Mobility

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 3 theorizes the flexibility of migrant South Asian dancers in Britain in relation to neoliberal demands for the transnational mobility of labor, on the one hand, and restrictive British immigration and citizenship policies, on the other. The artistic contributions of migrant South Asian dancers have been integral to the aesthetic development of British South Asian dance but have gone largely unacknowledged. This chapter tracks the various legal, economic, cultural, and political factors that both facilitated and hindered the mobility of transnational dance labor from India and the Indian diaspora to Britain between the 1990s and 2010s. In particular, it examines how immigration policies have choreographed the movement of transnational dance labor across borders, both speeding it up and slowing it down and, sometimes, stopping it altogether. Keeping the lives of transnational South Asian dancers and their experiences of migration at the forefront, the chapter takes an intimate look at how dancers negotiated volatile economic and political conditions. It argues that transnational dancers present a unique case in the study of flexibility insofar as they are hyperflexible: versatile (across dance forms), but also agile (across borders) and adaptable (across cultures). Focusing on these three aspects of flexibility, the chapter explores how hyperflexibility was demanded of and cultivated by migrant dancers to various ends and effects, and with varying degrees of stretch-ability.