Between Heaven and Earth, Hovering: A Music and Dance Collaboration Across Culture

This thesis examines the creative process and philosophy behind the piece Between Heaven and Earth, Hovering, a cross-cultural collaboration between music and dance. The dancer uses the traditional Chinese shuixiu (water sleeves) as an extension of her body and explores new pathways and movement patterns without referencing the symbolism of the traditional Chinese dance, while the music reinterprets the movement by blending the sound worlds of the Chinese traditional instrument pipa, Icelandic poem, vocal improvisation, live processed small objects and processed recordings from different locations. The music and dance reinforce each other and strive for the same concepts and aesthetics, developing into an immensely integrated theatrical performance that creates an imaginary reality from the distant memories. My research into the history of Chinese aesthetics explains how cultural backgrounds consciously and unconsciously influence the compositional process, and how our collaboration started with improvisation and eventually reached a highly structured form and relatively fixed composition with improvised elements.