Event overview
A talk by Brahma Prakash (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India), part of the Centre for Comparative Literature’s ‘Body-thoughts’: The CCL Postcolonial Dance Series, 2025.
(This event was postponed from the original date of 20 May to 27 May 2025, 3pm BST, with apologies for the inconvenience)
Dance has to be a movement.
Movements have to have dance.
These are two fundamental propositions – call them slogans – on which I speculate on the questions of dance, movement, performance and resistance discourses in India. My evocations of dance and movements attempt to read them beyond their specific bodies and locations, in larger connections and associations in which they are formed or they (dis)appear. ‘Dance has to be a movement’ is a basic premise on which I think around the questions of decolonization and De-Brahmanization of dance discourses. Likewise, a ‘movement’ here connotes both the bodily movement (from the movement of dancers to the movements of migrant labourers) as well as social and political movements that shape our understanding of body and aesthetics.
The talk will argue that the narrowness, individualization and interiorizations of dancing and dance discourses in India and South Asia have not only reduced dance to the level of pure physicality (turning the dancing body into athlete or spectacle), but also reduced the dancers to the body, dissociating them from the larger understanding of movements. Such understanding either posits the dance in an opposition to the movement (in the case of classical dance) or valorizes movement-exercises at the level of pure abstraction (contemporary dance). Taking dance and movements both as cultural surplus and as the site of remarkable reversals, the talk aims to discuss the appropriations, devaluations and democratization of dance and movements in the contexts of India and South Asia.
The talk will be chaired by Royona Mitra (Brunel University, UK).
THE SERIES
Since 2022 the CCL has hosted an annual series of talks on postcolonial performance; this year’s focus is on dance. Embodied performance arts are central to examining questions of decoloniality, given that bodies marked by enslavement, discrimination or occupation can both express and resist these oppressions. Dance becomes a creative practice and a form of thinking.
If colonial ideologies have historically devalued, even eradicated the cultural practices of colonized subjects, rhythms and movements can be stored in and replayed by the performer’s body. Inherited cultural practices like dance can re-enact past histories. Dance becomes a system of learning, storing, producing and transmitting knowledge: ‘body-thoughts’, to borrow the words of Black British choreographer-performers Alexandrina Hemsley and Seke Chimutengwende.
We shall discuss postcolonial dance from geographical areas which, while varied, share a common interest in resistance to oppression and/or occupation; the revival of indigenous or inherited practices; and the interrogation of fluid identities in a postcolonial world. These areas are Africa, South Asia, Latin America and Palestine.
More information on the talk, the speakers and the series
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 27 May 2025 | 3:00pm - 4:30pm |
Accessibility
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