Creating collaborative partnerships : enabling public access to live urban art, innovative performance and creative research

This paper explores a large scale international project, Accented Body, which involved partnerships across the arts industry, the tertiary sector, government and philanthropic organisations. These partnerships coalesced around a multi-faceted concept of the body as site and in site through connectivity. Complex funding and creative partnerships are often required to allow artists to access technologies and resources in order to realise works of scale, which connect physical and virtual environments and artists across countries. This paper will provide evidence of a successful role model in which research, community access and artistic goals were realised through processes linking the aspirations of all three sectors, in Australia and beyond. \ud \ud Whilst the rhetoric of global connectivity has become part of the lexicon of arts practice, this often requires resource-intensive technologies beyond the reach of independent and project-based artists. Accented Body was able to realise such rhetoric by bringing together small groups of interdisciplinary artists to work in tandem with large academic institutions, philanthropic organisations and arts industry funding bodies. It provides a model of a highly visible international performance event achieved through a series of discrete performance teams interconnected by an overarching creative brief. \ud \ud Central to all of the partnerships was the creative collaboration between artists and technicians in realising the concept of the body in site and as site, through physical and virtual connectivities in a performative environment. This occurred through thirty key artists from five countries working together across six sites at a newly developed urban village in Brisbane, with distributed events in Korea and the United Kingdom. Meeting at this major geographical site for the creative process and final performance outcome enabled artists and technicians to have access to state-of-the-art technological infrastructure housed at a major university within the urban village. The largely outdoor interactive environment provided both real time and virtual presences for onsite and remote audiences. \ud \ud This paper articulates the relationship between the various funding partners and how differing agendas were negotiated to realise a common artistic outcome. Creative processes established shifting mobile partnerships between technologies, artistic concepts and approaches, and architectural settings, at a local and global level. Most significantly, ongoing partnerships emerged between the collaborating creative and technical personnel in a mutual influencing in which the creativity of the technicians and problem solving of the artists blurred the boundaries normally defined between arts and science, and challenged audience/performer relationships