South Asian Dance Research Articles

Full Issue

This is the second volume, issue one of South Asian Dance Intersections.

Editorial

This is the editorial opinion piece by Dr. Arshiya Sethi, Editor-in-Chief of South Asian Dance Intersections.

Uday Shan-Kar and Me: Stories of Self-Orientalization, Hyphenization, and Diasporic Declarations

This article discusses how orientalism has operated and continues to operate within the North American artistic landscape of dance artists. The author starts by focusing on Uday Shankar (1900–1977), one of the major, though often overlooked, figures over the last 100 years of South Asian (and predominantly Indian) dance performance on the concert stage in the diasporic context, to consider how orientalism, the desire for authenticity, a nationalist agenda, religious fundamentalism, economic necessities, multi-cultural initiatives, and diversity desires all interact and coalesce to form an undercurrent of limited potentials about how and why South Asian dance can exist within the American performance discourse. In an auto-ethnographic move, the author then juxtaposes Shankar’s historical legacy with a new artistic project by the author (b. 1969), entitled Reorient the Orient, premiering in 2024. The writing uses archival sources such as photographs, programs, publicity materials, featured essays, newspaper previews, reviews, filmed dance footage, choreographic analysis, and personal reflections to explore how social factors and personal ambitions create awkward relationships within orientalism’s manifestations in the diasporic U.S. performance landscape.

Next Issue

The second volume is themed around the issue of censorship in dance and will include invited and openly sourced articles, interviews, book reviews, performance reviews, screendance reviews, and photographs. As a digital-only platform, it will include seminal performance excerpts as well, all of which will go through double-blind peer review and selection process. The range of contributions should aim at indicating theoretical, performative, and/ or activist intersections and interstices in South Asian dance. The contributions may hail from all geopolitical contexts where South Asian dance or its variants are practiced, nurtured, or consumed. All images, photographs or footages included, including personal, archival, performance, film, television and “found” footage, must be covered by the terms of copyright as covered in the journal’s ‘Terms of Copyright’ document.
 Final deadline: January 31, 2023.

Editorial: South Asian Dance Intersections

Welcome to the inaugural issue of SADI—South Asian Dance Intersections—a progressive, scholarly, blind peer-reviewed, open-access online journal. SADI was conceived during the pandemic as a transnational feminist project. It proposes a field-defining modality of looking at scholarship around South Asian dance studies emerging within the field across values, theories, and practices. It seeks to carry to newer and larger audiences, a unique blend of high-quality research in scholarly, theoretical, textual, choreographic, contemporary, social justice, and community-oriented, interdisciplinary, and intersectional writing. SADI explores the ecosphere of South Asian dance activities, celebrating plural practices, diversity, and richness, while challenging incongruencies.

Crossroads

South Asian Dance Studies has emerged as an international site for critical debates about various intersections of identity, power, media, and globalization. This multidisciplinary academic space is also a site for the intersections of theory and praxis/practice, criticality, and creativity. Yet, this arrival of South Asian Dance Studies is happening in a world daunted by political polarization and authoritarianism, inequalities deepened due to the pandemic, wars, refugee and environmental crises, a severe economic and political breakdown in Sri Lanka, and the changing political atmosphere in India—filled with instability, violence and divisive identity politics.
 Writing about dance and its history, or even its relevance, needs new methodological frameworks that, at once, give us the ability to speak from within as well as outside. This changing scenario requires the placing of dance within the framework of intersectionality as a survival strategy against the totalitarian reframing of ideas of culture, history, gender, class, caste, human rights and the politics of assertive and often violent marginalizations. Although not directly connected to any of these issues, the three essays below are situated within these discursive spaces that we are calling crossroads. We envision them as sites for interventions.

The embodied palimpsest

In the South Asian dance style of bharatanatyam, the devotional bodies of dancers and the gods they portray model a performative porosity about ‘religious bodies.’ But what embodied resonances of religiosity transfer when the intention of the dancer or topic is not marked as devotional? Apsaras Arts’ Agathi: The Plight of the Refugee (2017–18) offers an ethnographic case study through which I aim to deepen the theory around the porosity of bodies by developing the theoretical construct of an embodied palimpsest: a framework that allows previous ‘erased’ layers to become present and interactive with later layers. I demonstrate how the choreographed gestures and rasas, or aesthetic moods, utilized to embody certain Hindu myths inform this danced portrayal of migrant experiences, but also note how the interactive layers of the palimpsest reshape classical theories about rasa, in particular karuna rasa, the mood of compassion, and can be used to particularize theories about kinesthetic empathy.

