The dancing body: labour, livelihood and leisure

ABSTRACT

In India, discourses around the dancing body have long been trapped within the historical studies in and around dancers and their dance practices. 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. In the current times, the body discourse has given many of us tools to focus on socio-culturally excluded and dispossessed performers, whose presence and representation have historically been marginalised in the developing discourses on dance. It is, therefore, time to energise research that can generate new ideas of looking at existing binaries around the dancing body and challenging them as well. This essay is an attempt to bring together emerging issues and discourses around dance and the body that have become central through the cultural politics of the Indian nation-state in the post-independence years. Contemporary discourses around identity politics, survival strategies, neo-liberal dispossessions and the problematic constructions of the commodification of the erotic body vis a vis sexual labour, pleasure, desire and agency of dancers in diverse performing contexts, have helped us frame the focus around labour, leisure and livelihood concerning the concrete everyday existence of the body in dance.

KEYWORDS:

• Dancing body
• Labour
• Livelihood
• Leisure
• Control
• folk and classical dance

When we bristle with rage, or start with fright or resort to gesticulation when at a loss for adequately expressive words, we are practicing the beginning of dance.

[John Martin]¹

The last few decades of the twentieth century witnessed the body moving from being no one’s particular concern to virtually everyone’s preoccupation including among many others historians, anthropologists, feminist scholars, philosophers, researchers in social medicine and art historians, apart from the discipline of dance studies. In the year pegged as that of the pandemic, the body in all its strength and vulnerabilities has emerged as a principal concern. The discourse, though born out of this never before hyper-vulnerability of the body, has also given us time to work out the social, cultural and political layers that the human body has acquired through its existence over years of changing discourses around it. As the dancing body is the tool as well as the space where all changes around us get reflected and registered, the changing times do enhance the importance of addressing issues, old and new, emerging and ongoing, social or historical, across different mediums. Though the thematic thread for this journal was planned and commissioned before the deadly contagion of Covid 19, the pandemic and lockdown changed the perceptions of our lives and bodies – may be forever – we as editors realised the need to bring together a lot of shifting and often troubled layers of understandings around the discourse on bodies into dance and the other artistic/intermedial spaces that had made us propose ‘The Dancing Body: Labour, Livelihood and Leisure’ as the theme for our special issue. We have been able to collate scholarly works on many socio-culturally excluded performers, whose presence and representations were marginalised in the developing discourses around dance and performance. It has also given us theoretical formulations across geographies to look at individual/ensemble, folk/classical, devotional/commercial, celebrated/denigrated bodies within the purview of the body discourse in dance studies. The dancing body through the articles of this particular special issue of the journal, exists, survives and inhabits space and time simultaneously – by moving, labouring, migrating and straddling across geographic, cultural and emotional borders, always managing to negotiate different cultural meanings at different moments of time.

Dance scholarship in and on India foregrounds and hierarchises certain forms of dance over others. Bharatanatyam and Bollywood are definite winners in the race for visibility in recent years. Classical dances, historically seen as linked to temple sculptures and Natyashastra, have been recognised as worthy receivers of attention in a country where dance and the dancing bodies have systematically been separated in the national cultural policies. So in the nation-‘space’,² dances that are claimed as representatives of regional cultural practices and traditions, do not need the practitioners from the regional hereditary trainings to necessarily be acknowledged as the traditional inheritors at all. Hence bodies that are the vessels of dance knowledge now, remain as complex amalgams of accumulated information, which are not necessarily ‘traditional’. Thus the hereditary performers’ bodies are systematically disenfranchised of their inherited capitals. Through the biopolitical maneuvres, largely orchestrated by state policies, the dance that exists in India at the moment is a patchwork of body imageries as well as aesthetically varied codes of pedagogical and movement systems that differ widely depending on caste, class, ethnicity, religious, gender and regional affiliations.

The key words that have been chosen as the structural parts of this special issue, i.e. labour, livelihood and leisure, offer us the lenses through which we engage dance scholarship to focus on the dancing bodies. The same words also become crucial as the ends or outcomes that dancing bodies most often elicit for themselves. The three lenses relate to each other through the question Ranciere had raised, ‘[h]ow can the notion of “aesthetics” as a specific experience lead at once to the idea of a pure world of art and of the self-suppression of art in life, to the tradition of avant-garde radicalism and to the aestheticization of common experience?’³ All the three words are linked to the idea of training, performing and viewing that are related to the basic ideas of the body within the artistic and experiential realms of dance.

