Mapping Critical Dance Studies in India

Mapping Critical Dance Studies in India PDF Author: Urmimala Sarkar Munsi
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9819973597
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description

Mapping Critical Dance Studies in India

Mapping Critical Dance Studies in India PDF Author: Urmimala Sarkar Munsi
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9819973597
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book Here

Book Description


Dance, Performance and Visual Art

Dance, Performance and Visual Art PDF Author: Linda E. Dankworth
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031690842
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description


The Dancing Body

The Dancing Body PDF Author: Urmimala Sarkar Munsi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040119875
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This book, with its focus on the dancing body, is the first of its kind within the larger context of dance in India. The Dancing Body is a body that exists, survives, inhabits and performs in multiple space and time, by moving, laboring, migrating and straddling across geographic, cultural and emotional borders, writing different cultural meanings at different moments of time. In India, discourses around the body in dance have long been trapped within hagiographic histories in and around dancers and their dance. During the last few decades, however, significant scholarly inroads were made into the domain of dance by shaking up the stereotypes, assertions and labels, shaped and moulded by patriarchy, class, caste and power. This book brings together emerging discourses around dance and the body that have become central in the Indian nation-state. Contemporary discourses around identity politics, moral policing, politics of exclusion, and neo-liberal dispossessions vis a vis sexual labour, means of survival, pleasure and agency of dancers have helped frame the focus around labour, leisure and livelihood concerning the everyday existence of the body in dance. This volume will be of great value to students, researchers and scholars in dance, gender studies, cultural studies, and performance studies, with a particular interest in Asian and South Asian Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of South Asian History and Culture. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

Theatre, activism, subjectivity

Theatre, activism, subjectivity PDF Author: Bishnupriya Dutt
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526178540
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
Through the lens of performance and politics, this collection zooms in on the context-specific dimensions, analogies, and micro-histories of the Left to better understand the larger picture. It proposes a search for the Left not from totalising Leftist ideological positions and partisan politics but from ethical dimensions through smaller-scale Left-leaning struggles; not from the political to the aesthetic, but from the potentiality of art to offer new political imagination and critique; not from the individual subordinated to the collective, but from the dialectics of subjectivity and collectivity. This is not an attempt at a sweeping global overview of Leftist cultures either, but a collection that brings together culture-specific and comparative perspectives. This book searches for fragments of and on the Left, past and present, through which to rethink and patch a fragmented world.

The Dancer's Voice

The Dancer's Voice PDF Author: Rumya Sree Putcha
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478023767
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description
In The Dancer’s Voice Rumya Sree Putcha theorizes how the Indian classical dancer performs the complex dynamics of transnational Indian womanhood. Putcha argues that the public persona of the Indian dancer has come to represent India in the global imagination—a representation that supports caste hierarchies and Hindu ethnonationalism, as well as white supremacist model minority narratives. Generations of Indian women have been encouraged to embody the archetype of the dancer, popularized through film cultures from the 1930s to the present. Through analyses of films, immigration and marriage laws, histories of caste and race, advertising campaigns, and her own family’s heirlooms, photographs, and memories, Putcha reveals how women’s citizenship is based on separating their voices from their bodies. In listening closely to and for the dancer’s voice, she offers a new way to understand the intersections of body, voice, performance, caste, race, gender, and nation.

Bells of Change

Bells of Change PDF Author: Pallabi Chakravorty
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
"The first critical study of Kathak dance within the discourses of the modern and the global, tracing the arc of two centuries of Kathak: the colonial nautch dance, classical Kathak under nationalism and postcolonialism and 'innovation' and 'new directions' under transnationalism and globalization. It blends various approaches from anthropology, ethnomusicology, and performance, media and gender studies to map the journey of Kathak from baijis and tawaifs to the global stage. The book uses dance as a lens to explore the interaction between the actors and forces of cultural change from power and patronage to television and film."--BOOK JACKET.

Contemporary Indian Dance

Contemporary Indian Dance PDF Author: K. Katrak
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230321801
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Through discussion of a dazzling array of artists in India and the diaspora, this book delineates a new language of dance on the global stage. Myriad movement vocabularies intersect the dancers' creative landscape, while cutting-edge creative choreography parodies gender and cultural stereotypes, and represents social issues.

