Traversing Tradition

Celebrating Dance in India

Urmimala Sarkar Munsi, Stephanie Burridge, Urmimala Sarkar Munsi, Stephanie Burridge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781138662889
• eBook ISBN: 9781136703782
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performance Art

Dance occupies a prestigious place in Indian performing arts, yet it curiously, to a large extent, has remained outside the arena of academic discourse. This book documents and celebrates the emergence of contemporary dance practice in India. Incorporating a multidisciplinary approach, it includes contributions from scholars, writers and commentators as well as short essays and interviews with Indian artists and performers; the latter add personal perspectives and insights to the broad themes discussed.

Young Indian dance artists are courageously charting out new trajectories in dance, diverging from the time-worn paths of tradition. The classical forms of Bharatnatyam, Kathak, Odissi and Manipuri, to name a few, are rich resources for choreographers exploring contemporary dance. This volume speaks about their struggles of working within and outside tradition as they grapple with national and international audience expectations as well as their own values and sense of identity.

The artists represented here continue to question the uneasy relationship that exists between the insular world of dance and outside reality. Simultaneously, they are actively creating new dance languages that are both articulate in a performative context and demand examination by researchers and critics.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword by Ratan Thiyam
• Preface by Stephanie Burridge
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Dance Scholarship and its Future: The Indian Context
• 2. Institutionalization of Classical Dances of India: Kalakshetra — The Principal Case Study
• 3. Questions for the Modern Dance Teacher: Child–Parent Responses to Modern Dance Education
• 4. Writing out Otherness: Dancing Asian-Indian
• 5. Why I Am Committed to a Contemporary South Asian Aesthetic: Arguments about the Value of ‘Difference’ from the Perspective of Practice
• 6. Reading Dance, Performing Research: Meaning, Interpretation, Context, and Re-contextualization in Dance Performance and Research
• 7. Imag(in)ing the Nation: Uday Shankar’s Kalpana
• 8. In Dialogue with Histories: The Dancer and the Actress
• 9. The Beauty Myth and Beyond: Looking at the Bollywood ‘Item Number’
• 10. The Altered Space: Community Dances from Everyday to the Proscenium
• 11. Patronage, Politics of Culture and the Dancing Body of the Other: A North-east Indian Experience
• 12. Empowering through Dance Movement Therapy
• Artists’ Voices and Biographies
• Critics’ Voices and Biographies
• Index