1.  Introduction

The authors of this paper; the composer and electronics designer Mark Bromwich and the choreographer and dancer Julie Wilson began working together in 1988. Initially our work together took the form of a conventional collaborative brief, i.e. the composer writing an electro-acoustic score for a piece of choreography the choreographer had in mind.

Dancer/Composer collaborations in England were being encouraged at that time, and the Arts Council of England was supporting a number of investigative ‘how to collaborate’ residencies in an effort to encourage dance companies to commission more original scores for their works. However, many of the workshops and residencies failed to address any of the fundamental questions concerning boundaries and art form territories, and the possibilities of such boundaries being crossed through a variety of collaborative processes. It seemed difficult to break free from the old tried and tested model where both artists worked in isolation meeting briefly to share musical and choreographic ideas. This model provided a safe no-mans-land for negotiation and remains relatively non-art form intrusive. An extreme example of this type of process is perhaps the early collaborative work of John Cage and Merce Cunningham.

However, with the collapse of geographic boundaries with the increased power of telecommunications and the Internet; in the lifting of national and diplomatic boundaries in an attempt to promote greater political, economic and social co-operation, artists must begin to question whether it is within the spirit of the age to hang onto, and vigorously defend, their own art genre boundaries, or whether it would be more fruitful to relax their grip on the so-called high art forms, and allow them to hybridise, and perhaps give rise to other creative disciplines and forms. Art forms that may more adequately reflect, and establish themselves as more appropriate mediums through which to articulate the concerns and creative impulses of the 21st century.

2.  Toward a new way of working

In 1994 we began to move away from the traditional collaborative process, and look at ways of both including each other in the choreographic and compositional