A Pedagogy of Decolonial Choreography: Reflections of A South Asian Dance Practitioner

ABSTRACT Focusing on Sri Lankan dance and placing it on the broader spectrum of South Asian dance, I propose a pedagogical process that engages critically with colonial past and present realities, a pedagogy that I term decolonial choreography. A South Asian dancer born and bred in Sri Lanka, I studied and performed the Kandyan dance of Sri Lanka and the Kathak dance of India, and received a PhD in the United States. I have also taught South Asian dances in high schools and universities in the US. Based on my experience as a researcher, educator, and choreographer, I present a pedagogy of decolonial choreography that can be used when teaching and performing South Asian dances in postsecondary dance education. Instead of teaching South Asian dances as exotic, orientalist cultural expressions, decolonial choreography introduces novel critical choreographies resulting from its analytical engagement with South Asian dance and its colonial and postcolonial histories.

Choreographing a Rebuttal: Thinking through Praxis in South Asian Dance Pedagogy

ABSTRACT As an artist/academic, I discuss my pedagogical interventions in teaching Odissi through studio, theory, and praxis courses to populations across university students and professional artists. Through interdisciplinary research, I work at the confluence of historical and contemporary forces. Casteist, fundamentalist, racist, sexist, ablist, and hierarchical modes of teaching and learning plague Odissi as part of the field popularly known as “Indian classical dance.” The appellation of “classical” is itself a byproduct of complex social and cultural forces across Hindu majoritarianism, historical nostalgia, and anti-colonial nationalist resistance. While dance scholars have unpacked this historical complexity to some extent, I apply contemporary trends in performance and pedagogy that have received little scholarly engagement. I ground my work in an ethos of community building creating through lines across the diasporic Indian community and academia. This way of working presents questions of access and ownership as it bumps up against historical entanglements.

South Asian dance studies. nritta-nritya: choreography, aesthetics, heritage

South Asian dance studies. nritta-nritya: choreography, aesthetics, heritage

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

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.

Flexible Bodies: British South Asian Dancers In An Age Of Neoliberalism by Anusha Kedhar

Flexible Bodies: British South Asian Dancers In An Age Of Neoliberalism by Anusha Kedhar

British Multiculturalism and Interweaving Hybridities in South Asian Dance

British South Asian dancers, choreographers, curators, Arts Council policymakers, and directors of South Asian dance agencies, used ‘hybridity’ as a multi-faceted historical, political, cultural, aesthetic and public culture trope to constitute what is today known as the British South Asian Dance Sector in the UK. This constitution story, initiated under the ideological signs of British multi-culturalism, hybridity and cultural diversity, remains unexamined in theatre, dance and performance scholarship because scholars have not historicized the term and failed to see how it was used creatively as an interweaving trope to facilitate the integration of South Asian dance into British mainstream dance milieu in the three stages of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Drawing on the work of Homi Bhabha, I show how Shobana Jeyasingh, Akram Khan and British South Asian dance organizations used ‘hybridity’ as a multifaceted, historical, institutional, theatrical, choreographic and political trope to integrate South Asian dance forms into mainstream British dance milieu in the forty-year period from 1979 to 2020. I develop my argument by drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) and focus specifically on the distinction he makes between the two forms of linguistic and cultural hybridization, which he identifies within the frames of ‘unconscious’ organic hybridity and ‘conscious’ intentional hybridity. Significantly for my argument, Bakhtin explains that intentional hybrids build on the historic foundations provided by organic hybrids and deploy these pasts, intentionally, to create new visions in global diasporas. In this paper, I extend Bakhtin’s analytic frame and show how British South Asian chorographers and curators, decontextualized the classical forms of Bharatanatyam and Kathak and reused these, intentionally, to create a hybrid, post-colonial British South Asian dance phenomenon that was both Indian and British simultaneously.

Performing Gender, Class and Nation: Rukmini Devi Arundale and the Impact of Kalakshetra

Rukmini Devi Arundale, herself a choreographer and dancer, is considered one of the key figures in re-creating Bharatanatyam. Through her utopian arts colony, Kalakshetra, started during the movement towards Indian independence, she taught what she deemed to be a classical, religious and aesthetically pleasing form of dance. Her rejection of what she termed vulgarity and commercialism in dance reflects her Theosophical worldviews and her class position in a rapidly changing South India. The article examines the ways in which her understanding of Bharatanatyam developed in the context of contested forms of nationalism as a gender regime that contributed to creating proper middle-class, Hindu and Indian subjects. It also examines the impacts of this form of cultural heritage relating to gender, culture and nationalism in today’s globalised South Asian dance scenario.

