Abstract
ABSTRACT This article examines Kathak as an Inter-Asia dance form across India and Hong Kong. Typified as “classical” dance in India, Kathak’s twenty-first-century transposition to Hong Kong is enabled by members of the Indian diaspora and local performers. Kathak’s expansion is also facilitated by an interest in popular Indian culture across Asia, notably through Bollywood. Against this background, Kathak cohabits a tension between a classicized identity in India, and an ethnicized folk representation abroad. Drawing on perspectives of Kathak practitioners and my study of the dance in Hong Kong and India, I examine structures that enable the institutionalization of certain art forms and popularization of others. An analytical consideration of dance as performance art, academic discipline, and professional pursuit requires an Inter-Asia methodology of triangulation to examine narratives of “high” culture. Such an approach offers a variegated understanding of Kathak as an embodied art form that resonates across postcolonial Asian societies.
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