1st Edition

Performance at the Urban Periphery Insights from South India

    270 Pages 51 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    270 Pages 51 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This edited volume considers performance in its engagement with expanding Indian cities, with a particular focus on festivals and performances in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

    The editors ask how performance practices are affected by urbanisation, the effects of such changes on their cultural economy, and the environmental impacts of performance itself. This project also considers how performance responds to its context, and the potential for performance to be critical of the city’s development, and of its own compromises. Bringing together perspectives from the humanities, natural and social sciences, the book takes a multi-faceted analytical view of live performance, connecting contemporary with heritage forms, and human with more-than-human actors.

    The three sections, themed around heritage, everyday life, and future ecologies, will be of great interest to students and scholars in performance, heritage studies, ecology and art history.

    Acknowledgements

    List of contributors

    List of images

    Introduction

    Cathy Turner, Jerri Daboo, Sharada Srinivasan, and Anindya Sinha

    1 The spaces of everyday performance

    Narendar Pani

    Photo essay 1: Maha Shivaratri, 2018: a journey through Bengaluru

    Cathy Turner and Anne Fenk with photography by Siddarth Sumitran

    Part one: heritage

    Introduction: heritage

    Cathy Turner, Jerri Daboo, Sharada Srinivasan, and Anindya Sinha

    2 Crossing thresholds: transgressing space, identity and performance in the Urur-Olcott Kuppam Vizha in Chennai

    Jerri Daboo

    3 Performing craft, crafting performance: from the tangible to intangible in craft and performance heritage

    Sharada Srinivasan

    4 Staging the temple as a living experience of a distant past

    Smriti Haricharan

    Photo essay 2: Heritage performances at Tripunithura

    Cathy Turner

    Part two: everyday life

    Introduction: everyday life

    Cathy Turner, Jerri Daboo, Sharada Srinivasan, and Anindya Sinha

    5 The production of locality at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016)

    Cathy Turner

    6 Spectacle and subversion at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018)

    Cathy Turner

    7 Performing the digital city: flash mob performance and social exclusion in Bengaluru’s ‘new’ India

    Rebecca Savory Fuller

    Photo essay 3: fermented frontier: between north and south

    Lawai BemBem

    Part three: environment

    Introduction: environment

    Cathy Turner, Jerri Daboo, Sharada Srinivasan, and Anindya Sinha

    8 Musings from the Vrishchikotsavam of Tripunithura: the uncertain future of the performing temple elephants of Kerala

    Sreedhar Vijayakrishnan and Anindya Sinha

    9 Primate performances in a contact zone: interspecies communication and benefaction in a synurbising forest of Southern India

    Sarada Natarajan and Anindya Sinha

    10 Performing the Poromboke at the Urur-Olcott Kuppam Vizha, Chennai

    Sharada Srinivasan and Cathy Turner

    Photo essay 4: on the threshold of Urur Kuppam

    Cathy Turner

    Index

    Biography

    Cathy Turner is Professor of Drama at the University of Exeter.

    Sharada Srinivasan is Professor of Archaeology in the School of Humanities at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru.

    Jerri Daboo is Professor of Performance at the University of Exeter.

    Anindya Sinha is Professor of Animal Behaviour and Cognition at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore, India, and Honorary Research Fellow at the College of Humanities in Exeter University, UK.