Here comes… Beijing! London! Taipei! (in alphabetical order…)

After two phases of Artscross I attended in Taipei in 2011 and in Beijing in 2o12 so far, an important shift took place for me at the auditions for this 2013 phase in London. I had always been highly sensitive to the discourses that emerged around the dancers and choreographers, as well as academics, representing in some ways their ‘countries’. Very…

Beginnings…

Yesterday was my first day of watching rehearsals, and for most groups it was their second day into the work. I left in the evening with a variety of very touching impressions, of people from different places getting to know each other. When I entered the room of Beijing choreographer Zeng Huangxing’s rehearsal, I was struck…

Language and beyond

Since one of my tasks at this particular Artscross event is to focus on ‘language’ as part of a group of academics, my attention has been drawn on the sorts of languages that are being used in the rehearsal spaces. In many instances I have witnessed a ‘searching’ for the ‘right’ words or expressions by choreographers and dancers, when working a movement out together.…

Making new experiences happen – creating zones of contestation

What’s in a “dancer”? What’s in a dancer as part of Artscross? Giorgio Agamben writes in ‘The Coming Community’ that “the antinomy of the individual and the universal has its origin in language” (2009, 9), making the point that the way language is used “transforms singularities into members of a class, whose meaning is defined by a common property” (ibid.).…