Debanjali Biswas, A.P. Rajaram and Akhila C. Vimal
This edition of JEDS brings together the works of emerging scholars in dance studies on themes of The Moving Body, Identity, Non-Human Interactions. Dance is not just a fluid form – it could be a discourse, concept or metaphor. Dance may not be permanent, but it could bring to question many of the complex relationships of the times we are living in. In the 21st century, dance, regardless of what kind, inserts new voices to interpret bodies in motion. All the essays featured in this issue, arrive into theoretical perspectives from embodied experiences, distinct geographical and cultural locations, personal experiences or insights, thereby defining dance in personal and intimate human terms.
Jhinuk Basu deliberates her own experience of participating in a motion capture workshop along with American choreographer Bill T. Jones’s production Ghostcatching (1990) created by digital artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar. Separated by 32 years, through two case studies Basu raises possibilities of hope despite the challenges of working with technology in dance, dis/embodiment in virtual spaces, and what are the parameters of the body as an archive. This essay discusses human-non-human interactions within the ambit of dance, choreography, corporeality.
Deepshikha Ghosh enables a study of dance as seen through the prism of pedagogy. Ghosh charts how dance is taught, learnt and tested in Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan (India), the politics behind its application as pedagogy in the university system at a time when critique of colonialism, and surge in nationalism impacted holistic education. Ghosh claims dance as the integral core of [our] existence (p.13), nurturing an idea of identity such as the author’s own, as well as youth and women whose bodies and beings were shaped by the institution and sense of place.
Cora Laszlo’s essay addresses presence and the moving body in Brazilian performance cultures. She bases her findings on the Klauss Vianna Technique (KVT) which is an approach focusing on dance improvisation and movement awareness embedded in the history of contemporary dance and experimental performances in Brazil. More importantly, her commitment to engage with decoloniality in dance studies prompts her to veer her research away from patterns, values, and hierarchies imported from Eurocentric modes of knowledge production.
We hope this issue sparks attention towards embodied and artful mechanisms of survival with dance.
