture or workshop can do much to inspire and instil new glimpses, but it is in the day-to-day negotiation, in collectiveproblem-solving and the necessity for cooperative discussion that we really begin to understand the perspectives, the points of view of the ‘other’.

This will be the test – to achieve dialogue and hopefully understanding in the tangle of ‘otherness’ that will be in play — artists and academics, East and West, Republic of China/Taiwan and People’s Republic of China/China, theatre and dance, Europe and USA, women and men – in Rustom Bharucha’s words we are all ‘somebody’s other’. And this performance process is also a performative action in the sense discussed by the philosopher john Austin– the symbolic significance of the collaboration between the BDA and TNUA is active in the ‘real’ world, as well as in the reality of the world of performance, as is the presence of the UK partners.

One example of this is the fact that the BDA documentation refers to TNUA as TUA, omitting ‘National’ from the title as it implies the independence of Taiwan and denies the unity of China. This reflects the complexities of the arts when viewed within wider contexts, and perhaps recognises their value in cultural diplomacy, negotiating through and beyond the difficulties of language. In fact, as noted above, the formal designations for our partners’ nations are Republic of China (for what is often known as Taiwan) and the People’s Republic of China (often simply referred to as China). Seen through the formal construct, there appears to be agreement that there is only one China; the disagreement concerns whose claim to be the government of China has most legitimacy. The arguments surrounding this issue are many and it is not an issue that will be resolved through ArtsCross – rather, if necessary, we may employ what Colin Knox and Paul Carmichael, amongst others, referred to (in relation to the Northern Ireland agreement) as ‘creative ambiguity’.

Creative ambiguity is a stance that recognises and accommodates individual interpretations, even to the point of accepting the co-existenceof conflicting points of view. My sense is that creative ambiguity as an aesthetic principle is a feature of much artistic practice in the UK today, and artists often actively seek to create work that offers an interplay of interpretations. This observation does not attempt to minimise the potentially difficult ‘real life’ issues that surround the project – instead it recognises the potential sophistication of sensibility in the arts which, coupled with the openness and generosity shown by everyone up to this point, should continue to enrich the project.

In the working environment, it is most likely that associations, alignments and friendships will arise based on cultural values that stem from artistic and academic interests, minimising, if not eliminating, the significance of political terminologies of location. For example, the cultural values linking independent artists, or linking those in maintained arts organisations, just might supersede other considerations of culture, nationality and/or discipline.

And we must not forget that, potentially the most critical dynamic will stem from eastern and western perspectives.  In writing the announcement for ArtsCross, which precedes this blog entry, Martin Welton the co-directorof the overseas academic team (i.e. those not from China/PRC or Taiwan/ROC) suggested that the arts of East and West may not be as separate as they sometimes seem. Certainly the world is increasingly interdependent, and growing exchanges in the fields of business and commerce are being matched by exchanges in the arts. And yet, arguably the narratives of East and West do still diverge, or perhaps more accurately there is a narrative of separation.

This can perhaps be seen more strongly in the West, where the dynamics of past economic and cultural dominance, and associated interventions in Asia and elsewhere, have obscured the ability to know and understand ‘the other’. Amongst the reasons for this might be the lack of incentive for the dominant partner to be sensitive; and the assumption of the globalised status of the cultural values of the dominant (and in many casesEnglish-speaking) partner. However, an additional factor, as recent research by Gurminder Bhambra has made clear, is rooted in history, and the Western (re)construction of history. This was a project designed to bolster Western achievements by making them seemself-generated, a narrative of the renaissance and enlightenment as accomplishments created in splendid isolation through which the modern world came into being. The exclusion of Asia from this narrative was both a convenient means to enhance the narrative and an assertion of European hegemony — and so the East-Westdivide was written into history.

The analysis exposing the fallacies in this narrative is multifaceted, but one point is especially pertinent: the cultural transformation commonly known as the European Renaissance would have been impossible without the introduction of the printing press which originated in China and was introduced through busy trade routes into Europe. So, Martin Welton is right, both from a longer temporal perspective and because we must acknowledge work from the more recent past including East meets west in dance, a publication based on an initiative that brought together choreographers from east and west in the early 1990s, and the work of Yang Meiqi in Guangdong which began in the 1980s.

Still today, our partner artists and academics from Taiwan and China arguably know more about us than we know about them. Their artists and academics seem bilingual and bi-cultural, often trained in western and eastern forms, and comfortable with multiple modernities. We, as overseas participants, whether artists or academics, may recognise our unilingual limitations and experience our ‘otherness’; in this context we may become ‘dis-oriented’ and need to re-drawour mental maps to take account of present-dayAsia. We will see what transpires in the time to come, however the task may be eased by the green hills surrounding the TNUA campus, and the striking view of the eclectic and vibrant city of Taipei – as well as by the excitement of the dialogic space, the quality of the art and thinking, and the generosity and openness of the exchange.

As a conclusion, I would like to reformulate a point I made during Danscross. We see key challenges facing us today that are shared; they are also unconfined by national boundaries. We focus on the working environment and on the practices of artists and academics – encountering the ‘other’ hoping to better understand ourselves; examining the particular, hoping to see the panoramic. Today the artists are working and the exchange begins; I am optimistic and excited, but also, I confess even at this late hour that I have also experienced uncertain…waiting…

Austin, J L, 1962, How to Do Things with Words Clarendon Press

Bhambra, G K, 2007, Rethinking Modernity, Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination Palgrave Macmillan

Bharucha R, 1995, ‘Somebody’s Other: Disorientations in the Cultural Politics of Our Times’, Third Text 26:3–10 Routledge

Knox C, Carmichael P, 2005, “Devolution — the Northern Ireland way: an exercise in ‘creative ambiguity'” Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 23(1) 63 – 83 Pion

Landry, C and Wood P 2007, The Intercultural City: Planning for Diversity Advantage Earthscan

ResCen Danscross: Dancing in a shaking world (http://www.rescen.net/events/danscross09/DANSCROSS09.html)

Solomon R, Solomon, J Eds 1995, East Meets West in Dance: Voices in the Cross-Cultural Dialogue Harwood