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

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.