ArtsCross Beijing 2019: Beyond the Clouds
- Submitting institution
-
Middlesex University
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 1571
- Type
- H - Website content
- Month
- March
- Year
- 2021
- URL
-
http://rescen.net/ref21_artscross/
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- Yes
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
2
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- ArtsCross, Beyond the Clouds (BtC), involved intercultural dialogue in and through creative process, performance, seminars, conferences and forums linking artists, academics and producers from Beijing, London and Taipei. Curating BtC began 8 months prior to the project start date: selecting artists, academics (first-time attendees from Hong Kong Academy for the Performing Arts), producers (another innovation), interpreters and documentors; selecting the research themes and weaving the timetable into a flexible structure allowing creative process, dialogue, observation to move smoothly into and through the logistics of performances, forum and conference.
In the event, Beijing Dance Academy host, Professor Xu’s presence was required at a residential six-week Leadership seminar series. This necessitated real-time curation - improvising within the structure, altering and/or reconfiguring the plans. Potential chaotic disorganisation was reconceptualised by activating and applying Zhuangzi’s Daoist wuwei: spontaneous, active non-action (Barrett 2011). In a moment, previous reflective and intellectual research into traditional Chinese thought (Bannerman 2018) became, of necessity, present in/as lived experience.
The difficulties stimulated collegial good humour, despite increasing regional political tensions; one response involving a spontaneous collective relocation to the BDA café, without direction or intervention, which allowed mixed research teams to reflect on specific moments of practice and to discuss innovation in creative processes, movement ‘languages’, their provenances and contexts, translation, artistic identity/ies, embodied knowledges and working languages and the role of the creative producer.
Insights evidenced in artist, academic and producer dialogues and practices included the sometimes -conflicting contemporary manifestations and understandings of identity/ies and their evolving hybridised nature; issues of ‘Chineseness’ (Tucker 1994, Wu 2018), its relation to ‘the West’ and Anglosphere specifically, and the problematising of the binary/ies that this suggests.
Public performances were presented in Theatre of Beijing Dance Academy; Producers Forum and ArtsCross Conference: Beijing Dance Academy; ResCen website documentation/commentary.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
