A difficult whole: reading Ananya Chatterjea’s Mohona, Estuaries of Desire

Abstract

This article elucidates a pedagogical formulation delineating the collaborative, relational, and process-oriented nature of viewing dance as a practice-as-research (PaR) enquiry emanating in the field of South Asian Dance Studies. Being an Odissi practitioner, an Indian classical dance form from the eastern Indian state of Odisha, I account for my perspective as my embodied learning gets in the way of how I analyze Mohona: Estuaries of Desire, a dance-theater production by Ananya Dance Theatre (ADT) that premiered on 20–21 September 2013 in Minneapolis. Mohona is directed by dance-scholar-activist, Ananya Chatterjea, Artistic Director of ADT and a trained Odissi dancer. Mohona means “estuary” in Bengali and refers to confluence of the river with the ocean. I see Chatterjea’s work as a confluence of various elements because the choreography draws movement from Odissi and other Indian somatic practices like Yoga and Chhau. Architect Robert Venturi inspires me to think of contemporary Indian dance as “difficulty unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion.” Through a combination of choreographic analysis and PaR, I read Mohona as a self-reflexive phenomenon where theory and practice are imbricated within each other into Venturi’s “difficult whole.”