The BBC Young Dancer and the decolonising imagination

ABSTRACTThe process of decolonisation requires a radical re-imagination of how we construct our identities – one that steps away from fictions of independence and essentialism to acknowledge the complex webs of dialogue and interdependence. It requires a self-conscious abandonment of identities that privilege nostalgia for an idealised past, whether this is perceived as lost through geographical dislocation or through the changes of history. This is a nostalgia that tends to underplay cultural interweaving in favour of cultural essentialism. This article discusses the televised competition, the BBC Young Dancer, which offers a model, albeit imperfect, for navigating between essentialism and assimilationism, thereby contributing to a decolonised imagination of our future. It includes a South Asian dance category that is situated as equally representative of ‘British’ dance. In this way it helps us to imagine a decolonised future, which acknowledges the past to allow us to shape new identities.

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

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.”

Flexibility and Its Bodily Limits: Transnational South Asian Dancers in an Age of Neoliberalism

This article examines the conflicting and paradoxical ways in which race and citizenship intersect in late capitalism, and how dancers negotiate these contradictions through their bodily labor. Focusing on South Asian dancers in the UK, I suggest that transnational South Asian dancers have increasingly had to emphasize flexibility and mobility in their bodies and dance practices in order to gain access to mainstream funding, venues, audiences, resources, and touring circuits which have traditionally marginalized non-white dance practices. I argue that “flexible citizenship” is not just a political strategy to negotiate capital; it is also a bodily tactic and an embodied response to the racialization of labor in neoliberal economies. However, there are limits to how far the flexibility of flexible citizenship can stretch. Although the creativity of South Asian dancers and the strength of their bodily practices has helped them to negotiate racial inequalities in Britain, immigration laws, arts funding policies, and employment regulations have immobilized dancers. Addressing the various complexities and contradictions in which transnational bodies are embroiled, this essay is both a tribute to the creative, flexible practices of South Asian dancers as well as an acknowledgment of the limits of flexible citizenship and a critique of neoliberalism's toll on the racialized dancing body.

Defying Britain's Tick-Box Culture: Kathak in Dialogue with Hip-Hop

With questions of identity and multiculturalism remaining at the centre of debates in the press, political and academia arenas, a dance production tackles these issues head on in a surprisingly humorous and accessible way. Birmingham-based Sonia Sabri Company's Kathakbox is a collaborative production exploring the theme of ‘ticking boxes’ which sets out to challenge preconceptions about identity. Four specialists in kathak, hip-hop, African Caribbean and contemporary dance are joined by three musician-vocalists who eschew instruments, utilising their voices and bodies to create a vibrant rhythmic score influenced by a cosmopolitan mix of styles. Aesthetic and ideological meeting points occur onstage in the critically praised hour-long show, while counter-hegemonic possibilities emerge in associated workshops. The article explores how the narrative potential of kathak opens the way for Muslim women participants to delve into movement possibilities and improvisational potential of both the South Asian dance form and hip-hop.

Solidarity – rasa/autobiography – abhinaya: South Asian tactics for performing queerness

Abstract This article examines the work of D’Lo, a Sri Lankan-transgender-hip hop performance artist, and the Post Natyam Collective, a transnational coalition that develops critical and creative approaches to South Asian dance. The works utilize two strategies for performing queerness in relation to South Asian cultural practices: (1) autobiographic performance art rooted in identity politics and (2) the South Asian technique of abhinaya. These strategies use different modes of identification and audience–performer relationships. Autobiographical solo performance creates solidarity through shared identity or alliances between performer and audience. Abhinaya evokes pleasure and sensuality in multiple, ambiguous ways towards the goal of evoking rasa, ideally the audience’s experience of emotional–spiritual transcendence. We investigate tactical crossovers between the strategies of autobiography and abhinaya in D’Lo’s and Post Natyam’s work: how do they interact, where might they exclude each other, and what kind of performance of queerness emerges through their interplay?

Negotiating the Third Space: British Asian Independent Record Labels and the Cultural Politics of Difference

Within postcolonial discourse the emergence of British (South) Asian electronic dance music, with its conscious fusion of Eastern and Western influences, was seen as an important cultural-political moment, challenging essentialist perceptions of South Asian identity. Yet the danger is that such a perspective overstates the transgressive potential of Asian dance music. Based on in-depth interviews with managers of three independent record labels involved in the scene, this article demonstrates how standardized marketing processes transform the potentially disruptive hybridity of British Asian dance music into a source of fetishization, reinforcing the marginalization of Asian dance labels and South Asian expressive cultures in the West as a whole.