Labour is a part of a regular vocabulary of daily lives of people who do not differentiate between the dancing body and the labouring body. Thus the body that labours as a part of generating livelihood is also the body that is the tool and space for dance to manifest. Thus the term ‘labour’ is actually not only used to talk about the untrained bodies that use movements to communicate beyond everyday work related to survival, to create a communicative space within ritual, social or political spaces. It also refers to the specialised artistic and aesthetic endeavour named ‘dance’ through words such as ‘practice’, ‘dedication’, ‘diligence’, ‘sincerity of purpose’ is known as a way a skilled dancer prepares his or her body, but does not usually let the audience gauge the amount of effort he or she is putting in while in the very act of dancing. He/she is taught the techniques of not letting the audience understand the effort the body requires to move. While hiding all signs of tiredness or effort put in, the body shows off the ‘labour’ that s/he has invested over a long time to become a skilled dancer. The dance must then show the references to the investment, dedication and technique – as the long-term labour, while deliberately making invisible, how much immediate labour the body is putting in while dancing at a particular moment. The trained dancing bodies that are used, manipulated and often even abused in the name of practice to achieve the requited level of skill, are always in the making.

The word ‘livelihood’ is especially relevant in the discourse around ‘service’ and ‘leisure’ that has been woven together through the essays. On the one hand, this discourse in itself is grounded on a lack of inclusivity of many bodies from hereditary traditions that cannot ‘show and tell’ about their trainings. But undeniably the embodied knowledge, or the hereditary knowledge is their livelihood. On the other hand, consumerism and commodity culture bring together issues of ‘livelihood’ for a large number of practitioners in the world of dance who by their dancing/working, provide pleasure as a part of the ‘leisure’ and ‘entertainment’ industries. Thus, the difference between the service provider and the client is highlighted by the defined commodity named ‘aesthetic pleasure’. This by no means is a singular or a monolithic aesthetic experience, but definitely identifiable as the desired end product.

The realms of dance scholarship in India may be filled with aesthetically presented dancing bodies, sound of steps and ankle bells, temple chimes and musical accompaniments but they are also reverberating silences of absent bodies and cultures forcibly erased or coercively marginalised for ages. Each story of a successful dance practice and the visibility of the spectacular image of a corporeal presence thereof hides scores of bodies made missing and absent, of those performers invisibalized and rendered de-recognised by the severe systemic and social marginalisation imposed by the state and other patronage systems. It is time for such embodied histories to be brought forth with emphasis on the silences. We as editors believe that now is that moment in history when restaging and reorganising these dancing bodies needs to be given a priority in Indian dance scholarship.

Dance history in India is replete with references of the dancing bodies that stand as proof or documentation of the bodies of both male and female dancers who adorned the temple walls as early as the 2^nd century BC. These elaborate works of art stand proof of the artistic choices of the long dead patrons, usually male, who ensured their immortality by creating signature architectural monuments. The dancers are not remembered, they are aesthetic embellishments, which are appreciated as remnants of a culture that proves the strength of the Sanskrit text immortalised in the form of the Pancham Veda or the Natyashastra. The texts have been used to establish unified readings of those bodies on the walls. No reference is made to the sculptors, whose bodies were frequently maimed by these patrons who wanted to ensure that there would be no replication of the artistic creation. The labouring bodies of the sculptors, possibly less privileged and from low social caste and class backgrounds, have disappeared without a trace, though it is their deed that stays frozen in time and space. The aesthetic presentation of the body points to a sanctified ‘pure’ aesthetic presence of the clean body that does not show signs of labour – in breathlessness, tiredness and sweat.

