1st Edition
The Dancing Body Labour, Livelihood and Leisure
Preface
Urmimala Sarkar Munsi and Aishika Chakraborty
Introduction: The dancing body: labour, livelihood and leisure
Urmimala Sarkar Munsi and Aishika Chakraborty
1. Becoming a body
Urmimala Sarkar Munsi
2. Artistic labour in dance and painting: revisiting the theory-practice debate via mimesis (Anukrti) and the abject body
Parul Dave Mukherji
3. Folk dance/vulgar dance: erotic lavani and the hereditary performance labour
Anagha Tambe
4. Calcutta cabaret: dance of pleasure or perversion?
Aishika Chakraborty
5. The erotic power of the dancer: labour of the erotic and the bodies of the sensory in the Arkestra of North India
Brahma Prakash
6. The phantom of history: figurations of the dancing body and the ‘Sitara Devi problem’ of Indian cinema
Madhuja Mukherjee
7. Disco flamboyance, performative masculinities and dancer heroes of Bengali cinema
Spandan Bhattacharya
8. Choreographing the queer: Visual and textual stimuli in Mandeep Raikhy’s dance-making process
Shambhavee Sharma
9. The body and the contagion: a symbiosis of yoga, dance, health and spirituality
Pallabi Chakravorty
10. The award-wapsi controversy in India and the politics of dance
Anurima Banerji
Biography
Urmimala Sarkar Munsi is Professor and Dean of the School of Arts and Aesthetics in Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. Her research overlaps the intersection between dance, gender and lived experience; practice /theory interface; documenting performance; and the politics of identity and regional performances. Her recent publications are Uday Shankar and his Transcultural Experimentations: Dancing Modernity (2022), Alice Boner Across Arts and Geographies: Shaping the Dance Art of Uday Shankar (2021), Mapping Critical Dance Studies in India (2024), Marg Dance Readings (co- edited with Anita Cherian, 2023).
Aishika Chakraborty is Professor and Director of the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. A gender historian, her current research thrives at the interface of class, patriarchy and performance of the labouring bodies in Indian contemporary and popular dance. She is the author of Widows of Colonial Bengal: Gender, Morality and Cultural Representation (2023) Kolkatar Nach: Samakalin Nagarnritya (2019) and Kolkatar Cabaret: Bangali, Younata ebang Miss Shefali (2020). She is currently working on a co-edited volume titled Gendered Bodies, Social Exclusions: Contemporary Issues in Women’s Studies (Routledge).
