Towards Hybridity

Abstract

This article considers the many layered and multi-faceted questions of hybridity as interdisciplinary encounter through the lens of a central case study – the EU-funded project, CultureMoves (2018-2020), on which the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) was a collaborating partner. With Europeana principles as a backdrop for the re-use of cultural heritage content, CultureMoves was an 18-month long project that aimed to develop a series of digital tools enabling new forms of touristic engagement and dance educational resources. The CultureMoves project is marked by hybridity in terms of its very interdisciplinarity, in its rooting in an interpretation of ‘creative tourism’ (Richards and Raymond 2000; Richards and Marques 2012) as a means of enhancing encounters between artists, tourists and communities and in its focus on the expanded sense of the coming together of dance artist and cultural heritage site. With particular reference to the broader field of creative tourism, this article reflects on the key questions and assumptions that underlie existing and potential collaborations between the dance research/ education, digital technology and tourism sectors, and which prepared the terrain for the toolkit development.

The article will also provide a close examination of experiments in the project that intend to awaken new experiences of space and place, and dormant histories, through bringing dancing bodies into relation with the built environment and digital technologies, as an intervention into creative (and cultural) tourism. Marked by the intersection of the human and non-human, and the differing expectations of stakeholders and audiences, the discussion also considers where experiments fail, to offer a view of what that tells us about the limits of hybridity in performance.

Notes

1 For information on CultureMoves see https://culturemoves.eu Alongside C-DaRE, collaborating project partners include IN2 Digital Innovations (DE), Fondazione Sistema Toscana (FST) (IT) and Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (UNL) (PT). The online kit features three digital tools: a plug-in, MovesCollect; a digital scrapbook, MovesScrapbook; and an online annotator, MotionNotes.

2 Europeana is the EU’s digital platform for cultural heritage and has more than 50 million digitized items, ranging from books, music, artworks and many other items. www.europeana.eu

3 See further, https://bit.ly/3lLkriy The CultureMoves team produced the MOOC in collaboration with KU Leuven and the EU-funded Kaleidoscope project (https://bit.ly/344mtEn). Covering topics such as museums, photography and dance, learners can acquire knowledge about user engagement theory, how to apply these ideas to cultural heritage contexts and how to use digital collections to create new ways of engaging and inspiring audiences.

4 Richards and Marques (2012: 2) relate this to the concept of ‘experiential tourism’ (see further Prentice 2001, 2005; Smith 2006).

5 Stock employs this term in the context of the growth of festival culture in Australia (through several major annual arts international festivals featuring dance and physical theatre, as well as smaller festivals) in parallel to the growth of cultural tourism, often in world heritage sites. The use of the term is significant as it can refer to the need to include traditional dance on an ethical basis, given the relatively recent concern to respect the cultures of indigenous communities in Australia.

6 The Internet Festival is the largest Italian event dedicated to the World Wide Web and digital innovation.

7 The chosen tourist destination was the Apuan Riviera, the northern coastal area of the Tuscany region (the Province of Massa-Carrara), because it is a challenging context to work in. Its peripheral position in the Tuscany region, as well as the complex historical, cultural and social characterizations of its strong identity, are very different from the classical tourist image of Tuscany.

8 This was sourced from Europeana and from two local archives, the EX APT photographic archive – Provincial Archive of Massa-Carrara, and the historical archive of the Private Marble Railway – Municipality of Carrara.

9 For example, the work of 1927 Productions can be seen to more successfully use interaction between live performance and digitally animated backdrop, as can UK choreographer Akram Khan’s dance work DESH (2011).

10 For useful distinctions on hybridity and synergy in other fields, see further Quammen interviewed in Dobrin and Keller (2005) and Jeremiah (2013) following Corning (1995). For Jeremiah, writing on cultural hybridity, a synergetic perspective may be pertinent as it allows for fruitful, co-existing multiplicities and makes recourse to ‘“co-operative effects” … produced by things that “operate together”’ to make significant impacts, rather than trying to ‘produce a third space which carries the best or worst of both worlds’ (2013: 165).