It is also an energising moment to see the emergence of new narrators and narratives on the Devadasi debate in our post-colonial dancescape. Devadasi history is a history of forcible removal of the dancer’s body, literally from the temple precinct by prohibiting her to dance there, refusing her rights to stay in the property as had been previously in her right as the wife of the god, and also taking away her right to call herself an artiste, by designating her as a fallen and polluted/pollutant body. Davesh Soneji referred to ‘Brahmin propriety over Bharatanatyam’ to explain the resultant reorientation of the aesthetic structures of the classical dance form of Bharatanatyam. He writes:

National imaginaries and identities, inflected by class and caste anxieties, undoubtedly hinged upon constructions of gender, and specifically on the control and regulation of female sexuality. Reform projects around devadaˉsıˉs also represented a persistent, middle-class altruism that was justified through a discourse of moral recuperation.⁴

The huge caste, class and gender implications in case of the Devadasi women, whose disenfranchisement remains as the most written-about story of silencing/marginalising in Indian dance history, are however not the only story of removal of hereditary dancing bodies from their rightful social and public presences. Similar experiences come from dance forms such as Gotipua from Odisha – whereby the classicisation of Odissi as the principal dance form of the region has severely limited the patronage and visibility of other practitioners. The inexorable process of eviction and disenfranchisement continues under several guises in different parts of the postcolonial nation. This issue will also bring to the fore some unfamiliar narratives of eviction from the margins of the nation.

‘Dance’ and ‘body’ – both words are constantly vulnerable to socio-cultural-moral policing. The national cultural policy has relied heavily on the Natyashastra for giving dancing bodies layers of legitimacy and support, by aestheticizing and fixing the limits of their possibilities, through affixing of heavily prescriptive brahminic values to their presences. By doing so, these policies have created a regime of surveillance within and by the dancers themselves, as well as the patrons and the audience, thereby making it difficult for the dancing body to move out of the aesthetic cage.

It is therefore extremely common and easy for the society to mark certain dancing bodies – usually seen as ‘professionally’ earning money through dance – as unacceptable or un-aesthetic or even dangerous. The cultural capital that gives classical dancers the prestigious position of connoisseurs and practitioners of an aesthetic and high form of art, is not present for other dancers who use their art to earn a living. The question of vulgarity introduced in terms of the dancing body is another mode of patriarchal – moral control over dancing bodies that cannot be ignored in the contemporary moment in the Indian context. The same has been systematically co-opted into the coding of the aesthetic that seems to be a part of a somewhat non-negotiable ‘national’ identity in post-independence India. In its basic tenets, vulgarity was a word associated with the art of women dancers. While writing against the devadasis, Periyar (E.V. Ramasamy) was putting forth his conviction that the survival of the devadasi system was a concrete sign of ‘the subordination of lower-caste women to the fulfilment of the needs of upper-caste men’. Periyar states that their lives were ‘vulgar and artificial to the extreme. They are often responsible for spreading diseases such as gonorrhea. They must therefore be prevented from pursuing their profession’.⁵

The question of vulgarity in art also brings about the sensibility and the aesthetic structure that becomes a reference for Indian dance as a whole. As a result, the delegitimization and forced removal of certain bodies from the dance space becomes normalised as an activity of a democratic state that sees itself as progressive. Many of the papers have addressed the issue of patronage, where the patrons are known to exercise prescriptive control over the bodies of the dancers, their labour and their public visibility.

In the process of understanding the discourses around dancing bodies the special issue includes contemporary research around the social, cultural, historical, political and discursive constructions of the body in dance connected to South Asia. As editors, our aim has been to bring together a group of exciting authors whose writings will privilege the corporeality of the bodies that have animated artistic spaces in relation to their specialised areas of study. The essays weave in and out of historical references and contemporary contestation aiming to recognise caste, ethnicity, class and gender politics, that push us towards yet another reading of the dancing body. Some of these essays consist of specific case studies covering a range of performers/practices in the everyday context or are in relation to the texts, history, memory, violence, resistance and movements that the dancers’ bodies gets inscribed with – across time and space.

We hope that the essays included in this special issue are inclusive of differences, and even on the grounds of what is, or may be, included under the umbrella of the word ‘dance’. These essays have taken us on a journey of the discourses on ‘the body per se’ to capture its historical constructions and culturally mediated representations, a shift that lies in connecting the dancer with the dance to their embodied politics, life patterns, gendered identities and cultural crossings. They have created challenges of research, documentation and theorisation around constructions of new identities. They will talk about new bodies in new precarious spaces with individual dancer’s personal/somatic/erotic/political experiences, woven into the fabric of larger history of performance. Hence, the issue will provoke some of the following questions:

• Can the dancing body that emerges as an archive of memories and a storehouse of knowledge and information, double as a potent tool of resistance and defiance through the embodied politics of the performer?

