Scripting Dance in Contemporary India
As stories of Indian dance's renaissance span almost a full century,
there has emerged a globally dispersed community of Indian dancers,
scholars and audiences who are deeply committed to keeping these
traditions alive and experimenting with traditional dance languages to
grapple with contemporary themes and issues. Scripting Dance in
Contemporary India is an edited volume that contributes to this field of
Indian dance studies. The book engages with multiple dance forms of
India and their representations. The contributions are eclectic,
including writings by both scholars and performers who share their
experiential knowledge. There are four sections in the book - section I
titled, "Representations' has three chapters that deal with textual
representations and illustrations of dance and dancers, and the
significance of those representations in the present. Section II titled,
"Histories in Process" consists of two chapters that engage with the
historiographies of dance forms and suggest that histories are
narratives that are continually created. In the third section,
"Negotiations", the four chapters address the different ways in which
dance is embedded in society, and the different ways in which the
aesthetics of a form has to negotiate with social, economic and
political imperatives. The final section, "Other Voices/ Other Bodies"
brings voices which are outside the mainstream of dance as 'serious'
art.
Edited by Maratt Mythili Anoop and Varun Gulati - Contributions by
C. R. Rajendran; Ruchika Sharma; Justine Lemos; Anandi Salinas; Kelli
Ling; Sushmita Arunkumar; Kaustvi Sarkar; Veena Basavarajaiah; Divya
Venkatesh; Puthumana Govindan Namboodiri and Melwyn Pinto
TILT PAUSE SHIFT: DANCE ECOLOGIES IN INDIA
edited by Anita E. Cherian, Associate Professor, School of Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University Delhi.
Published by Tulika Books in association with Gati Dance Forum
Tilt Pause Shift engages the knotty question of dance in
today’s India. It is an investigation of movement, and, in particular,
of a ‘marked’ subset of that – ‘dance’. In its many peregrinations it
seems to ask, what kind of movement is dance? Most pointedly, it
performs the question: What is dance in India? And, relatedly, what is
it to dance in India?
In its design, the book offers the reader the opportunity to manoeuvre
between the analytic registers of the essays, and the sensuous and
performative choreographic portraits. Interspersed between these are
curated photo-spreads and imagistic representations of the material
traces of performances-in-process. The latter, which take the form of
diary notes, sketches and photographs, enhance the reader’s encounter
with performances by providing another experiential layer. These
residues of performance highlight the significance of process,
contingency and reflection to choreographic composition. They are also,
importantly, archives of performance in miniature, which reference the
processes of the artist and her ensemble, and also perhaps,
intriguingly, await reactivation in performance or discourse at some
later date. In both the essays and the choreographic portraits, the
effort has been to show the diversity of practices and methodologies
that comprise the movement ecosphere that we inhabit today.
The contributors to the book include Ranjana Dave, Navtej Johar, Sundar
Sarukkai, Brahma Prakash, Paromita Vohra, Padmini Chettur, Abantee
Dutta, Shabari Rao, Rajyashree Ramamurthy, Justin McCarthy, Arushi
Singh, Veena Basavarajaiah, Rose Merin, Himalay K. Gohel, Parvathi
Ramanathan, Anita E. Cherian, Gabriele Wittmann and Esther Sutter. The
choreographic portraits have been edited by Gabriele Wittmann and Esther
Sutter.
The book has been published with support from Pro Helvetia- Swiss Arts
Council, Royal Norwegian Embassy, Goethe-Institut/ Max Mueller Bhavan
and Raza Foundation.
To order copies of the book at Rs 950 (excluding postage), please write to:
gati.parvathir@gmail.com / gatidance@gmail.com / or call +91 9971406113
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