“Nothing begins with us.”

There is a curious myth that artists sometimes tell themselves. It is the myth of originality.

We speak of finding our voice, as though it were buried somewhere inside us, waiting patiently to be unearthed. We celebrate the novel, the unprecedented, the breakthrough. We describe artists as visionaries who conjure something from nothing, as if creativity were an act of immaculate conception.

But if we are honest, nothing begins with us.

The first rhythm we ever knew was another person’s heartbeat. The first language we spoke was inherited. The first stories that settled into our bones belonged to people whose names we may never know. We learned to clap because someone clapped before us. We learned to sing because someone sang. Even silence was taught to us.

An artist does not arrive in an empty room. They arrive in the middle of a conversation that has been unfolding for centuries.

Every painting is in dialogue with another painting. Every poem remembers another poem. Every dance carries the residue of bodies that moved long before ours. We inherit metaphors, myths, gestures, harmonies, recipes, rituals and ways of seeing. We borrow them unconsciously before we ever choose to borrow them consciously.

Culture, after all, has never been a museum. It is a river.

Rivers do not ask permission before crossing borders. They gather mountain streams and village wells, absorb rainfall and snowmelt, carry sediment from one landscape into another. They shape everything they touch, while being reshaped in return.

Culture behaves much the same way. Languages borrow words without embarrassment. Music migrates with merchants, migrants and memory. Architecture carries the imprint of conquest and trade. Food tells stories of journeys more faithfully than maps ever could.

There is no such thing as an untouched tradition. What we often call tradition is simply change that has survived long enough to become familiar.

And yet, in recent years, another conversation has entered our studios, classrooms and rehearsal halls. The conversation about appropriation.

It is a conversation that refuses to disappear, and perhaps it shouldn’t. Because history matters.

The world has not been built through equal exchanges of ideas. It has also been built through colonisation, displacement, extraction and erasure. Cultures have not merely shared with one another. They have also been plundered.

There is a huge difference between learning from a community and profiting from it while rendering that community invisible.

When a sacred symbol becomes a fashion accessory, something shifts. When ceremonial music becomes background ambience stripped of meaning, something is lost. When indigenous patterns appear on luxury products while the communities that created them remain economically marginalised, we begin to understand that the problem is not borrowing itself.

The problem is extraction.

Extraction is a familiar story.

Take the spice but forget the farmer.

Take the melody but ignore the musician.

Take the textile but erase the weaver.

Take the aesthetic while dismissing the people who carried it through generations of hardship.

Appropriation is rarely about objects. It is about relationships. And relationships ask uncomfortable questions.

Who has the power to tell this story?

Who receives recognition?

Who profits?

Who disappears?

These are necessary questions, because they remind us that art does not exist outside history. Every artwork enters a world already shaped by inequality.

But there is another danger waiting quietly on the opposite shore. It is the temptation to mistake ethics for prohibition.

If every cultural boundary becomes impermeable, what becomes of art itself? If imagination requires identical lived experience, literature begins to collapse. If empathy is restricted to autobiography, theatre becomes impossible. If artists may only create within the borders of their own identity, then we are left not with richer culture but with smaller worlds.

The novelist imagines murder without becoming a murderer. The actor inhabits lives they have never lived. The composer writes for voices they do not possess. The dancer learns movement from animals, weather, machines, memory and dreams.

Art has always depended upon acts of imaginative crossing. It asks us to leave ourselves. Perhaps that is one of its oldest purposes: not to reinforce the walls between us, but to discover the doors.

This is why the conversation cannot be reduced to a simple question of permission. Art is not immigration control. Neither is culture private property. Every civilisation has been shaped by encounter.

Consider music.

The tabla is younger than its legend. A popular story credits a medieval poet with splitting a drum in two and inventing it overnight, but there is no real evidence for that, and the instrument we recognise today took its form only a few centuries ago, when Indian drumming met Persian and Arabic rhythm in the courts of the north. Jazz is unimaginable without the collision of African American musical traditions with European harmony and instruments. Flamenco braids Romani, Andalusian, Moorish and Sephardic histories into a single pulse, carried in part by people who had themselves migrated west out of India. The modern piano has travelled across continents, equally at home in Vienna, Lagos, Chennai and Buenos Aires.

Or consider dance. Classical forms often present themselves as timeless, yet every classical vocabulary has undergone revision. Patronage reshaped them. Politics reshaped them. Technology and migration reshaped them. Even traditions that seem ancient are often surprisingly modern in the forms we now recognise.

Purity is usually something we invent after the fact.

The irony is striking. The cultures we defend today often came into being through the very processes of exchange we now view with suspicion. This does not make every borrowing ethical. It simply reminds us that borrowing itself cannot be the crime. The question is the manner of borrowing.

There is a difference between conversation and conquest. Between dialogue and extraction. Between carrying a flame and stealing a fire. One enlarges the world. The other diminishes it.

Perhaps what distinguishes appreciation from appropriation is not ownership but orientation. Do we approach another culture as tourists collecting souvenirs? Or as students willing to be changed?

Research matters. Context matters. Relationships matter. Acknowledgement matters. Collaboration matters. Compensation matters. Humility matters.

These are not bureaucratic obligations imposed upon creativity. They are artistic virtues.

Because genuine curiosity is never superficial. The more deeply one studies another tradition, the less one wishes to simplify it. Every artist knows the feeling: the closer you move towards mastery, the more mysterious the subject becomes. Knowledge rarely produces certainty. It produces reverence.