• In a capitalist market economy is the decorated body of the classical dancer an iconic showpiece placed in the sanitised and high-profile order, as much commodified as the licentious and lustful dancer who dances to earn livelihood in the city’s underbelly?

• If the high-caste, middle-class audience reifies the pure and pristine bodies of dancers emblematic of moral nation, who ogles, indulges and then evicts the illicit sexualised bodies of proletarian performers?

• Thriving at the troubled interface of caste, gender and sexual labour, how does the erotic dancing body violate the sexual morality of a dominant culture?

• In a culture that always patrols, vigils, regiments and disciplines the body as a pre-given entity, how does the ‘aberrant’ queer body, engaged in ‘questionable and abnormal actions’ transgress and challenge the hetero-normative patriarchally constituted body frame?

• How do the cinematic representations of performing bodies write a new narrative on dance? How do films facilitate documentation of desires and pleasures by assembling the spectacle of dance along with music, costume, choreography and cinematography?

We are our bodies

Ever since the founding moment of Indian dance the reinvention of a dancing body remains a fraught exercise; a body which is torn between conflicting and conflating pulls between gender, nation, tradition and modernity. Kalpana Ram has argued that the mix of eroticism, professional identity, and public performance was destined to fall foul of the new morality of a respectable nationalist construction of Indian culture’.⁶ But the body is not some kind of a technical tool of performance. It does not simply occupy ‘space’ like any other object, nor is it a ‘container’ in which an inner ‘I’ resides. In fact, when Ram proclaims that ‘We are our bodies’ it infers that the body is not somehow mysteriously identical with us and our projects; it is above all, the very basis of our sensory connection with the world, for our having a world at all. Ram emphasises, ‘Dance, with its mobile and labile qualities, emphasises that the body is not a static entity. It is through the process of moving and sensorily exploring the world that we come to know and constitute both ourselves and the world around us.’⁷

Drawing out cultural parallels at another geopolitical landscape of Iran, Ida Meftahi critiques the constructions of dominant categories of ‘modern’, ‘high’, and ‘artistic’ with a simultaneous downgrading and ‘othering’ of public dancers discursively peripheralized from the national stage.⁸ Meftafi writes about

…. the shifting dynamics of the body in public space as they relate to urban transformations, the state’s top-down implementations in establishing various institutions, the competing conceptions of discipline and regulatory systems as pertaining to public space, and the bio-economy of the dancing body in relation to the income of the performance venues.⁹

That is why perhaps the challenge of ‘becoming a body’ is both historical as well as about the here and now. Turning around the multiple axes of labour, effort, deviance, dedication, precarity and resistance, Urmimala Sarkar Munsi argues in her essay that a body that claims history is not necessarily a historical body or a body from history; rather, it is a body that seeks validation from history. Within specific contexts of labour and leisure, she explores the varied contexts in which bodies in public spaces come under scrutiny. If political bodies are scrutinised by surveillance cameras, police picket and social media, the bodies of the classical dancers come under the cultural monitoring of the state. Carrying the aesthetic weight of a timeless tradition the classicised bodies are respected as dedicated tools upholding the national culture. For Bollywood and other resistive or erotic dance forms, bodies in display are considered dangerous, deviant and ‘available’ for sexual exploitation. Bodies can devise their own negotiations with the spectators by riding the gaze, submitting to the gaze, inviting the gaze and controlling the gaze. For Sarkar Munsi thus, the process of embodying is becoming a body, signifying a commitment not only to dance as an art or a livelihood providing expertise, but a controlled and yet fragile docility, that could, on the one hand, take charge of all independent thoughts, while on the other, can make one challenge all existing structures of control.

In her paper, ‘Artistic labour in Dance and Painting: Revisiting the Theory-Practice Debate via Mimesis (Anukŗti) and the Abject Body’ Parul Dave Mukherji takes up labour or śrama, a loaded term by itself, not only as involving labour as skill embedded in dancing but also as a thematic of representation itself. The author untangles the tense relationship between manual/artistic labour and ritual labour of the performing body – both in its artistic and physical sense – that proposes an entry point into the slippery terrain of ‘Indian’ mimesis and its larger cultural politics. Through an incisive reading of Nāṭyaśāstra, the Citrasūtra of the Vişņudharmottarapurāņa and the Abhinavabharati she shows how the divine body is set apart from human bodies along the registers of beauty, cleanliness and pleasures of viewing. At the interface between the two remains the abject body, a body which is labouring and thus anti-aesthetic, and rejected as apratitam or improbable bodies, pushed outside the upper class/caste/man’s horizon of experience.

