British Multiculturalism and Interweaving Hybridities in South Asian Dance

Abstract

British South Asian dancers, choreographers, curators, Arts Council policymakers, and directors of South Asian dance agencies, used ‘hybridity’ as a multi-faceted historical, political, cultural, aesthetic and public culture trope to constitute what is today known as the British South Asian Dance Sector in the UK. This constitution story, initiated under the ideological signs of British multi-culturalism, hybridity and cultural diversity, remains unexamined in theatre, dance and performance scholarship because scholars have not historicized the term and failed to see how it was used creatively as an interweaving trope to facilitate the integration of South Asian dance into British mainstream dance milieu in the three stages of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Drawing on the work of Homi Bhabha, I show how Shobana Jeyasingh, Akram Khan and British South Asian dance organizations used ‘hybridity’ as a multifaceted, historical, institutional, theatrical, choreographic and political trope to integrate South Asian dance forms into mainstream British dance milieu in the forty-year period from 1979 to 2020.

I develop my argument by drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) and focus specifically on the distinction he makes between the two forms of linguistic and cultural hybridization, which he identifies within the frames of ‘unconscious’ organic hybridity and ‘conscious’ intentional hybridity. Significantly for my argument, Bakhtin explains that intentional hybrids build on the historic foundations provided by organic hybrids and deploy these pasts, intentionally, to create new visions in global diasporas. In this paper, I extend Bakhtin’s analytic frame and show how British South Asian chorographers and curators, decontextualized the classical forms of Bharatanatyam and Kathak and reused these, intentionally, to create a hybrid, post-colonial British South Asian dance phenomenon that was both Indian and British simultaneously.