Contemporary Indian Dance: New Creative Choreography in India and the Diaspora by Ketu H. Katrak (review)

What are labeled as “contemporary Indian dances” emerged in the form of continually evolving constellations of artistic works dispersed in India and its diaspora around the globe during the 1970s and ’80s, with roots stretching back to the early decades of twentieth-century Indian nationalism. I use the plural form, dances, primarily because of the complexity involved in grouping them within a single genre. The term “contemporary” in relation to Indian dance is concerned with a complicated array of intended meanings that are multifaceted, multifarious, and unique to each sociopolitical, economic, geographic, and racially bound artistic constellation—and are in some ways unique to each dancer within the constellation as well.

Ketu Katrak’s Contemporary Indian Dance: New Creative Choreography in India and the Diaspora is an adventurous attempt to analytically weave the threads of selected contemporary Indian dance choreographies around the globe, including India, the UK, Canada, and the United States, into a single study. As Katrak notes in her introduction, the project is charged by the notion of change, intending to reflect the extent to which the traditional Indian dance vocabulary has been transformed “from the inside, along with creatively bringing in other movement styles to make a new hybrid work” (xix). Her primary focus is on changes in the form and content of these contemporary dances in terms of their evocation of “rasa,” a theoretical term that could be loosely translated as the taste or aesthetic pleasure derived by informed spectators. Her emphasis is on “the rasa evoked by the self-reflexivity of contemporary artists” (xxi), which is meant to raise audiences’ social awareness of issues like gender inequality, domestic violence, female sexuality, or the need for “challenging stereotypes of sexuality or nation” (ibid.).

The introduction lays down the theoretical framework of the book, providing an elucidation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary notion of “heteroglossia” as applicable to contemporary Indian dance. Bakhtin conceptualizes the term as a distinguishing feature of the novel, which orchestrates the dialogization of its multiple voices through the social diversity of speech types, conflicting views, and inflectional meanings. Katrak usefully adopts heteroglossia to describe contemporary Indian dance and the dancers’ fluid approach to tradition and innovation, referring to the “dialogic” nature of dance in terms of its open-endedness and “the impossibility of closure,” the multiplicity of social voices and meanings, and diverse movement techniques and cultural experiences (14). Katrak further invokes the Bakhtinian notion of multivocality to emphasize the hybrid nature of dance’s meanings “generated in the interaction between … the performer and the audience” (ibid.).

The book references choreographic works of contemporary Indian dancers who are well-known around the globe, namely, Astad Deboo, Shobhana Jeyasingh, Akram Khan, Daksha sheth, Aditi Mangaldas, Mallika sarabhai, Anita Ratnam, Ut-tara Asha Coorlawala, Hari Krishnan, and several other emerging artists. Chapter 1 foregrounds the early twentieth-century nationalist and reformist movements against British colonization and emphasizes the international and intercultural connections pioneered by Uday Shankar’s “creative dance” in Europe and North America. Katrak also provides a detailed description of Chandralekha’s outstanding works that emphasize sexuality, sensuality, and spirituality; this discussion, however, would have provided variety and a broader scope to her study had it included an analysis of some of the breakthrough choreographies of other Indian dance styles from Chandralekha’s contemporaries, such as Manjusree Chaki-Sarkar (Navanritya), Priti Patel (Manipuri, Thang-ta), Annette Leday (Kathakali), and Kumudini Lakhia (Kathak). In chapter 2, Katrak discusses the conceptual works of Astad Deboo (India) and Shobhana Jeyasingh (UK), both of whom broke new ground in creating abstract dances. Chapter 3, part 1 follows some of the classically trained dancers in India and throughout the diaspora who use the Kathak and Bharatanatyam idiom as a basis for their contemporary works. Part 2 refers to emerging artists that are experimenting and exploring the transformative potential of traditional dance. Interestingly, Padmini Chettur calls her work simply “contemporary dance...