Performance and Culture

Performance and Culture PDF Author: Archana Verma
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443828327
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
This book deals with various aspects of performance in India; especially that related to dance and dance-drama. Rather than being a description of the various dance forms of India, it attempts to discuss the social equations and cultural ideas that a performance attempts to portray. In this sense, a performance is a narrative. At the same time, performances also deal with well-known narratives from the religious traditions of India, often redefining and recounting them in the process of performance. A study of these aspects is important to understand the kind of equations that define these discourses on the performance narratives. Chapter I shows the different forms of dances that are described in the iconographic canons and also the famous dance treatise the Natyashastra, correlating them with the sculptures of dance available in the temples. Here, the temples of south India datable to 6th- 13th centuries have been studied for this purpose. Attempt is made to study the gender equations that are expounded through these dance images and texts, as also the correlation between the audience and the performance and how these ideas are intertwined with the religious images. Chapter II deals with four Sanskrit burlesque plays written in the ancient period, which reverse social equations and classical dramatic representations through the genre of satire. Almost every elite-class person, generally idealized in the classical Sanskrit plays, is lampooned here. Issues of audience perception and the reception of this kind of reversed images of the ideal figures of the society are discussed in this chapter. Chapter III deals with the aesthetics of eroticism that form the basis of many Indian classical dances, how they are intertwined with the notion of devotionalism in Hinduism and how they are negotiated in the Indian classical dances in our contemporary period. A case study is done here of Odissi, the classical dance from the eastern state of Orissa, which draws extensively from the temple sculptures of dance. Chapter IV shows that sacred narrative in India is not always a means of glorifying the divine. Rather, sometimes it is also used to satirize the established notions of religiosity and of divinity. This forms the basis of this very interesting semi-classical dance-drama form called Ottan Thullal from the southern state of Kerala. Kathakali, the classical dance-drama and Mohiniattam, the classical dance from Kerala have dominated the scene so much that this form of dance-drama has been overshadowed and it is little known to the world outside Kerala, even in India. There is not much scholarship on Ottan Thullal. This chapter deals with this form and the manner in which it uses the idiom of satire to narrate the religious legends. Chapter V is a study of the Mithila narratives from the eastern region of Mithila in Bihar to understand the ways in which gender equations in the Mithila society influence the making of these narratives. There is a discussion of the nature of “folk narratives” in this chapter. Chapter VI takes some folk forms of performance and visual narratives from different states of India to show how social equations such as power hierarchy, gender and caste dimensions are negotiated. All these use the traditional religious space to work out these equations. Chapter VII on one hand is a comparative study of two Hindi films made in 1960s, based on the lives of two women dancers from ancient India. One of them is a historical figure and the other is a figure. On the other hand, this is an attempt o show how the narratives of these women dancers are remodeled in literary as well as the cinematic medium, every time these narratives are retold. Effort is made to show how the cultural memory of the ancient history of India that the modern narrators of these stories have been received as a process of acculturation, which influences this recasting of narratives in literature as well as in film. It is also shown that this process of narration through cultural memory is not a new phenomenon, since it occurred even in the ancient period when narrative was being remodeled to present in a new form before the audience.

Traversing Tradition

Traversing Tradition PDF Author: Urmimala Sarkar Munsi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136703799
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Contributed articles presented as a collaborative series initiated by World Dance Alliance, Asia Pacific Center with Jawaharlal Nehru University, School of Arts and Aesthetics.

India's Kathak Dance in Historical Perspective

India's Kathak Dance in Historical Perspective PDF Author: Margaret E. Walker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317117379
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
Kathak, the classical dance of North India, combines virtuosic footwork and dazzling spins with subtle pantomime and soft gestures. As a global practice and one of India's cultural markers, kathak dance is often presented as heir to an ancient Hindu devotional tradition in which men called Kathakas danced and told stories in temples. The dance's repertoire and movement vocabulary, however, tell a different story of syncretic origins and hybrid history - it is a dance that is both Muslim and Hindu, both devotional and entertaining, and both male and female. Kathak's multiple roots can be found in rural theatre, embodied rhythmic repertoire, and courtesan performance practice, and its history is inextricable from the history of empire, colonialism, and independence in India. Through an analysis both broad and deep of primary and secondary sources, ethnography, iconography and current performance practice, Margaret Walker undertakes a critical approach to the history of kathak dance and presents new data about hereditary performing artists, gendered contexts and practices, and postcolonial cultural reclamation. The account that emerges places kathak and the Kathaks firmly into the living context of North Indian performing arts.