And it is the abject, anti-aesthetic and labouring body that raises its discomforting heads across historical time and space. Moving in many clumsy and ungainly forms or gyrating in bawdy and vulgar movements it often steps outside the purview of respectability, civility and morality. The unabashed celebration of the sexual body seen in the dirty ballads, the erotic folklore or naughty movements of the rural folk/urban mass often fall into this category. In ‘Folk Dance/Vulgar Dance: Erotic Lavani and the Hereditary Performance Labour’, Anagha Tambe unpacks the process of folkization that leads to simultaneous celebration and stigmatisation of subaltern female bodies in the erotic dance of lavani as the folk art of Maharashtra. The choreographed celebration of the folk and tribal dancers in the festive carnivals sponsored by the state often battles with reality. Valorised as a codified rustic folk of Maharashtra in national folk festivals, television dance shows and urban revivalist cultural shows, the same erotic dancing of lavani performed for livelihood by poorer low-caste women is downgraded as vulgar –‘just sex, no art’. The sexual pleasure, leisure and agency of one group of performers stand out against the cheap sexual labour of the vulgarity low-caste women. Drawing on vernacular sources and texts, Tambe digs into lavani’s fraught relationship with respectability and spectatorship around the triadic relationship of caste, class and gender. However, folk artists have articulated themselves not in terms of a sense of victimhood, or wrongs to be righted, she argues, a paradigm that is produced with the democratic state’s politics of folkization that disconnects the folk performance from its organic performing contexts and marks out the very same performing bodies as vulgar.

Indeed, the middle-class hegemonic culture was constituted not as an autonomous entity, but through relationships of exclusion and inclusion with other/lower class and caste communities, creating new forms of marginalisation for particular styles and specific categories of public performers. If the right wing state of Maharashtra found in the low-caste and lustful dancing bodies potent threats to the fibre of the nation, the long drawn out moral battle won or lost on the bodies of erotic dancers of the leftist state of Bengal turned on discursively produced binaries between sanskriti (culture) and apasanskriti (decadent/pervert culture). In ‘Calcutta Cabaret: Dance of Pleasure or “Perversion”?’ Aishika Chakraborty privileges the subversive testimonies of marginalised cabaret dancers of postcolonial Calcutta to interrogate the moral policing of the liberal democratic state that erased and evicted the dancers from the space(s) of performance, disenfranchising them of their claims to livelihood and survival. The essay captures the shifts in the night-time economy of Calcutta as the changing rhythms of the exotic transnational night dancers of the upscale entertainment venues of the colonial White Town slowly merged with and faded into the ‘seedy and insalubrious’ cabaret shows enacted by the poor refugee girls at commercial/sex/porn theatres. Straddling two worlds of entertainment of two Calcuttas, cabaret thrived on the city’s everyday disrupting critically the moral universe of the Bengali middle class. As her case study, Chakraborty revisits the many journeys of Miss Shefali, a refugee from East Pakistan-turned-the first Bengali cabaret dancer of India, who ferried herself between the swanky and the sordid worlds of pleasure, catering erotic indulgence to the hegemonic cultured elite and the uncultured Others at large, before being purged of the city as a visceral symbol of vulgarity and degeration.

But why, at all, does dance need eroticisation of the body? What is this special connection between dance and the erotic? Is it just a matter of sexuality or is it a fundamental condition of the body in dance and performance? Analysing the erotic power of the dancer in relation to the performance of the arkestra girls in the north Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, Brahma Prakash argues that the erotic does something exceptional to the body of a dancer that is uncommon in everyday lives. It creates a dynamics of the body; it gives the body a phenomenal capacity. In his essay, ‘The Erotic Power of the Dancer: Labour of the Erotic and the Bodies of the Sensory in the Dance of Arkestra Girls in North India’, Prakash troubles the binary between dance work and sex work that often obscures the question of labour, as he sees in the erotic body a potential site of radical politics and subversion. From the discursive lens of body, agency and identity, the author moves to explore the corporeal presence of the dancer who brings the labour of the erotic and the sensory body into her performance.

The dyad of the promiscuous dancer versus the unsullied ideal woman remains central in the whole discourse on performance, especially when the (dancing) body has been prototyped through its onscreen visual representation. In the tinsel media if the ideal heroine of the nation is situated in the inside (safe) domain, showing no signs of explicit physicality, dance takes place in the fraught domain of the outside world, weaving the magic of fantasy and unrealism. The dancers, vamps, and anti-heroines of Hindi cinema who could put at risk the unsullied image of the nation-mother include names like Helen, Azurie (Anna Marie Gueizelor), Cuckoo (Moray), Kuldeep Kaur et al. But one star that perhaps sinks into oblivion was the inimitable dancing star, Sitara Devi, whose dance and desire once troubled the patriarchal anxiety embedded in the cinema industry.

Reclaiming Sitara Devi and her untamed desiring body from historical debris and amnesia, Madhuja Mukherjee’s ‘The Phantom of History: Figurations of dancing body and the “Sitara Devi Problem” of Indian cinema’ foregrounds Sitara as the versatile Kathak dancer and femme fatale of Bombay’s film industry. Best remembered for her vibrant ‘fusion’ numbers in Roti (1942) and her balletic en pointe chakkars on a piano in Phool (1945), Sitara came clear about her dancing style, ‘when I will dance, I have to appear sexy!’¹⁰ Thus, Saddat Hossain Manto’s ‘deliciously gossipy, and cheerfully malicious’ tattletale describes Sitara not as a woman but ‘a typhoon’, as she loved her art in the same total way as she loved her men. The male anxiety around women’s unbridled sexuality seeped through the characterisations of dancing divas/vamps of the Mumbai film industry as well and even the most progressive minds of modern India did not escape the ambivalence in receiving the sexual and the sensual dancing body of a woman who appeared blatantly transgressive of the industry’s sexual and moral norms. While historical readings of Indian cinema mostly invisibilised the formidable power of her dance and labour, Mukherjee locates Sitara in the topography of Hindi popular films, drawing our attention to the deleted/edited out/excesses/absentee dance of her life.

The virtual absence of dancing bodies in Bengali film took a crucial turn only in the 1980s with the establishment of performing masculinity, machismo and disco sensation embodied by the star-persona of Mumbai-bred Bengali actor, Mithun Chakraborty. Despite a couple of exceptions including Soumitra Chatterjee’s popular twist on the street in Teen Bhubaner Pare Bengali heroes dithered to try dancing on screen. However, the 1980s witnessed, as Spandan Bhattacharyya mapped in his article, a significant departure from the ‘actor hero’ to the ‘performer hero’ with ‘a certain form of machismo, physicality and bodily presence’ being prioritised over ‘emoting skills, dialogue articulations and notions of realism’. The newly formed performative culture (of action and dance) unsettled the established idea of gendered star bodies of Bengali cinema from earlier decades and offered new textual formation and pleasures. Bhattacharyya’s ‘Disco Flamboyance, Performative Masculinities and Dancer Heroes of Popular Bengali Cinema’ argues that the inclusion of performative male bodies in the dance numbers introduced a different imagination of masculinity, disrupting the genteel urban bhadra image of Bengali actors. He takes the Bengali blockbuster movie Troyee (released in May 1982) as a case in point to demonstrate the rise of the eponymous hero of the next Bollywood hit Disco Dancer (released in December 1982), Mithun Chakraborty who spawned generations of Bengali (Indian) youngsters to take to (disco) dancing. Mithun’s pelvic thrusts, improvisational leg shakes and free style gestures became a rage, a testimony to disco’s global and regional popularity. Bengali cinema that had so far remained largely impersonal to dancing was soon to be flooded by the new popular dance moves of the next generation of male stars. The paper traces the shifting visual idioms of Mithun’s disco dancer till his star texts had first been appropriated and then replaced by a more localised and hybrid dance form of Bengali star Prosenjit. Taking Mithun’s ‘national-popular’ model alongside the localised star power of Prosenjit, the paper throws light on the different determinants of cinematic masculinity in Bengali popular cinema.

Is it the fear of heterotopic patriarchy that stopped men from dancing on stage/screen? Can dance turn a male body effeminate troubling the signifiers of heterosexual masculinity? If performative masculinity has its roots deeply embedded in the bedrock of patriarchal culture then by dancing queerly can an artist ever challenge the deeply entrenched gender binary? The term ‘queer’ as a theoretical and political category has been deployed as a fluid and capacious container for the marginal, the renegade, the imminent, the precarious, the insurgent – signifying all that is anti-normative.¹¹ Delhi-based contemporary choreographer Mandeep Raikhy’s choreographic explorations in Queen Size and A Male Ant Has Straight Antennae deal with the male queer body by sending discomforting ripples across the mainstream performance space. Drawing upon various visual and textual stimuli including images, paintings, drawings and observations, Shambhavee Sharma’s ‘Choreographing the Queer: Visual and Textual Stimuli in Mandeep Raikhy’s Dance-making Process’ unfolds how dance can be used as a medium of communication and activism. Raikhy’s Queen-size poses questions around spectatorship, privacy and dissent around the sexual intimacy of two men while A Male Ant Has Straight Antennae explores the paradoxes of masculinity as an object of desire, fear, repulsion and attraction.

Pallabi Chakravorty focuses on the intersection when dance merges with yoga and yoga becomes the idiom of a virile nation. Chakravorty interweaves the politics of yoga as and with dance at a wider cross-cultural plane to analyse the systematic restructuring of the embodied traditional practice, wiping out the heterogeneous and subaltern roots of the psycho-somatic practice. The article unravels the yoga revivalism that has many similarities with the processes of dance revival in twentieth century India. Foregrounding the use of selective concepts of purity, health, spirituality, and transcendence that are now popularly seen as part of yoga-based embodied practices, Chakravorty maps the route that upper caste Hindus have culled out to establish a caste-based exclusivity using yoga. The consumption and circulation of the dominant narratives found within the global yoga industry, typically inspired by nineteenth century romanticism and the exoticization of the Orient, are reconstituted and institutionalised by the Indian state’s promotion of spiritual tourism, trade, and development opportunities in India. It is the consumption of fetishised, Hindu-inspired objects of worship, the use of Sanskrit prayers (mantra-s), expressions, practices, and identities that exposes the consumer of global yoga to a Hindu idiom, and to supremacist ideology.¹² This essay explores how the heterogeneous roots of yoga have been homogenised in modern India into something that is Hindu and Brahminical as the state organises large-scale Yoga Day in the public domain to assert its virile political-cultural identity.

Going beyond the theoretical remit of the dancing body per se, this issue takes on board the politics, subjectivity, agency and opinions of dancers who sometimes fail to move politically, rising to the demand of the hour. The paper by Anurima Banerji is set against the recent controversy around the ‘Award Wapsi’ movement by a group of artists who returned their national awards to protest the normalisation of violence against minoritized subjects. After the mob lynching of a Muslim man in Dadri in Uttar Pradesh over cow-killing rumours and subsequent attacks on rationalists the nation witnessed a show of strength by artists, filmmakers, writers who in a snowballing anti-intolerance campaign returned their state honours and awards, accusing the BJP-led government of putting fuel on communal tensions and gagging criticism. While artists from across the nation, in a collective gesture of political assertion, countered the inaction of the state it was only the dance community who stayed back and failed to stand up in dissent during the ‘Award Wapsi’ action. In a provocative essay, ‘The Award-Wapsi Controversy and the Politics of Dance’, Banerjee discusses how this event calls into question the ‘task of the dancer’ as an oppositional or emancipating figure as well as the absence and inefficacy of dance to challenge the dominant political order of things. What we have under the existing regime is a kind of consolidated political bargain, argues the author, the artist-as-dissident claims creativity, while the artist-as-conformist can claim power.

The strength of this collection of essays lies in and stems from the range of expertise, knowledge and embodied histories the authors draw upon in their writings. For many of us, the exploration of the dancing body has just begun, for some it is ongoing, and for others, it is yet another step towards understanding and knowing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Martin, Introduction to the Dance, 133–4.

2. See Deshpande, “Hegemonic Spatial Strategies: The Nation-space and Hindu Communalism in Twentieth Century India,” 167–211.

3. Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, 116.

4. See for details Soneji’s, Unfinished Gestures, 113.

5. cited in Soneji, Unfinished Gestures, 140.

6. Ram, “Dancing off-stage,” 5.

7. Ibid., 6.

8. Meftafi, Gender and Dance in Modern Iran.

9. Ibid., 4.

10. Kothari, “Long live the Star,” 2014.

11. Banerji, “Queer Politics,” 81-101.

12. Ibid.