The thesis investigates how Bharatanatyam dance practice is reconfigured through the specific cultural histories and novel practices of emerging dance artists in Britain. At the outset, I engage with how various dance labels are contested socially and culturally by diverse groups of people. In doing so, I intertwine the discussion with the politics of identity to illuminate how these dance artists negotiate their multiple identities, encompassing the issues related to race, ethnicity, gender and citizenship. Through a situated reading of postmodern and postcolonial praxes, I argue that these dance artists construct a permeating border by continually bringing new elements into their contemporary works, dismantling the purity/hybridity dyad. Additionally, I demonstrate how the theme of the ‘city’ is adopted as a performative device to portray kaleidoscopic patterns of cultural, historical and psychological climates of urban cities. While analysing non-proscenium choreographies, I demonstrate how an assembly of the senses overlap with various architectural places to create a complex web of history, cultural identity and memory to construct a ‘site’, which in turn, opens up rooms for discussing the previously ignored senses, including tactility, gustation and olfaction. Furthermore, I reveal how digital performance as a genre is increasingly celebrated by these dance artists, which decisively has challenged the bodily boundary and influenced the psycho-visual aesthetics of contemporariness. Drawing on interdisciplinary theoretical lenses, my readings of a range of danceworks and a mixed-method approach, I argue that contemporary Bharatanatyam practice is always in a state of flux due to the incessant mobility of people, ideas, cultures, histories and differential artistic subjectivities, and therefore it restricts any closure of meanings. In a nutshell, this thesis offers a new perspective on the disjuncture and reconfiguration of contemporary practice of Bharatanatyam dance in the 21st century British context, provoking new ways of seeing, interpreting and appreciating contemporary performance.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:678019 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Banerjee, Suparna |
| Contributors | Grau, Andrée ; Meduri, Avanthi ; David, Ann R. |
| Publisher | University of Roehampton |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/portal/en/studentthesis/emerging-contemporary-bharatanatyam-choreoscape-in-britain(96730b2d-768c-4d04-b9ee-d50e831c14be).html |
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