Dance Matters Too

Dance Matters Too: Markets, Memories, Identities is a rich intellectual contribution to the growing field of dance studies in India. It forges new avenues of scholarly inquiry and critical engagement and opens the field in innovative ways. This volume builds on Dance Matters (2009), which mapped the interdisciplinary breadth of the field. The chapters presented here continue to underline the uniqueness of a field that is a blend of critical scholarship on aesthetics and performance with the humanities and social sciences. Including diverse material, analytical approaches and perspectives from scholars and practitioners, this multidimensional volume explores debates on dance preservation and tradition in globalizing India, multimedia choreographies and the circulation of dance via electronic media, embodiment and memory, power, democracy and bourgeoning markets, classification and censorship, and corporatization and Bollywood. This tour de force will appeal to those in dance and performance studies, cultural studies, sociology as well as to readers interested in tradition, modernity, gender and globalization.

Pallabi Chakravorty is Associate Professor and Director of the Dance Program in the Department of Music and Dance at Swarthmore College, USA. Nilanjana Gupta is Professor of English at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India.

List of Figures. List of Contributors. Acknowledgements. 1. Dance Matters II: Introduction Part I 2. Mah Laqa Bai: The Remains of a Courtesan's Dance 3. Conflict between Cultural Perpetuation and Environmental Protection: A Case Study of Ritual Performance in North Malabar, South India 4. Bodies and Borders: The Odissi Costume Controversy 5. I Know It and I Name It as I Do It: Embodied Practice as a Key to Understand Performance 6. Cosmopolitan Then and Cosmopolitan Now: Rabindranrtiya Meets Dance Reality Shows Part II 7. Corporatization of Dance: Changing Landscape in Choreography and Patronage since Economic Liberalization in Bengaluru 8. Negotiating Space for Dance within the Spectrum of Contemporary Performing Arts in a Globalized India: The Experiences of an Indian Arts Manager 9. Bollywood Dance: Desire for the 'Other' Part III 10. Rasalila Remixed: Tracing the Dances of an Image 11. Why Dance Today in India? A Philosophical Approach 12. Playing Dance and Dancing Music: The Work of Intimacy in Kathak 13. Embodiment, Reflexivity and Practice-as-Research in Indian Dance: A Case Study 14. Remixing Natya: Revanta Sarabhai's LDR and Post Natyam Collective's Super Ruwaxi: Origins Part IV 15. Dancers and Critics: Re-viewing Tagore 16. Pedagogy of Manipuri Dance: In and Beyond the Temple Premise 17. Text, Context and Interpreter: Understanding the Paradigms of Sattriya Dance and Dancer in the Changing Space 18. Why Dancing the Sensual Sculptures Matters? Considering a Sensory Paradigm for Odissi Dance Index