Royona Mitra

Decolonising immersion: Translation, spectatorship, Rasa Theory and contemporary british dance

This article decolonises hitherto Anglophonic theorising of the audience phenomenon of immersion by disassociating it from the participatory and interactive nature of immersive theatre practices, and locating it instead in the reception of contemporary British dance. It argues that by looking to rasa, the art reception theory as laid out in the Natyashastra (an ancient Indian dramaturgical treatise), immersion can also be theorised and experienced as an embodied and psycho-physical state that transpires between any audience, any artist and any piece of art that is premised on gestural codes of communication, regardless interactive participation. If rasa is immersion, as demonstrated through the context of contemporary British dance, then this article simultaneously de-Sanskritises (and de-exoticises) this very concept that has become many western scholars principal intrigue within the Natyashastra. The article then further challenges western preconceptions of rasa as a culturally loaded and temporally specific concept that is only experienced through interactions with Indian art, as per its codifications nearly two millennia ago. In order to exemplify this argument, the article draws on two case studies from the field of contemporary British dance: Desh (2011) by the British-Bangladeshi dancer and choreographer Akram Khan and Yesterday (2008) by the Israeli choreographer Jasmin Vardimon. While distinct in many ways, Desh and Yesterday embody shared themes and aesthetic in the forms of border-identity politics, character transformations through body-markings and intermediality. Through comparative analyses the article argues that in these pieces, audiences can experience immersion, but it is not through physical interactivity as championed by immersive theatre practices. Instead, here, immersion is triggered as an embodied state, accessed from within the audiences interiorities and attuned-ness to twenty-first global migration politics, enhanced by their first hand lived knowledge and/or second hand mediatised awareness of what is at stake for bodies at borders, vis-à-vis volatile migrant identity-politics.This article decolonises hitherto Anglophonic theorising of the audience phenomenon of immersion by disassociating it from the participatory and interactive nature of immersive theatre practices, and locating it instead in the reception of contemporary British dance. It argues that by looking toxa0rasa,xa0the art reception theory as laid out in the Natyashastra (an ancient Indian dramaturgical treatise), immersion can also be theorised and experienced as an embodied and psycho-physical state that transpires between any audience, any artist and any piece of art that is premised on gestural codes of communication, regardless interactive participation. Ifxa0rasaxa0is immersion, as demonstrated through the context of contemporary British dance, then this article simultaneously de-Sanskritises (and de-exoticises) this very concept that has become many western scholars principal intrigue within the Natyashastra. The article then further challenges western preconceptions ofxa0rasaxa0as a culturally loaded and temporally sp...

Postcolonial Pedagogies: Recasting the Guru–Shishya Parampara

The presentations below took place at a roundtable organized for the Congress on Research in Dance and Society of Dance History Scholars Joint Conference on November 5, 2016. Five faculty from four institutions in the United States and United Kingdom—Brunel University London, Colorado College, California State University at Long Beach, and UCLA—discussed the pedagogical strategies used to teach South Asian performance concepts and techniques in the classroom, in relation to the conference’s structuring theme, “Beyond Authenticity and Appropriation.” The principal question guiding the conversation was: How do we engage the common inheritance of the guru–shishya parampara, or the teacher–disciple mentorship model?—the context for collective training in various South Asian movement forms. Given the specific histories and premises of the guru–shishya parampara, how are elements of this educational system adapted, preserved, or repurposed in the Western classroom? This note from the field covers the participants’ training experiences, reflects on the values and limits of guru–shishya instruction, and presents approaches to creating new teaching methods. In the process the participants share strategies for developing performance pedagogies in a transnational frame.

Auto-ethnography and Loose in Flight (1999)

Khan’s use of the body as both a site and source of decolonisation may have reached a crystallised political aesthetic in Gnosis, but its presence as a strategy of artistic enquiry was evident from his earliest endeavour as a student at university. Between 1996 and 1998, during his time at Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Khan created Loose in Flight, a solo that began to negotiate the confusion generated through the multicorporeal layers between his training in kathak and contemporary dance idioms. The innovative spirit and distinctive aesthetic of Loose in Flight is seminal to Khan’s career trajectory for two reasons. Firstly it marks the moment when his very confusion began to generate an organic, dynamic and unique emerging aesthetic. Secondly and more significantly, the piece signals Khan’s earliest approach to new interculturalism as an auto-ethnographic enquiry of his own complex embodied condition. In 1999 British television producer Rosa Rogers of Channel 4 approached Khan to adapt this solo for the screen in collaboration with filmmaker Rachel Davies, as part of a series called Per4mance which was designed to promote short collaborations between filmmakers and performing artists. As a dance-film Loose in Flight (1999) embodied the interdisciplinary and collaborative spirit that has continued to characterise Khan’s trajectory.

