Studies in South Asian Film & Media - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2012

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?

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.

Drawing on experiences that have entailed watching and learning forms of so-called ‘Indian dance’ (Bharata Natyam and Odissi), and watching Odissi dancers performing in various locations in Orissa’s ‘sacred triangle’ (Puri, Konark, Bhubaneswar), and against my own background in contemporary dance, I propose that the difference of the Odissi body is that the dancer dances with his or her feet in more than one kingdom – that is, he or she maintains a link between human bodies and the bodies of plants. Such a perception can help to displace questions of the dancer’s spatiality and representations, challenging western or westernized visions of the industrial or mechanical body, assumed hierarchies of body parts and their signifying powers, and assumptions about the role of the joints. The sense of a botanical imaginary or specific cultural body-schema at work in Odissi dance is supported by discussion of historical and ethnographic literature pertaining to the (former) female dancers of the Jagannath Temple in Puri; the temple’s links with Oriyan tribal cultures; the dancers’ traditional importance according to an axis of social auspiciousness/inauspiciousness as opposed to social purity/impurity; and the particular processes of the reconstruction of Odissi dance (separate from that of Bharata natyam) after independence.

This article explores kinaesthesia as a central aspect of religious pedagogy in a transnational Hindu community, through ethnographic observation of American practitioners of Bharatanatyam (classical Indian dance).1 The Natyanjali School of Dance (Andover, Massachusetts, United States) is a small, multigenerational community, comprised of dance teacher Jeyanthi Ghatraju, a group of South Indian first-generation immigrant IT professionals, and their American-born children. Through Bharatanatyam, pedagogical practices of physical training, repetition and constructions of body comportment, students learn South Asian languages, culture and Hindu religious narratives. Additionally, they absorb practices of social organization and moral knowledge through interactions with their teacher, elders and peers. Although studies of kinaesthesia attend to the physical body and its faculties of movement, sense, socialization and cognitive knowledge, the processes by which kinaesthetics inform the construction of religious experience, value, belief and identity remain relatively unexplored. This article examines the construction of Hindu and Indian identity, personal religiosity and morality, through the kinaesthetic pedagogies of basic step (adavu) repetition, the embodied and discursive pedagogies of dramatic gestural narration of sacred stories (natya), and the interpretive and devotional conjuring of expression (abhinaya) inherent in Bharatanatyam.

In February 2012, Richard Schechner’s performance-installation Imagining O travelled from its original place of creation in Canterbury (UK) to the International Theatre Festival of Kerala in Thrissur (India). Imagining O is an immersive and participatory experience that brings together voices of Shakespeare’s women and Pauline Reage’s classic French erotic novel The Story of O. This performance report explores the encounter of a primarily European company with the bodies/gazes of an Indian audience, and their role as spectators in shaping the living organism of the performance. Taking a dialogic structure, it exists in the space between two authors’ voices and experiences — Roanna Mitchell as movement director, Dr Pablo Pakula as performer – mirroring the production’s decentred nature and its refusal of an objective standpoint.

This article explores how the Indian navanritya or ‘New Dance’ body, as crafted by choreographers Manjusri Chaki Sircar and Ranjabati Sircar, provided an alternative to the hegemonic representation of femininity in Indian classical dance. The Sircars’ feminist ideology-driven rebuttal of institutional and patriarchal dance pedagogy and praxis produced local critiques of cultural nationalism in and through the dancing body. This article discusses how these new bodies, shaped by a simultaneous eschewal and espousal of Indian cultural legacy, produce a complex picture of negotiation, one in which dialectical relationships between culture and the bodies that are situated within it are seen to emerge.

Community, purpose, context and an anchored presence in encountering difference – these are qualities stimulated by tikanga Māori frameworks as an approach to theatre. Viewpoints-based choreography contributes attention to time and space, playfulness, and ensemble connection. Both value the audience’s contribution as an integral part of the work through the immediacy of a real-time meeting. Together they provide a framework for setting up a dialogical performance environment in which a cast, drawn from all over India, are able to bring their traditions, psychologies, gestural languages and beliefs into the work. The choreographic approach allows extant text and body text an independence that is constantly negotiated, constantly changing and surprising. These frameworks hold a combination of the artistically fixed and the improvisationally free. Both encourage agency in all collaborators. These qualities make them powerful and repeatable tools for engagement with the present. They treat the audience as participating guests, moving their engagement from passive to active. The effect of this framing is performance that is filled with a sense of ‘alive-li-ness’ in an approach that is applicable in the Indian context.

This article looks at how applications of Forum theatre process and related approaches in India may operate in terms of activation of particular modes of learning centred in the body. It discusses the body: as context (individual and collective, embedded in social, political, physical and emotional practices); with reference to process (activation, multiplication of kinds of knowing through theatre work); as extended beyond everyday operation and beyond the individual/egoic towards collective experience and action, including co-creativity and ‘rational collective action’. The article explores the operation of forms of embodied learning in Forum practice, with particular reference to the work of Jana Sanskriti, in India.

This article explores the tensions that surround the effort to make intercultural performance. In particular it draws on the author’s experience of making a cross-cultural devised theatre project for the British Council in India, working with Indian performers and largely western devising techniques. This is contextualized by a discussion of the work of some key practitioners in this area, such as Eugenio Barba, Jerzy Grotowski and Tatsumi Hijikata. Barba’s notion of ‘travellers of speed’ is discussed, as is the critique of such ideas by Phiip Zarilli, among others. The attempt to make a performance space that transcends culture is contrasted with the experience of making performance in a context where cultural specificity is written through every aspect of the work and expresses itself within the bodies of the performers themselves.

A History of the Jana Natya Manch: Plays for the People, Arjun Ghosh (2012) London and New Delhi: SAGE Publications, xx+293 pp., Hardback, Rs 695.00