Choreographers and Musicians in Collaboration, from the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Century
Traditionally, dance has always needed music, although over the last century, this relationship has frequently been questioned. This chapter charts key historical shifts in choreomusical thinking, followed by a series of contemporary case studies demonstrating a range of approaches to, as well as commonalities across time in, the theories and practices of collaboration. Evidence shows increasingly independent, multidimensional, even oppositional relations between music and dance and a new fluidity in the behavior of artists, enabled partly by the advent of super-fast technology. In dance, relatively little information is available on the nature of creative processes, especially on musical issues. For the case studies, this chapter incorporates new interview material with choreographers and musicians based in the UK: Wayne McGregor, at home in both contemporary dance and ballet; Shobana Jeyasingh, who draws from South Asian classical and Western dance practices; and the performance duo Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion.