7.) New Dance for New Audiences: The Global Flows of Bharatanatyam

Today Bharatanatyam circulates in ever-expanding directions. The form has moved well beyond its twentieth-century epicenter, the city of Chennai (formerly Madras), and its pulse can be felt in every major urban centre around the world. Post-colonial and hybrid diasporic identities have given new impetus to the form. In North America, elements of Bharatanatyam dance have interfaced with contemporary dance and new kinetic vocabularies have been created by prominent second and third generation artists of Indian origin. Professional Bharatanatyam training and performance has also extended to include practitioners of non-South Asian origins, and this too has moved the dance in highly innovative directions. The form has also been used to address social issues such as displacement and violence, and has been thoroughly institutionalized and professionalized, especially in the UK, Canada, and the United States.

Readings:

O’Shea, Janet. “Tradition and the Individual Dancer.” In At Home in the World: Bharata Natyam on the Global Stage. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Chatterjea, Ananya. “Chandralekha: Negotiating the Female Body and Movement in Cultural/Political Signification.” In Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, ed. Ann Dils and Anna Cooper Albright. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Grau, Andrée. 2007. “Political Activism and South Asian Dance: The Case of Mallika Sarabhai.” South Asia Research 27 (1): 43-55.

Assignments:

Research one of the following figures in Indian contemporary dance: Chadralekha, Shobana Jeyasingh, Akram Khan, Hari Krishnan, Anita Ratnam, Mallika Sarabhai, or others you may come across. Write an essay that situates these figures in terms of their own self-representation, and in terms of the debates around their work. How are do these artists deploy aesthetic strategies that are affected by their location as feminist artists, diasporic artists, post-modern artists, etc.

Think about how we can theorize the connections between “tradition” and “innovation.” How do we think about the idea of “tradition” given Bharatanatyam’s hybrid modernity, and how do we determine the limits of this “tradition” – that is, when does a “reconstructed” artform begin and cease to become “traditional”? How do debates around contemporary Indian dance (Chadralekha, Shobana Jeyasingh, Akram Khan, Hari Krishnan, Anita Ratnam, Mallika Sarabhai, etc) refract some of the anxieties around the ideas of “tradition” and “innovation”?

• Start
• Primary Sources
• Introduction
• 1.) Devadasis in South India
• 2.) Nattuvanars
• 3.) Temple Performance
• 4.) The Dance Traditions of Thanjavur and Courtly Patronage of Devadasi Dance
• 5.) Social Reform and the Disenfranchisement of Devadasis
• 6.) Technique
• 7.) New Dance for New Audiences: The Global Flows of Bharatanatyam


• Comment on this module

• VIDEO

• Hari Krishnan
• Purnima/Full Moon
• Medium, High

• Video 3
• Video 3
• Medium, High

• TEXT

• Soneji, Davesh. 2008. “Memory and the Recovery of Identity: Living Histories and the Kalavantulu of Coastal Andhra Pradesh.”
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• Gaston, Anne-Marie. 1996. “Training of Bharata Natyam Teachers.”
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• Kersenboom, Saskia. 1991. “The Traditional Repertoire of the Tiruttani Temple Dancers.”
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• Krishnan, Hari. 2008. “Inscribing Practice: Reconfigurations and Textualizations of Devadasi Repertoire in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century South India.” 
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• Narayana Rao, Velcheru and David Shulman. 2002. “Muddupalani.”
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• Allen, Matthew Harp. 1997. “Rewriting the Script for South Indian Dance.”
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• Arundale, Rukmini. 1948. “Bhava, Raga, Tala.”
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• Balasaraswati, T. [1975]. “On Bharatanatyam.”
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• Srinivasan, Amrit. 1988. “Reform or Conformity?  Temple ‘Prostitution’ and the Community"
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• Whitehead, Judith. 1998. “Community Honor/Sexual Boundaries: A Discursive Analysis of Devadasi Criminalization in Madras, India, 1920-1947.”
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• Ramanujan, A.K., Velchuru Narayana Rao and David Shulman. 1994. When God is a Customer: Telugu Courtesan Songs by Ksetrayya and Others.
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• Viswanathan, T. and Matthew Allen. 2004. “Contextualizing South Indian Performance, Socially and Historically.”
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• O’Shea, Janet. “Tradition and the Individual Dancer.”
•  
• Chatterjea, Ananya. “Chandralekha: Negotiating the Female Body and Movement in Cultural/Political Signification.”
•  
• Grau, Andrée. 2007. “Political Activism and South Asian Dance: The Case of Mallika Sarabhai.”