ABSTRACT
While collaborative projects are to be applauded for bridging gaps and promoting cultural understanding, it is important to understand the politics at work surrounding every encounter. Theatre artists have always traveled and have always shared their work outside of their respective communities. Practitioners must consider who benefits from artistic collaboration. An artist must be conscious of any imbalance of power and privilege, and contemplate appropriate ways to acknowledge what someone has given in an exchange. Many cross-cultural collaborations involve generating new work or creating theatre out of contemporary literature. International theatre collaborations, and certainly nearly all of the international collaborations that receive acclaim in the international press, spring from companies based in Western Europe and the United States. The Internet has made communicating between groups and individual artists easier than ever, and digital tools such as streaming and video calls have given rise to unprecedented real-time collaboration across the globe.