Third Space Politics in Zero Degrees (2005) and Desh (2011)

Khan’s new interculturalism is bound up in questions of the self. Through it he negotiates the tricky terrain between his inherited relationships with Bangladesh and his own embodied Britishness. This in-betweenness fuels Khan’s musings on identity-politics in the diaspora and beyond, and finds profound manifestations in two critically acclaimed pieces, Zero Degrees (2005) and Desh (2011).

Mobility and Flexibility in Bahok (2008)

In Zero Degrees’ and Desh’s dismantlings of the third space, Khan’s complex negotiations between his inherited roots and his chosen routes emphasise his multiple affiliations to people, places, cultures, nations and ultimately homes. His ability to move between, occupy, find resonance in and influence multiple spaces and places simultaneously points to another significant catalyst that fuels his embodied approach to new interculturalism; this is the condition of mobility and its relationship to flexibility vis-a-vis relocated subjectivities and homes.1

Queering Normativity in iTMOi (2013)

If Bahok explores the condition of flexibility through evoking global flows of mobility and relocations, iTMOi (2013) places it at the heart of the aestheticisation process through which Khan’s new interculturalism queers normativity. An acronym for In the Mind of Igor, and inspired by Igor Stravinsky’s seminal composition of The Rite of Spring, Khan choreographed iTMOi for the centenary celebrations of its premiere on 29 May 1913 at Theâtre des Champs-Elysees in Paris. Critics have received Khan’s homage in divergent ways.

Corporeal Gestures in Gnosis (2010)

Gnosis in Greek means knowledge, particularly ‘knowledge from experience’: nThe word Gnosis does not refer to knowledge that we are told or believe in. Gnosis is conscious, experiential knowledge, not merely intellectual or conceptual knowledge, belief, or theory. […] Personal experience is not transmissible in conceptual terms; a concept is merely an idea, and experience is far more than an idea. In other words, real Gnosis is an experience that defies conceptualization, belief, or any attempt to convey it. To understand it, one must experience it. (Gnostic Instructor) nThis emphasis on knowledge derived from first-hand embodied experience rather than inherited intellect is a poignant echo of my framing of Khan’s new interculturalism as an interventionist aesthetic that is driven by his unique embodied realities, as detailed in the previous chapter. It is therefore not a coincidence that Gnosis (2010) is the title of Khan’s explorations of a minuscule and mostly disregarded aspect of the Indian epic of the Mahabharata: a mother-son relationship between Queen Gandhari and Prince Duryodhana. In emphasising the embodied nature of his exploration of both the epic and the theme of mother-son relationships, Gnosis distinguishes itself from Brook’s intellectual and dis-embodied treatment of the Mahabharata, and is thus exemplary of Khan’s new interculturalism.

Khan’s Body-of-Action

As a London-based second-generation British-Bangladeshi with training in multiple performance vocabularies that permeate every aspect of his aesthetic, it would be reductive, even impossible, to engage with Khan’s art without understanding the embodied reality and the socio-political contexts that catalyse it. Sondra Horton Fraleigh reminds us of the fundamental link between a dancer’s lived reality and their art: nBecause dance is in essence an embodied art, the body is the lived (experiential) ground of the dance aesthetic. Both dancer and audience experience dance through its lived attributes — its kinaesthetic and existential character. Dance is the art that intentionally isolates and reveals the aesthetic qualities of the human body-of-action and its vital life. (Fraleigh xiii) nTo understand the kinaesthetic qualities of Khan’s art requires an engagement with his dance vocabulary drawn from kathak and contemporary dance idioms. Moreover his embodiment of eclectic movement languages is nuanced further by his own biographical circumstances and his interactions with the wider field of British South Asian arts. Together they generate complex affiliations to diverse traditions, cultures, nations and histories. It is this processual intersection between his biography and his art that lends Khan’s vital life its charge, and infiltrates his new interculturalism with a spirit of ‘self-knowledge’, evoking identity not as a fixed inherited entity, but as an ongoing exploration of its incomplete and multi-layered constructions (Fraleigh xxii).

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