Unmaking Contact: Choreographic Touch at the Intersections of Race, Caste, and Gender

Royona Mitra

doi:10.1017/s0149767721000358

Abstract

AbstractThis article interrogates “contact,” understood by Global North contemporary dance discourse as choreography that is mobilized by shifting points of physical touch between two or more bodies, by attending to inherent, and often ignored, power asymmetries that are foundational to such choreographic practices. This “unmaking of contact” is undertaken by deploying the lenses of race, caste, and gender in order to argue for an intersectional, intercultural and inter-epistemic understanding of “choreographic touch” that may or may not involve tactility. It starts by examining contact improvisation (CI), and its now ubiquitous choreographic manifestation of partnering, as an aesthetic that can work in colonizing ways on South Asian dancers who train in primarily solo classical dance forms. The article then moves on to place South Asian bodies, philosophies, and discourses at the heart of its interrogation of choreographic touch, and foregrounds the culturally specific politics and powers that govern them.

Highlights

In many ways that first encounter with contact improvisation has been the impetus of my lifelong, critical, and embodied enquiry into touch, contact, choreography, and asymmetries of power in contemporary dance practices, that has emerged slowly and steadily over two decades
The article interrogates ‘contact’, understood by Global North contemporary dance discourse as choreography that is mobilized by shifting points of physical touch between two or more bodies, by attending to inherent, and often ignored, power asymmetries that are foundational to such choreographic practices
Punctuated and framed by three personal and reflective ‘Touch Tales’, this article has offered a critique of CI and its deemed democratizing principles as a movement practice, by focusing on intersectional considerations of race, caste and gender

Summary

Introduction

In many ways that first encounter with contact improvisation has been the impetus of my lifelong, critical, and embodied enquiry into touch, contact, choreography, and asymmetries of power in contemporary dance practices, that has emerged slowly and steadily over two decades. As per Kimberlé Crenshaw’s foundational conceptualization of intersectionality, racially minoritized brown South Asian dance artists are at the heart of my considerations of new interculturalism, as I analyse their experience of power and marginalisations vis-à-vis choreographic touch in the UK and in India, compounded further by discourses of caste and gender locations.

Results

Conclusion