On the politics of interdisciplinary collaboration

This paper investigates how the trend towards interdisciplinary collaboration has recently come to define both the art of dance and the academic discipline of dance studies. The call for collaboration is almost invariably accompanied by a rhetoric about democracy, and hence treated as politically significant. Artistic or academic encounters which permit dialogue are frequently (and often unquestioningly) regarded as democratic in nature, and hence construed in strongly positive terms. Democracy is indeed a major selling point of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century art, including dance. This article questions, however, whether interdisciplinary collaboration must necessarily be seen as democratic and therefore desirable, or whether it could instead be viewed as a more problematic corollary of contemporary forces such as globalisation and the modern market economy. My discussion applies models proposed in the realm of visual arts which also offer a useful framework within dance studies.