Month: November 2012

    The new National Library of China building in the Haidian District of Beijing. The studios of the Beijing Dance Academy are in the distance on the right.

Past  1 a.m. and I’m trying to get a lot done, incl packing, in London before I fly back to Beijing for the fist time since 2009 and the inaugural phase of this international cultural exchange centred round dance. I’m sorry to have missed the selection process of the dancers particularly by the choreographers from England. As I remember…

ArtsCross Beijing 2012: Light and water We are back in Beijing, scene of the first collaboration project in 2009, Danscross: Dancing in a shaking world. This was followed in 2011 with an expanded collaboration ArtsCross 2011: Uncertain…waiting…which linked Beijing Dance Academy, (BDA) Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA) and ResCen Research…

I was met at the airport by the delightful Starry. This is her chosen English name. Alas, I didn’t jot down her Chinese name. (Given that I’d just gotten off of a ninehour-plusflight, I guess I was allowing myself to take it easy on the language front on my first day here.) I do know, however,…

Studio and seminar I believe we academics like to talk in dichotomies and dualities – despite all claims to the opposite and numerous attempts to transgress or even abolish them. Our second working day in Beijing has come and gone. The two days were filled, in the mornings, with watching the final rehearsals of works created by Asian…

Since my arrival in the rehearsal rooms two days ago at the Beijing Dance Academy I wonder how I might begin to be able to refer to the various unfolding dance works that are being developed here. While I have not been able to visit rehearsals of all choreographers yet, I already have become aware…

The first thing that hit me as I walked into the first session today was that some of the instructions that choreographer Zhang Yuanchun was giving to his dancers (translated by the interpreter) were very similar to ones that I give to my students: ‘Let yourself be surprised by the moment’, ‘The movement is good but…

We dance round in a ring and suppose But the Secret sits in the middle and knows Robert Frost’s short poem “The Secret Sits” from the collection A Witness Tree (1942) does what it says and is therefore, according to Jonathan Culler (1981), performative: it keeps its secret by inviting us to join a speculative…

Ongoing challenges with accessing this blog from China means that posts are currently being made on a Chinese blog site. You can follow the progress here: http://artscross.blog.sohu.com/

This is my second occasion to attend ArtsCross, as I attended the first ArtsCross (called Danscross) in 2009 at Beijing Dance Academy. I, who come from Japan, appreciate from the bottom of my heart the invitation to me for this ArtsCross in this difficult diplomatic situation between Japan and China. I am very glad to keep our…

Picking up from Martin and Ola’s post I was thinking about the term ‘lost in translation’ (also used by Robin in his rehearsal – muttered under his breath, laughingly, as a lively debate ensued between the dancers and the interpreter about one of his instructions.  Although the problems of mis-communication and mis-understanding during any translation…

Great questions, Rebecca (see “Lost in translation”, 2012-11-15, below). I find questions as useful as answers in the present circumstances and so can the hiatus of translation be in creative processes, as you and the mentioned choreographers point out. In your last paragraph you pose the question of what it is that is being translated: “An idea,…

Because we sinned in our desire — our hubris – to equal God, we were scattered like lost sheep “abroad upon the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4). Previously a united humanity which migrated from the East speaking one tongue, we were now isolated geographically and socially, vainly…

I read Alex’s and Martin’s entries with great interest: Alex’s caution about conceptual dichotomies and oppositions in our observational/writerly challenges and Martin’s affirmative stance of a sense-based mode of perception in response to an experiential excess – and, of course, the ensuing task how to formulate overdetermined events. I particularly concur with the view that the promise…

On exchange and translation in light and water In America, when one has lost something—a sweater forgotten in a dance studio for instance—one goes to the “Lost & Found.” At my school, the Lost & Found is a cardboard box in a dressing room of our theater. One makes the detour hoping to find that something forgotten left behind, hoping…

Both this year, and last, I have been struck by how often I have watched the rehearsals sideways. Instead of watching from the front ‘as if’ in a theatre, I mostly watch from where the wings might be. This is largely accidental, and dictated by trying to sit somewhere as unobtrusive as possible after entering the room. There…

“Really?!” Martin leaned forward suddenly, a smile sneaking across his face, “You use the word in that sense?” We were sitting in the hotel lobby. I had referenced the word, “radical” as adjective, as in “of or going to the root or origin; fundamental.” I nodded slowly, squinting at Martin: a very witty guy, one never knows precisely…

On Thursday I had the privilege of watching some of the dance classes at BDA. The experience brought a new perspective to me with regard to the overarching theme of “translation” in ArtsCross, which has underlined many discussions this year in Beijing and last year in Taipei. Translation implies boundaries to be crossed over as well as practices and meanings that…

While the intensity of the work at BDA continues and as we move into the new theatre for the final rehearsals, another aspect of ResCen’s ArtsCross work takes place in central Beijing, in an independent arts centre called Penghao which is located in a traditional hutong building near the Central Academy of Drama. Richard Layzell, a ResCen Research…

I’ve been thinking along the same lines as Ted in terms of the translation process (Radical Geography). A moment from Rachel’s rehearsal on Tuesday, when she was speaking to the translator who was about to pass this on to the dancer: ‘The other day when we were doing some practice in here she was referencing…

Reading the various blogs, what draws my attention are the varieties of complex fluidities between experiences from the rehearsal spaces and the larger and wider contexts and exchanges. The various practices of performance-making in the studios here at Beijing Dance Academy, and how they may or may not relate to each other, are of course part of a larger ‘set-up’,…

In working across cultures, translation is mostly presented as a matter of how to speak to one another, but the difficulty of communicating across languages and cultures is also often a matter of how to listen. In this respect, we also need to remember that culture is a meaningful part of each person’s life, rather than…

I’m writing this on the train from gatwick airport into London to catch my next train to Exeter in the south west of England. Another context in which to consider the questions we’ve been discussing this week! I’m so sorry that I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye last night — I had to run straight…

Last day in Beijing and I sense a need to make the past week’s throughline as clear as the day outside the hotel window. For two reasons my focus has gravitated towards classic Chinese poetry as an entry point to a contact zone of translation: first, for the obvious linguistic reasons that reflect differences between our uses of language; second,…

… a continuation of my blog from 16 November … After many years of thinking about Chinese as a basis for his universal pictographic language to improve understanding between peoples, the philosopher Leibniz abandoned this undertaking; however he retained a deep adoration for what he saw as the ‘other’ concentration of human cultivation and refinement…