Traversing Tradition

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.

Urmimala Sarkar Munsi is Visiting Faculty, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Vice President - South Asia, World Dance Alliance - Asia Pacific. Stephanie Burridge lectures at Singapore Management University and is a dance critic, author and editor of the book series 'Celebrating Dance in Asia and the Pacific'.

Foreword Ratan Thiyam Preface Stephanie Burridge Acknowledgements 1. Dance Scholarship and its Future: The Indian Context Kapila Vatsyayan 2. Institutionalization of Classical Dances of India: Kalakshetra - The Principal Case Study Sunil Kothari 3. Questions for the Modern Dance Teacher: Child-Parent Responses to Modern Dance Education Ranjita Karlekar 4. Writing Out Otherness: Dancing Asian-Indian Uttara Asha Coorlawala 5. Why I Am Committed to a Contemporary South Asian Aesthetic: Arguments about the Value of 'Difference' from the Perspective of Practice Ananya Chatterjea 6. Reading Dance, Performing Research: Meaning, Interpretation, Context, and Re-contextualization in Dance Performance and Research Shrinkla Sahai 7. Imag(in)ing the Nation: Uday Shankar's 'Kalpana' Urmimala Sarkar Munsi 8. In Dialogue with Histories: The Dancer and the Actress Bishnupriya Dutt 9. The Beauty Myth and Beyond: Looking at the Bollywood Item Number Priyanka Basu 10. The Altered Space: Community Dances from Everyday to the Proscenium Debanjali Biswas and Anirban Ghosh 11. Patronage, Politics of Culture and the Dancing Body of the Other: A North-east Indian Experience Lokendra Arambam 12. Empowering through Dance Movement Therapy Sohini Chakraborty. Artist Voices and Biographies. Critics' Voices and Biographies. Index.