Dancing the dual phoenix - Collaborating across cultures: A choreographer’s view of a Vietnamese – Australian collaboration

摘要

Collaboration in artistic practice ideally embraces ideals of cooperation, teamwork, and symbiosis amongst like-minded people with common goals and a shared philosophy. However, when one is working collaboratively with another culture, training, creative processes, expectations, relationships, and aesthetics may not only contain differences but in some cases may appear to be directly in conflict with one’s own experiences and beliefs. In this context concepts of collaboration must necessarily be re-examined, and the following paper does so from the point of view of an Australian contemporary dance director and choreographer participating in a Vietnamese/Australian music and dance project Through the Eyes of the Phoenix, in which five Australian and forty five Vietnamese artists participated