ABSTRACT

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.

chapter 1|11 pages

Dance matters II

Introduction

part I|80 pages

chapter 2|21 pages

Mah Laqa Bai

The remains of a courtesan’s dance

chapter 3|13 pages

Conflict between cultural perpetuation and environmental protection

A case study of ritual performance in North Malabar, South India

chapter 4|17 pages

Bodies and borders

The Odissi costume controversy 1

chapter 5|12 pages

I know it and I name it as I do it

Embodied practice as a key to understand performance

chapter 6|15 pages

Cosmopolitan then and cosmopolitan now

Rabindranritya meets dance reality shows

part II|41 pages

chapter 7|12 pages

Corporatization of dance

Changing landscape in choreography and patronage since economic liberalization in Bengaluru

chapter 9|10 pages

Bollywood dance

Desire for the ‘Other’

part III|87 pages

chapter 10|31 pages

Rasalila remixed

Tracing the dances of an image

chapter 11|8 pages

Why dance today in India?

A philosophical approach

chapter 12|14 pages

Playing dance and dancing music

The work of intimacy in kathak

chapter 14|20 pages

Remixing Natya

Revanta Sarabhai’s LDR and Post Natyam Collective’s Super Ruwaxi: Origins

part IV|84 pages

chapter 15|27 pages

Dancers and critics

Re-viewing Tagore

chapter 16|10 pages

Pedagogy of Manipuri dance

In and beyond the temple premise

chapter 17|22 pages

Text, context and interpreter

Understanding the paradigms of Sattriya dance and dancer in the changing space

chapter 18|23 pages

Why dancing the sensual sculptures matters?

Considering a sensory paradigm for Odissi dance