عنوان

Emerging contemporary Bharatanatyam choreoscape in Britain :

Number

TLets678019

Title Proper

Emerging contemporary Bharatanatyam choreoscape in Britain :

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Banerjee, Suparna

Title Proper by Another Author

the city, hybridity and technoculture

Subsequent Statement of Responsibility

Grau, Andrée ; Meduri, Avanthi ; David, Ann R.

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

University of Roehampton

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2015

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Ph.D.

Body granting the degree

University of Roehampton

Text preceding or following the note

2015

Text of Note

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.

Banerjee, Suparna

David, Ann R.

Grau, Andrée

Meduri, Avanthi

University of Roehampton

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y