Search Results

Although the history of the South Indian classical form bharata natyam is most often associated with female performers called devadasis, Hari Krishnan shows that men were also involved, not only as teachers but also as performers. He describes and analyzes the shifting gender expectations and roles of male dancers of South Indian court dance, especially as they relate to colonial modernity and Indian nationalism. Under British rule, the Asian male was categorized as “effeminate,” a perception perhaps enhanced by the practice of gynemimesis (female impersonation) by 19th‐century male dancers of sadir kaceri, the form that was reinvented as bharata natyam. Krishnan demonstrates that an important aspect of reinventing bharata natyam was not only to make it suitable for upper‐class women to perform but to invent a new, hypermasculine style for male performers to allay any anxiety over Indian masculinity.

Chapter 3 focuses on Azurie and Sadhona Bose, once-famous, now-forgotten dancing stars of the 1930s–1940s, to excavate an intersecting, global history of early twentieth-century discourses on dance, featuring figures like Ruth St. Denis, Anna Pavlova, Rabindranath Tagore, Uday Shankar, and Rukmini Devi Arundale, among many others. Situating Bose, the Bengali bhadramahila, and Azurie, an Indo-German “dancing girl,” as co-choreographers of new mobilities throws light on cosmopolitan, transnational dance networks that intersected with nationalist projects of modernity. This chapter relates these dancer-actresses to the so-called revival of classical dance forms, which involved an appropriation of the cultural practices of traditional performers like devadasis and tawaifs by upper-caste, upper-class performers. By reading Bose and Azurie’s performing bodies and careers alongside each other, this chapter dislodges unitary accounts of the impulses and controversies around dance on film by a new class of urban performers.

Chapter 2 develops a body-space-movement framework that studies the spaces of dance, the movement vocabularies used, and the resulting construction of star bodies. This framework uncovers the production processes behind the fetishized space of the Hindi film cabaret, an “architecture of public intimacy,” whose spatial and choreographic operations arouse intense sensorial stimulation. Through a focus on cabaret numbers featuring the dancing star Helen, this chapter discusses the cine-choreographic practices that produce a collision of infrastructures, bodies, and spaces. The body-space-movement framework is also employed to analyze film dance in relation to Indian “classical” and “folk” dance forms. Borrowing from Indian performance treatises like the Natya Shastra and Abhinaya Darpana, this chapter deconstructs the dancing female body into three broad zones—the face, the torso, and the limbs—each of which is capable of a variety of addresses depending on the social connotations of those gestural articulations at certain historical moments.

This chapter uses some key songs and dance sequences from past Bombay cinema and contemporary Bollywood films to illustrate the journey of screen dances to the televisual spectacle of dance reality shows. Part of this journey traverses the performance context of traditional ‘mujras’ to the emergence of ‘item numbers’ in Bollywood.

In her interview, Sonal Mansingh discusses Indian classical dance. Determining the difference between Indian classical dance and other genres in the East and the West, Mansingh looks at classical dance in contemporary India. She attempts to explain why the seven forms of classical dance are parts of a single whole, even though they have their own features and peculiar characteristics and provides insight on why Indian classical dance has survived after all these years and what it is like to perform outside India.

This chapter focuses on an approaching well-backed competitor to Lincoln Kirstein, even as he pleaded his case for contemporary classical dance in the competitive ballet world of New York. Using the press as a bully pulpit, John Martin and his disciples were vocally proclaiming that Lucia Chase's new company, Ballet Theatre, was New York ballet. Debuting on 11 January 1940, Chase's new troupe virtually overnight became “the finest company as [has] yet been seen in America,” wrote Martin. “The Ballet Theatre, whether by accident or design, has hit on the answer to the question of what constitutes an American ballet....It is a fine thing to have one's novelties and experiments designed to please one's own self instead of being created with the approval of Paris and the Riviera in mind.” Within a few years, Martin had added that Ballet Theatre possessed “the most brilliant aggregation of ballerinas to be found in any single company.”

This chapter examines the traces the devadasi past in modern-day Chennai (formerly Madras). It explains that Chennai remains the capital of Indian classical dance and describes the practice and politics of Bharatanayam, one of India's most cherished cultural exports which were created in Madras. It also discusses the narratives that often accompany token gestures toward the devadasi community in the cultural life of modern Chennai.