South Asian Dance Intersections最新文献

{"title":"Tale of a Choreographer, Her student, River and an endangered Heritage","authors":"Feriyal Amal Aslam","doi":"10.55370/sadi.v2i1.1555","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.55370/sadi.v2i1.1555","url":null,"abstract":"Choreographing in Pakistan since the 50’s, the country’s senior most 90+ years young classical dance maestro Indu Mitha has made trailblazing contributions within the Kalakshtera Bharata Natyam using North Indian music, interesting and contemporary content, while also producing more tableau forms of dance. \u0000In one of her recent solo pieces in the later style, titled “Qaseeda-i-Ilm of Jamal” or “An Ode to Wisdom and Beauty” Indu engages with symbolisms of a Hindu goddess of knowledge and Aesthetics_Saraswati and pays tribute to a forgotten dried up river of the same name. Indu Mitha allows the author, for whom and on whose body the dance is made, to bring in the forgotten river in her engagement with people’s histories of the land of present-day Pakistan and eventually facilitates her accessing of and embodying a pluralistic space of inter faith harmony which was occluded.","PeriodicalId":143610,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Dance Intersections","volume":"132 13","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138598991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Censorship and the Nationalization of Dance in India: An Overview from 1947 to the Present","authors":"Arundhati Chakravarty","doi":"10.55370/sadi.v2i1.1563","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.55370/sadi.v2i1.1563","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000\u0000\u0000In this essay, I present a broad overview of the intersections between dance and censorship in independent India. I try to explore the consequent exclusions within the mainstream dance discourse and practices as they were shaped by hegemonic forces of nationalism. I also look at how the changes in instruments and objectives of censorship reflect changing visions of nationalism. Thisessay broadly examines two major forms of censorship, both of which have been crucial in the appropriation and reconstruction of dance as an integral part of the nationalist cultural identity of India. First, there are the overt forms of censorship, which have been enforced by instruments of state power like legislation and statutory bodies. The post-independence government enacted the Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act 1947 and Cinematograph Act 1952 ostensibly for socialreformandprotectionofpublicmorality,butineffectthey carried forward socio-political biases of Orientalism and colonialism into the postcolonial project of constructing the Indian imaginary. The process necessitated the elimination of hereditary artist communities and professional women performers (and many of their movement idioms) from mainstream practices of dance, even as their art was decontextualized and reconstructedtosuittheofficiallysanctifiedhighculture. This mode of erasure also influenced popular forms ofdance, especially those appearing in Indian cinema, by inscribing them with nationalist notions of womanhood, sexuality, and, more recently, religious majoritarianism. Second, I trace the covert operation of censorship, in which state institutions play a key role in the support and promotion of art. Through selective funding and promotion, conferring privileging labels like “classical,” and presiding over the formalization and classicization of dance, these institutions helped fit dance practices within the nationalist framework of a normative Indian cultural identity that is predominantly Hindu and rahminical. This process resulted in hierarchization, stigmatization, and even omission of certain dance practices, some of which I have highlighted in this essay. The sustained influence of direct and indirect modes of censorship created standardized codes of aesthetics and performance practices, contributing to a chilling effect and leading practitioners to censor themselves. Finally, I argue that the centrality of dance in the national cultural discourse enabled its\u0000\u0000\u0000use as propaganda to censor negative actions of or perceptions about the government. The phenomenon, which may be described as artwashing, has become increasingly prominent in the contemporary context of Hindu majoritarian nationalism seeking to launder itsexclusionary tendencies in the process of redefining Indian cultural identity on its terms. Thus, I argue that censorship in the domain of dance has played not just a repressive role but also a productive role by enabling discourses of nationalism. It has acted","PeriodicalId":143610,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Dance Intersections","volume":"110 23","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138599796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Teaching Dance as a Multi-Spatial/Multimedia Practice: Reflections on De- vising Contemporary Dance Pedagogy in University Spaces","authors":"Megna Bhardwaj","doi":"10.55370/sadi.v2i1.1573","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.55370/sadi.v2i1.1573","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000\u0000\u0000The last ten years have seen a remarkable rise in the number of art and dance degree programs in universities worldwide. This essay originates in my experience of having taught for three years (2019–2022) on an ad-hoc basis at one such program in a private Indian university. I describe some of my pedagogic methodologies and creative teaching experiments devised during my tenure and that were dedicated to questions of space and multimedia in dance and performance research. I examine how these methodologies and experiments were not just creative in nature but also triggered by: a. the output- driven approach of private-university systems, and b. the precarity of my own status as an adjunct teaching faculty and a “contemporary”—by which I mean non- classical, non-traditional—dancer in the Indian context. Dance scholar Janet O’Shea, in her essay Decolonising the Curriculum? Unsettling Possibilities for Performance Training, critiques the structure of the university as both “colonial and corporate” (750), and points at its links with the “precarity of neoliberalism” (750). I resonate with O’Shea’s position and acknowledge the neocolonial and neoliberal tendencies of private universities in India that idolize Euro-American university models in their approach to higher education. However, I also argue that these universities, with their advocacy for the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary forms of research, mostly aimed at claiming the “cutting-edge” in the liberal art and education industry, inadvertently generate scope for upsetting the traditional hierarchies and trajectories of dance pedagogy and challenging the exclusive notion of dance itself.