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Welcome to ArtsCross Hong Kong 2025
歡迎加入 跨藝 香港 2025
Welcome to the ArtsCross 2025 blog, only active now although the choreographers and dancers have been working since 3 June at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. This year’s theme is Dancing on the Edge and a provocation paper provided to artists and academics is downloadable here – the paper is also available in Chinese and Simplified Chinese. The seven choreographers from the partner cities Beijing, Hong Kong, London and Taipei are in the studios each working with a mixed group of dancers.
This year sees some developments including choreographers requesting some time free of webpostings and taking on the responsibility for documentation of the process and some vlogging as well, as well as allowing them more observer-free time in the studio.
Such changes are a natural feature of both the project and each location and it is easy to see the highly-energised 2025 studio sessions as a reflection of the highly-energised streets and lanes of Hong Kong’s vibrant built environment. Of course correlation is not causation, but one advantage of the blog format is the space for speculation. As long as there is the intellectual clarity on the part of writers and readers to distinguish between the considered judgement and the spontaneity of intellectual and artistic processes, then both modes of scholarly engagement are welcomed.
There are also changes in the wider context of ArtsCross, and I sense a shift that is the culmination of some years of incremental change, perhaps highlighted now by the presence of two choreographers from Beijing who are from contemporary dance backgrounds. Discussions more than 10 years ago raised questions of terminology relating to the nature of the cultural relationships and included whether we should describe ArtsCross as an intercultural or transcultural project; whether the project was the product of an exchange between cosmopolitan world cities; and if an internationalised dance market and culture linked us even if each was marked by local features.
Such debates about the local and global are almost perennial, but the internationalist perspective seems less persuasive today in a world of disrupted relationships between nation states. And in fact, the local is now being emphasised in UK funding systems as part of a recognition of the significance of being rooted in and contributing to a place. But even in 2015 there was resistance from our Beijing colleagues as if the concepts of transcultural, cosmopolitan, internationalised diversity, were western lenses that diluted the specificity of the culture and history of Chinese dance.
This was deeply felt given the role of the Beijing Dance Academy in developing Chinese dance culture which, since the 1950s, flowed into, through and out of that institution and included important development work on things such as Chinese Classical Dance. From the London perspective, the idea of a transcultural project was stimulated by surprising and impressive rapidly developing physical and digital infrastructure of the East Asian partner cities, and their increasing significance in a recalibrated world order.
The concept of cosmopolitan world cities never proposed a singular modernity, rather a spectrum of modernities but nonetheless we agreed on intercultural as the preferred term and noted the specificity that this acknowledged.
Here in Hong Kong in 2025, however, there appears to be an inflection point and both the choreographic work and the discussions seem less concerned with emphasising overtly Chinese characteristics and traditions. Perhaps these aspects are now themselves internationalised and there is a cultural confidence that does not require special attention. Or it is simply a feature of this ArtsCross and the context of Hong Kong with its role as both a transcultural meeting point for, and gateway to, the world; as well as its presence in the Greater Bay Area, a megalopolis of 86 million people and the world’s largest and most populated urban area.
Whatever the reasons for this change, it is only because of the longevity of ArtsCross that these things can be noticed and noted. A reminder again that it is a privilege to continue this set of relationships and the creative endeavour in an unstable world; to have a point of reference and set of engagements that can evolve over time, an ongoing vehicle for the ephemerality of dance and the flow of change that is fundamental to Chinese philosophy and world view. This is a special space which should not go unremarked.
Welcome to the blog for ArtsCross Hong Kong 2025: Dancing on the Edge.
Professor Christopher Bannerman
June 2025