Artistic labour in dance and painting: revisiting the theory-practice debate via mimesis (Anukrti) and the abject body

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article will critically explore how the intersection of mimesis and labour may open up another perspective on the much-theorized relationship between practice (prayoga) and theory (śāstra) in dance and painting. Labour or śrama, a loaded term by itself, will be taken in its complex sense of not only involving labour as skill that informs acts of painting, acting-dancing but also as a thematic of representation. Interspersed into these two senses is ritual labour or the labour involving acts of propitiating the divine – a domain not sufficiently thought out beyond the truism that religion pervades all spheres of Indic life. What this mode of inquiry aims to bring out is a tense relationship between manual/artistic labour and ritual labour both as a site of complicity and conflict amongst the actor-dancers and the authors of the treatises.