Dancing in the Diaspora Part II: Britain

Abstract

Contemporary Indian dancers with their variety of creative explosions gravitated in the late twentieth century and into the new millennium to the global North even as the genre continues to evolve within India. As discussed in the previous chapter, diasporic North American artists take Contemporary Indian Dance into bold thematic explorations of socio-political issues, gender and sexuality, as well as expanding the form in multidisciplinary and polyvocal directions. In this chapter, I explore the dance scene in Britain — the colonial epicenter with a specific relationship to South Asia going back to the eighteenth century, and continuing in ambivalent and complicated ways with the migrations of South Asians into Britain during the twentieth century. Whereas the United States is commonly recognized as a land of immigrants (though I would caution against romanticizing this), the arrival, integration, or marginalization of former ex-colonized peoples, including artists into Britain follows a different trajectory in the twentieth century. In British society, acutely class-conscious in the 1950s (somewhat different from the United States), working-class populations that entered the country performed specific service jobs in the economy. Their children, the second generation, as in the United States occupy a different space with higher levels of confidence than their South Asia born parents, and have openly embraced British identity. As I explore the British dance scene, similarities and differences with the artistic scenarios in North America (discussed in the previous chapter) will come to the fore.KeywordsZero DegreeTaxi DriverFemale DancerContemporary DanceSilk RouteThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.