Crossing Languages 跨越語言

1. Crossing Languages跨越語言 Seminar for ArtsCross London 2013

2. Crossing Languages: • Crossing verbal languages Crossing body language and verbal language Crossing systems of body languages Crossing ways of understanding and interpreting the world 跨越語言: 跨越不同的文字語言、跨越身體語言與文字語言、跨越不同的身體語言體系、跨越不同的理解與詮釋世界的模式

3. “Routes begins with this assumption of movement, arguing that travels and contacts are crucial sites for an unfinished modernity…: a view of human location as constituted by displacement as much as by stasis…. They are concerned with human difference articulated in displacement, tangled cultural experiences, structures and possibilities of an increasingly connected but not homogeneous world.” (From James’s Clifford’s Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, p.2; Bold added)

4. Discussing the unfinished modernity within the context of ArtsCross • How is the concept of “modernity” perceived historically in the cultural-social-political contexts of China, Taiwan and the UK/European continent/US? • How is it related and reflected in the development of dance(s) in these respective locales? • How is ArtsCross creating dialogue with these diverse histories of modernity?

5. “Travelemerged as an increasingly complex range of experiences: practices of crossing and interaction that troubled the localism of many common assumptions about culture. In these assumptions authentic social existence is, or should be, centered in circumscribed spaces—like gardens where the ‘culture’ derived its European meanings…. But what would happen…if travel were untethered, seen as a complex and pervasive spectrum of human experiences? Practices of displacement might emerge asconstitutive of cultural meanings rather than as their simple transfer or extension.” (From James’s Clifford’s Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, p.3; Bold added)

6. How do we think and talk about culture and authenticity in ArtsCross? • How does the action and concept of travel (practices of crossing and interaction) trouble and broaden the traditionally holistic and static interpretation of (national/ethnic) Culture? • How do we navigate between and understand the relationship between (cultural) authenticity, authority and authorship in this globalized contemporary world, especially with regard to creative acts in dance?

7. Indeed, the currency of culture and identity as performative acts can be traced to their articulation of homelands, safe spaces where the traffic across borders can be controlled…. Cultural action, the making and remaking of identities, takes place in the contact zones, along the policed and transgressive intercultural frontiers of nations, peoples, locales.” (From James’s Clifford’s Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, p.7; Bold added)

8. culture and identity as performative acts • From homelands to traveling in the world • The relation between dance and nationalism/state in diversely different political-economic contexts in the history of the 20th century. • The unraveling/re-entagling of this relationship in the 21st century. • How does ArtsCross address this history?