[h]interland: Shobana Jeyasingh’s ‘undoing of location’ and the rearrangement of colonial space

Shobana Jeyasingh’s [h]interland marks a pivotal moment for digital dance in the early 2000s through its use of live webcast technology. Set in Greenwich Borough Hall, less than a mile from the Prime Meridian – a vestigial signification of the British Empire’s proclamation as the centre of the world – [h]interland navigates the tensions of urban sites through a restless contemporary hybridization of bharata natyam and ballet against live and pre-recorded projections of Bangalore. Through its splintered mediations of space, time and classical movement vernaculars, I argue that [h]interland shapes a radical cosmopolitanism built from layers of otherness and contoured through the mutuality of dance forms, the migration across cities, and the ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ borders between colonial locations.