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This thought was marinating as I went to see the culturally collaborative, contemporary dance trilogy Other Suns on Thursday night: “Music is not an international language. It consists of a whole series of equally logical but different systems.” This nugget was drilled into me by an ethnomusicologist professor and seemed apropos given what I’d learned about the creation period for this piece. What about dance, then? Is movement truly an international language, or does it too consist of different systems, steeped in the cultures from which diverse styles are born? 

Choreographer Margaret Jenkins curated notions of communication and balance with her company of San Francisco-based dancers, then took her dancers to China to further develop these ideas in collaboration with the Guangdong Modern Dance Company (GMDC), following which the GMDC developed its own conjugation of the material. (Notably, the collaboration between both companies was used as the finale of the trilogy.) Read more »