Meirigah Abubakari with the Author. Accra, Ghana. 2017 Source: Photo by Cari Ann Shim Sham 2017
Congratulations to NYU Tisch Dance Arts Professor Andy Teirstein for publishing a article in the International Journal of Social, Political and Community Agendas in the Arts!
VOLUME 14 ISSUE 4
Translucent Borders:
Dance and Music in Global Dialogue
Andy Teirstein,1 New York University, United States
Abstract: A border can be represented by a line. But it can also be viewed more expansively, as its own space, fertile with the potential for either confrontation or learning and evolution. This article examines ways that music and dance can engage cultures across borders. Focusing on “Translucent Borders,” a research Working Group at New York University, we consider the use of improvisation at points of cultural juxtaposition. Beginning in refugee camps in Lesbos in 2016, the Translucent Borders Working Group has facilitated global conversations between dancers and musicians in Israel, Palestine, Greece, Cuba, and Ghana through interviews, knowledge-sharing circles, improvisation, and performance. Over three years of meetings at these global sites, “Translucent Borders” encountered some recurring commonalities and differences in the ways that time is perceived musically and choreographically, a dynamic tension between repetition and development, extending also to concepts of improvisation and performance. The resonance of the “mother-tongue” as a cultural well-spring of both tradition and innovation is inseparable from these time-perceptions. We will look at the ways that these differing approaches affect roles in inter-cultural collaboration, and discuss some of the inherent tensions over the course of the project’s meetings and performances.
The International Journal of Social, Political and Community Agendas in the Arts is one of four thematically focused journals in the family of journals that support the Arts and Society knowledge community—its journals, book series, conference, and online community. It is a section of The International Journal of the Arts in Society.
The International Journal of Social, Political, and Community Agendas in the Arts explores the various points of interface of arts practices and communities, including the arts expressions of community, and group identities, arts policies, art and government, art as activism, museums and galleries as institutions, arts in advertising, and public arts.
As well as papers of a traditional scholarly type, this journal invites presentations of practice—including experimental forms of documentation and exegeses that can with equal validity be interrogated through a process of academic peer review. This, for instance, might take the form of a series of images representing artistic practice, together with explanatory notes that articulate this practice with other, significantly similar or different and explicitly referenced practices. The International Journal of Social, Political and Community Agendas in the Arts is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal.