\u0000\u0000\u0000","PeriodicalId":143610,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Dance Intersections","volume":"86 20","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138600372","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Roof/Room Pieces: An Ethnography of Lockdown Lives, and Digital Perfor- mances of Rabindranritya","authors":"Debanjali Biswas","doi":"10.55370/sadi.v2i1.1556","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.55370/sadi.v2i1.1556","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000\u0000\u0000This essay is an exploration of precarity and sociality within performing arts in India. It analyses dances made digitally for audiences during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-21) and engages with scholarly literature and movement system with reference to Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and forms of dance identified as rabindranritya. Interpreted through interdisciplinary research methods of digital ethnography, questionnaires, content analysis and dance studies, the essay aims to understand why some of us continued to dance through the global pandemic. I focus on YouTube as a site of research as we realize that technology’s relationship with human and arts have now evolved and ‘liveness’ could be optional. I question various forms of precarity in arts industries through respondents’ answers and observe what notions of sociality are exchanged between the performer and their audience. I bring to light the mundane and vibrant of the quotidian lockdown lives of performers who remained cloistered at home, but with cameras on them, how they seized the pandemic precarity and continued dancing with a sense of immediacy and new kinds of intimacy, communicating their imaginations and emotions and bridging social- temporal-spatial distances.\u0000\u0000\u0000\u0000 ","PeriodicalId":143610,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Dance Intersections","volume":"123 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138599621","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"SADI Feature and CFP","authors":"SADI Editorial Team","doi":"10.55370/sadi.v2i1.1678","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.55370/sadi.v2i1.1678","url":null,"abstract":"Featuring online content (documentary, film) and CFP for 2024. ","PeriodicalId":143610,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Dance Intersections","volume":"8 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138598591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"When Bharatanatyam Moved from the Popular to the Classical","authors":"Deepa Mahadevan","doi":"10.55370/sadi.v2i1.1554","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.55370/sadi.v2i1.1554","url":null,"abstract":"This paper is abstracted from my larger research where I study the aesthetics of Bharatnatyam through the axis of spectacularization of the Bharatanatyam body at different points of its history. This paper specifically deals with the period between the end of 1950s and 1970s which set off the rupture from the popular aesthetics in the movies to the classical aesthetic in the mainstream Bharatanatyam world outside of it. This period led to the complete transition of transmission techniques to a tertiary model of learning from its primary habitus in hereditary practitioner households spearheaded as early as 1936 by Rukmini Arundale through her institution of mass learning and transmission, Kalakshetra. Several dance schools mushroomed among the Bharatantyam middle and upper class, largely populated by upper caste, brahmin female students of hereditary Nattuvanar teachers following the lead set by Arundale’s tertiary model of transmission. This period was punctuated by a loss of dancing bodies, practices and methods that irrevocably impacted how dance is being transmitted, presented and assimilated by the Bharatnatyam field today. ","PeriodicalId":143610,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Dance Intersections","volume":"19 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138598264","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cover Page and Table of Contents","authors":"SADI Editorial Team","doi":"10.55370/sadi.v2i1.1679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.55370/sadi.v2i1.1679","url":null,"abstract":"Cover Page and Table of Contents","PeriodicalId":143610,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Dance Intersections","volume":"63 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138600715","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Vajira: The Pioneering Female Dancer","authors":"M. Raheem","doi":"10.55370/sadi.v1i1.1475","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.55370/sadi.v1i1.1475","url":null,"abstract":"Vajira Chitrasena is regarded as a pioneer in the field of Kandyan dance, primarily for being the first female professional dancer. At nearly ninety, she was awarded the prestigious Padma Shri by the Government of India in 2021, in recognition of her art form and her contribution to dance culture in Sri Lanka. Vajira has received numerous awards from the state and private institutions in Sri Lanka, and she has been the subject of numerous articles over the years. Most of the popular writings on Vajira highlight her critical contribution in advancing the female form of a traditionally male dance, paving the way for successive generations of professional female stage dancers. These commentaries that appeared in print and, later, in online media, also document the aesthetics of her dance and the supporting role she played to the acclaimed Kandyan dancer, Chitrasena, who was her partner on stage and in life. These accounts have, however, tended to ignore her role as a multifaceted artist. In addition to being a performer, Vajira is a choreographer of traditional dances and a co-creator of numerous productions; she has also been a teacher to numerous dancers over the decades and, in this process, she has developed her own, influential pedagogy for teaching Kandyan dance.","PeriodicalId":143610,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Dance Intersections","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117050180","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editorial: South Asian Dance Intersections","authors":"Arshiya Sethi","doi":"10.55370/sadi.v1i1.1469","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.55370/sadi.v1i1.1469","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":143610,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Dance Intersections","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122991104","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Wicked Problem” of Locating and Safeguarding Dance in Bangladesh","authors":"Lubna Marium","doi":"10.55370/sadi.v1i1.1471","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.55370/sadi.v1i1.1471","url":null,"abstract":"The history of dances in Bangladesh reads almost like a history of the belief systems crisscrossing this deltaic plain, entrenched as these dances are within indigenous myths and philosophies. However, in the recent past, regional and global dance traditions have superseded indigenous dances by nearly erasing them from within mainstream, specifically urban, practice. Even a cursory interrogation confirms that the historical hierarchization of dance in Southasia1 has spurred this divide between the evaluation of present-day manifestations of dance within local cultural expressions and, on the other hand, the dominant genres of classical and contemporary artistic representations of dance. This highbrow, selective notion of dance from beyond the borders has led to a gradual decline and devaluation of traditional dance, especially within the non-subaltern social classes, resulting in its “invisibility” in those circles. Therein lies the “wickedness” of the problem. Borrowing from theoretical notions in the social sciences, a “wicked problem” is a puzzle. Furthermore, adverse sociopolitical circumstances of the indigenous heritageholding communities contribute to the endangerment and diminishment of their dances. At this juncture, a combination of research and practical action is the need of the hour (Nielsen). Action research, or ethnographic activism, can be a form of ethical praxis that can overcome historical bias and safeguard these dances.","PeriodicalId":143610,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Dance Intersections","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116766725","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}