Beyond the Cloud - ArtCross 2019

ArtsCross is a long-term initiative which brings together academics and artists across cultural, national and artistic borders. It is designed to enhance the prospects of stronger, more productive debate between East and West at a strategically critical moment. It seeks to harness the transformative power of the arts and art-making, to further intercultural dialogue, understanding, and to develop professional, personal and institutional exchange.

Artscross began in 2009 with an innovative and successful collaboration between ResCen (UK) and the Beijing Dance Academy (China) entitled Danscross: dancing in a shaking world. The project focuses on developing understanding not simply through exchanging cultural artefacts or performances, but by working together; examining creative processes and their outcomes; exchanging knowledge, skills and perhaps most importantly, points of view. At this time of intense change in the geo-political context, the project examines the particular – creative processes and performances – in order to glimpse the panoramic.

In 2019 it seems that the world is not just shaking – it is breaking apart, fragmenting, dis-integrating. All of this has taken us to a place where it is hard to see a way forward, and hard to imagine what dance can say or do to move things forward, to make a difference. For the edition happening in Beijing, the theme got inspired by the Chinese poetry Li Bai also known as Li Po (701-762 CE). He proposed that we might ‘meet at last on the Cloudy River of the sky’  a gleam of resilience and ability to endure turbulent times. ‘Beyond the clouds’ refers not only the traditional clouds, but also the modern ‘cloud’ of the digital age.