ABSTRACT
Worlding is a concept that situates human relationships beyond the logic of sameness, as qualified by globalisation theories. This chapter borrows ideas from Cheah’s question, ‘What is a World?’, to define worlding as a promotion of ‘co-dependency’ and ‘aroundness’—as something which exceeds the spatial and temporal boundaries to experience moments of liminality or in-betweenness. It is in these interstices of experience that affect can be lived as a somatic encounter which resonates with other bodies undergoing (or having undergone) a similar encounter. In order to demonstrate that worlding is an affective experience, I will study the works of Deepak Kurki Shivaswamy. I propose that his choreographic pieces and the audience responses to them establish the concept of co-dependence as a mutual affect in process. And therefore, as also something which is an open-ended moment of being.
My reading of Deepak Kurki Shivaswamy’s contemporary-styled choreographic pieces highlights the fallacy inherent in defining meaning in dance movement through cartographical boundaries of their origins. As I suggest, dance is not something definitive or that which seeks a specific emotional response. In fact, this chapter will show how an introduction of the ethos of participation in dance performances transcends the boundaries of any predetermined somatic experience. The analysis of the moment of affective reception and reaction in and through Shivaswamy’s performances will invite thoughts on worlding as a consequential channelisation in the experiential process.
