'Fusion' Performing Arts: a Plea for Diversity

International audienceThe authors are proposing an approach to creative forms of performing arts allowing diversity and unity to coexist. In their view, this is possible through a cross-fertilization of Western and non-Western cultures in which the main theoretical and practical knowledge sources would derive from cognitive anthropology and the experience acquired by learning from acknowledged masters. Having questioned the role of "ethno"-sciences in this process, they discuss analytical methods in research on music/dance, such as space categorizations and movement transcription. They suggest that composers and choreographers should work together to render explicit certain fundamental aspects of their knowledge, more specifically those relating to experiences of time. In the end they outline an old cognitive theory of suggestive expression in music/dance/drama performance which comes in support of recent work in anthropology of the arts