Writing out otherness

Increasingly, global–local situations call for theory to honour culturally diverse discourses and histories. This article is concerned with the ways that critical writings affect material concerns of dancers. The article stages crises of alterity; writing from the underside, I call attention to the need to acknowledge multiple subjectivities and locations. Alterity compels Asian artists to negotiate whiteness as praxis, and as theories of performance. However, even as writings valorize resistance and interventions of performance, by what theories are we restraining performers?2 Is the dancer-as-subaltern3 always to be the data that validates western theory and theorizing – regardless of the origin and commitments of the writer? How may the other, redefine himself or herself and be heard? I attend to the discomforts of participant-observation when writing about performances; to the discomforts produced by dichotomizing gazes on bodies that perform nationality. I attend to the performance of pluralities of Asianness from within the glass walls of a hothouse inside Euro-American dance discourse. Much has been said about intertexts and performance, but what about tacit knowledge that flies below the radar of ‘the cultural’?4 We need to consider intracultural epistemologies of perception such as the Natya Shastra discourses. This article asks how do we write non-violently so that identities can travel amidst moving spaces, cultural, personal, theoretical, performative spaces.