Euro-Asian dance alliances

November 2020

European media consumers feast on the elections of a country half way across the globe: the United States of America. We witnessed this change of power with a great sense of involvement and even emotion, perhaps even more so than in our own countries. Where does this obsession with the USA come from? If it was due to our interdependence in economics, technology, safety, and environmental health, wouldn’t we pay just as much attention to what is happening in East Asia? Culture and language are key. One moment they are like a bridge, the next – a barrier. They make our relationship to North America and Asia essentially different. And even though Taiwanese films, Japanese novels and K-pop songs are increasingly becoming part of European mainstream culture, they remain poorly represented compared to other imported cultural goods. Non-verbal art forms like dance are less prone to that problem, and lend themselves to help us close the gap.

Despite its undeniable remit of facilitating cross-border connections within Europe, Aerowaves doesn’t shy away from transcontinental thinking. Armed with dance and with John Ashford at its helm, the organisation commits to giving more visibility to emerging European choreographers in Asia, and vice versa, and to deepen understanding among the individuals involved in these exchanges as well as among their audiences and communities altogether.

Taiwan

The earliest of those partnerships dates back to 2009, when Ashford met Gwen Hsin-Yi Chang at the selection panel of the Taishin Arts Award in Taiwan’s capital Taipei. “I really appreciated John’s perspective and his openness to Asian art. He had very profound conversations with Taiwanese artists at the time,” Chang recalls. With a shared ambition to support young artists in a sustainable way, they established a structural collaboration in 2017 when Chang became Head of International Partnerships at National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Weiwuying), a state-of-the-art performance centre in south Taiwan.

Their agreement with Aerowaves is threefold. First, both organisations have agreed to exchange programmes every two years between their respective presentation platforms: Weiwuying’s Taiwan Dance Platform, a biennial showcase of independent and mainly Asian dance, and Aerowaves’ Spring Forward Festival.

A second component focuses on dance criticism. At Spring Forward 2018, Chang was invited to attend Springback Academy, Aerowaves’ intensive writing workshop, as an observer, resulting that same year in a Taiwanese spinoff called Writing about Dance, conducted by Sanjoy Roy and Stella Tsai in English and Chinese during the Taiwan Dance Platform. “We reached a young generation of local writers for whom reviewing in English was a big step, but also a strategic step for the future,” says Chang.

Third, Chang represented Weiwuying in Aerowaves’ annual partner meetings, to exchange opinions and to vote in the selection procedure as a European partner. “Within this network everything is open for discussion without any presumption or limitation: not only trends and the art, but also the situations in different countries, difficulties, practices from companies, artists, producers, presenters and so on,” she says. Chang recently left Weiwuying to relocate to Europe, but she is convinced that the alliance between Weiwuying and Aerowaves will only intensify, even without her as its driving force.

South Korea

In South-Korea, several Aerowaves artists have made stage appearances at Jong-Ho Lee’s SIDance (Seoul International Dance Festival), following the director’s visits to most Spring Forward events. Ahram Gwak, current Head of the Programming & Production Teams at Korea National Contemporary Dance Company (KNCDC), was formerly active in international programming at SIDance.

“My job at SIDance was to promote international activities for Korean independent choreographers and dance companies. So I studied Aerowaves as a model,” says Gwak. After making the switch to KNCDC, the same questions remained pertinent: “How to introduce our domestic choreographers to a world stage?”

In 2018, the company initiated their STEP UP commissioning programme, with the aim of further developing existing works by emerging Korean choreographers. Gwak invited three international jury members to be on the jury panel, including Ashford from Aerowaves. “I particularly pursued an international evaluation of the candidates, in order to prospect which works could have a life outside of Korea,” she says. After being selected and developed inside the framework of STEP UP, A complementary set_Disappearing with an Impact by The Choi X Kang Project was scheduled for Spring Forward 2020, but could only be presented online due to Covid-19. But KNCDC and Aerowaves didn’t let that spoil the fun. “We plan to keep this collaboration going. I even dream of one day inviting Aerowaves choreographers to Korea for dance creations with our local creatives,” says Gwak.

Japan

Another collaboration in the pipeline is with Kinosaki International Arts Center (KIAC) and Yokohama Dance Collection (YDC) in Japan. The foundations for this partnership were laid at TPAM2020, the performing arts meeting in Yokohama, where Ashford, Yuichiro Yoshida (Program director at KIAC) and Shinji Ono (Director at YDC) put their heads together.

“We envisioned an exchange in which Mr Ono and I would select an Aerowaves artist from Spring Forward Festival, let this choreographer use the facilities of the residency centre in Kinosaki to create a new work, and finally present the final result in Yokohama. In return, Spring Forward Festival would include a Japanese artist in their programme,” says Yoshida. “The Japanese dance scene is fairly weak compared to the one in Europe. Our goal as a residency centre is to connect with partners outside of Japan, to provide opportunities for domestic artists to present their work internationally. That is why our connection with Aerowaves is so important.” After years of preparation, the three partners hope to finally kick off the first residency in 2022 with the Finnish artist Jenna Jalonen.

Europe

But we don’t always have to look far for meaningful connections to Asian culture. Among the many selected Aerowaves artists who work in geographic Europe are some with a deeply rooted connection to Asia, which they put at the centre of their work. Italian-Japanese Masako Matsushita (selected in 2020) uses taiko drumming to explore questions of cultural heritage and biculturality. Joy Alpuerto Ritter was raised in the USA and Germany, but was immersed in Filipino traditions by her mother. Her work Babae, a solo that invokes ancestral stories, was selected for Spring Forward Festival 2020.

“Right now I really want to connect with my roots,” says Ritter. “Filipino folk dance is still in my body because I did it for such a long time. The witch dances with their feminine specificity have a quality that I see rarely in other styles. This is all defining my personal voice as a choreographer.”

Korean dancer and choreographer Sung Im Her moved to Belgium in 2004, but her work and her Korean background stay inseparable. Her work NUTCRUSHER was selected for Spring Forward 2021. “This piece deals with my experience of being an Asian woman living and performing in Europe, and the Western male gaze that makes obedient and quiet stereotypes of us,” she explains. Because Ritter and Her’s work has only been shared digitally inside the Aerowaves network due to COVID-19, they are impatiently waiting to return to the stage, to continue enchanting and disenchanting live audiences with both old and new forces of the Far East.

By Jonas Schildermans