Professor Chris Bannerman: dance from intercultural perspectives

Drawing on an illustrious career in dance and choreography, Professor Chris Bannerman’s research focuses on dance and intercultural connection to help us make sense of the world.

Starting his career in dance at the National Ballet of Canada, Chris Bannerman left to explore South Asian dance forms by travelling through India, and across the region. He decided to stop off in London on his way back home to Canada in 1973 – and ended up staying in the city. He retrained at London Contemporary Dance School (LCDS), danced and choreographed for a number of companies, and then joined The Place, where he performed and choreographed for 15 years. After this, he went onto Middlesex University to take on a role as Head of School of Dance. During his time there, he became a Professor of Dance and established the ResCen research centre to explore performance processes, practices and contexts. He has also served on judging panels for a range of prestigious dance awards including the Olivier Awards, and continues to work with a variety of arts, industry, and governmental organisations. In 2023, he became a Visiting Professor at The Place.

Chris’s research interests span dance and body practices, audiences, and intercultural connections. With a focus on bringing together different people from various contexts, his research hones in on cultural exchange to further our understanding of dance and the world more broadly. Chris has a particular interest in dance and the arts in China, and looks for ways to meaningfully nurture knowledge exchange. He also believes in raising the profile of all the different people who make dance relevant in the real world – from producers to audiences. He brings his deep experience in the industry to navigate different cultural perspectives and what they can bring to dance and the arts.

Dance across borders

“Most of the issues in the world today are not confined to national boundaries,” Chris explained. “That is true for everything from pollution to Covid-19. In the arts, we’re trying to answer some key questions about how the world can operate.”

Chris has worked on a number of cross-border, intercultural projects that explore ideas of dance and culture in different contexts. ArtsCross is one long-term initiative which brings together academics, artists and producers from Beijing, Hong Kong, Taipei and London. “ArtsCross is intercultural and ethnographic research,” Chris said. “It involves dialogues between academics and artists who are creating work, culminating in performance and academic presentations. It’s designed to enable a strong and productive debate between East and West.”

Each ArtsCross collaboration brings participants together for three weeks at a time, with the purpose of creating pathways across cultural, national and artistic borders. So far, there have been more than 300 participants, who have created 45 new dance works, which have reached more than 9,000 audience members. ArtsCross has enjoyed wide impact, and the results have been presented at conferences, plus included in a range of articles. The processes and findings from ArtsCross also resulted in the publication of a dedicated edition of the Choreographic Practices journal.

In China itself, the work has directly led to curriculum changes in China’s leading dance academies, the support of influential dance artists in China, and professional development for people involved in the dance sector in China. One finding of the ArtsCross work was that dancers need to respond imaginatively and confidently as part of the creative process, which resulted in improvisation and creativity classes being introduced in China’s dance schools, open to all dancers regardless of their specialist dance form.

In addition, Chris is the Principal Investigator of ‘Future Ecologies: Producing Dance Network’ (FE:PDN), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to bring together academics and arts professionals to reimagine an inclusive, extended and sustainable ecosystem for dance. This network comprises academics from six higher education institutions and arts professionals from seven arts organisations. The programme of activities has included open forum events designed to collaboratively envisage the future for dance and practice research. The findings from this network are currently being analysed and written up.

Continuing intercultural work

Underpinning all of Chris’s research is the exploration of dance, the arts and culture from different perspectives. “There’s the macro-geopolitical level, with shifting geopolitical tectonic plates,” he explained. “Through ArtsCross we addressed themes such as ‘Dancing in a Shaking World’ and ‘Dancing on the Edge’ that relate to where we think we are in the world at the moment. But it’s also about the working environment and the mundane, everyday studio practices in dance, and how they are – or are not – culturally related.”

The research that Chris has done to date demonstrates how dance can bring people together. The Taiwan Strait is one of the world’s most militarised zones, and ArtsCross has created dialogue in the region even as political tensions rose. “When you’ve involved in dance, you go into a room that could be a room anywhere, with mirrors and ballet barres,” Chris said. “And yet, what happens in that room has connections across the world.”

There are also new research questions that have appeared through the course of his research. One of these relates to the issue of translation. “Often, specific Chinese concepts just can’t be mapped onto the West,” Chris said. “Even with a simple greeting, many English-speaking people want to say ‘Ni hao ma’ in Chinese, which directly translates to say ‘how are you?’ But this can be seen to be a deeply personal question and so Chinese-speakers often say ‘ni chi le ma’ which literally translates to ‘have you eaten?’ but really means ‘how are you?’ These seemingly simple examples demonstrate that understanding dance and concepts such as postmodernism just can’t be shifted from one context to another.”