A talk by Brahma Prakash (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India)
Part of the Centre for Comparative Literature’s series of talks ‘Body-thoughts’: The CCL Postcolonial Dance Series, 2025.
Postponed to: Tuesday 27 May 2025, 3pm BST (online)
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)
Attendance is free but booking will be essential to receive a link to attend. REGISTRATIONS HAVE CLOSED, but you can watch the video recording of the seminar:
The participants
Brahma Prakash Brahma Prakash is an Indian writer, essayist and cultural theorist based in Delhi. He teaches Theatre and Performance Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
He is the author of critically acclaimed books including Cultural Labour: Conceptualizing the ‘Folk Performance’ in India (OUP, 2019) and Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India (LeftWord, 2023). He has also published in various journals, including Performance Research, South Asian History and Culture, Economic and Political Weekly.
His popular columns on art, culture and politics frequently appear in Outlook India, Scroll, Wire, Indian Cultural Forum, and other media platforms. His opinions have also appeared on the BBC, Aljazeera, New Arab, Print and other popular podcasts in Hindi and English.
Royona Mitra (chair) is Professor of Dance and Performance Cultures and Associate Pro-Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion at Brunel University of London, UK.
She is the author of Unmaking Contact: Choreographing South Asian Touch (OUP, 2025) and Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism (Palgrave, 2015). Her first monograph was awarded the 2017 de la Torre Bueno First Book Award by the Dance Studies Association (DSA); her article “Unmaking Contact: Choreographic Touch at the Intersections of Race, Caste and Gender” was awarded DSA’s Gertrude Lippincott Award in 2022 for the Best English-Language Journal Article; and her special issue of the Contemporary Theatre Review journal, titled Outing Archives/Archives Outing, co-edited with Bryce Lease and Melissa Blanco Borelli, was awarded TaPRA’s Edited Collection Prize in 2022.
Her research examines systems of oppression in dance and performance cultures at the intersections of bodies, social power regimes, and choreography as resistance. She contributes to the fields of diaspora and performance, South Asian dance and performance cultures, critical dance studies and performance studies.
Royona was Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded #DanceResearchMatters South Asian Dance Equity project (2023-2025) alongside Prarthana Purkayastha (RHUL) and Anusha Kedhar (UC Riverside), and is the current co-Chair of TaPRA alongside Broderick Chow (RCSSD) (2022-).