I think often about apprenticeship. Across artistic traditions, learning has historically begun not with performance but with listening. You watched. You repeated. You failed. You listened again. Months became years, and years became decades. Technique was only one part of the education. The deeper lesson concerned responsibility. You were not merely inheriting movements or melodies. You were inheriting relationships.

Perhaps that is what we forget when we speak about culture as though it were content. Culture is not a collection of assets waiting to be downloaded. It is a network of living relationships between people, memory, place and practice.

To borrow responsibly is therefore not merely to cite your influences. It is to recognise that behind every form stands a community. This recognition need not diminish creative freedom. On the contrary, it may deepen it.

Freedom without responsibility often becomes consumption. Responsibility without freedom becomes orthodoxy. Art requires both.

The paradox is that the greatest artists have always balanced these forces instinctively. They honoured lineage while refusing imitation. They studied tradition deeply enough to transform it honestly. Innovation was never rejection. It was conversation.

Perhaps we ask the wrong question. Instead of asking whether artists have the right to borrow, perhaps we should ask whether they are willing to belong.

Belonging is different from ownership.

Ownership claims. Belonging participates.

Ownership extracts. Belonging contributes.

Ownership ends with taking. Belonging continues with giving back.

This shift changes everything. It transforms influence from consumption into relationship. It reminds us that inspiration carries obligations as well as possibilities.

But honesty asks us to go further. Because even this can fail.

You can study for years and still be told the door is not yours to open. You can name every source, share every credit, pay what is owed, arrive with all the humility you can carry, and still hear a community say: this is not yours to make. Not now. Perhaps not ever.

This is the part we prefer to skip.

We like to imagine that careful borrowing earns belonging, that diligence will be rewarded with welcome. But belonging is not a transaction. It cannot be purchased with footnotes or fees. It is offered, or withheld, by people who owe us nothing. And sometimes the answer is no.

Sometimes the wound is too recent. Sometimes a community that has spent generations watching its forms walk out the door without it has every reason to guard that door against one more visitor, however gentle. The willingness to belong is real, and it matters. But it is only one half of a relationship. The other half is not ours to supply.

So what do we do when the hand we extend is not taken?

I do not have a clean answer, and I distrust anyone who offers one. But I have come to think that a closed door deserves the same respect as an open one. To withdraw is not always defeat. Sometimes restraint is the most generous thing an artist can give. At other times the work is simply to wait, to keep listening, to let a relationship ripen on a timeline we do not control.

What I am fairly sure of is this. The right to be changed by another culture is not the same as the right to be welcomed by it. We can earn the first through our own effort. The second is never ours to earn alone.

I used to picture the artist as a gardener.

Nothing in a garden truly belongs to the gardener. The seeds arrived from elsewhere. The soil was formed by forgotten forests. The rain travelled across oceans. The bees ignore fences. Even sunlight refuses ownership. The gardener’s work is only to care, to notice, to understand what each plant needs, and, if fortunate, to leave the garden more alive than before.

It is a comforting picture. But it is not quite true.

Because soil cannot refuse the gardener. A garden has no say in who tends it. And culture is not soil. Culture answers back. The people who carry a tradition are not waiting to be cultivated. They have their own will, their own memory, their own reasons to say yes or no. A gardener decides what belongs. A tradition decides for itself.

So perhaps the gardener is the wrong teacher. Perhaps the truer image is the guest.

A guest does not own the house. A guest is invited, and can be turned away. A guest learns the customs of a home that is not theirs, accepts what is offered rather than taking what is not, and leaves the place in better order than they found it. A guest knows that welcome is a gift and not a right, and that the surest way to be asked back is to have honoured the house the first time.

To enter another tradition is to enter someone’s home.

Maybe artists are not inventors standing outside history. Maybe we are custodians, passing something through our hands. Not possession. Stewardship.

To inherit gratefully. To borrow carefully. To acknowledge generously. To create courageously. And then to pass the work onward.

Because one day, another artist will stand where we now stand. They will inherit our songs alongside countless others. They will misunderstand some of them. Transform others. Reject a few. Love many. As they should.

The river will continue flowing long after our names have been forgotten.

Perhaps that is the deepest comfort art offers. We are not asked to own the river. Only to enter it with clean hands. To drink with gratitude. To leave enough water for those who come after us.

Nothing begins with us. And if we are fortunate, nothing ends with us either.

Here is a practical guide for artists on Cultural Appropriation and Creative Freedom.

A friend once told me she had sat through ninety minutes of a performance she did not enjoy and had still come back the following month to the same series. When I asked why, she said something I have been thinking about since: because I knew it was chosen for a reason, even if the reason wasn’t mine.

She was not describing tolerance. She was describing trust, the particular trust that exists between an audience and a curatorial voice they have learned to believe in, even across disagreement. It is a different thing from liking a show, and it is a much more durable thing. Liking a show produces a ticket sale. Trusting the chooser produces an audience, and there is a long distance between those two nouns.

Most Indian venues have not made that distance their business, and I want to argue that this is the single most underexamined problem in the performing arts in this country. We have spent a great deal of energy on access, on funding, on audience development in the statistical sense: how many, how often, from where. We have spent almost nothing on the question that underlies all of those: why would someone return to a stage they do not yet know, surrender two hours to work they cannot preview, and extend the trust that makes a cultural institution something more than a calendar with a lobby?

Start with the calendar itself, because it is everywhere. Walk into the programming of most Indian performing arts venues and what you find is a sequence of events with no argument between them. A classical recital, a fusion showcase, a contemporary piece, a children’s theatre morning, a corporate award function. Each has been produced, funded, and delivered on its own terms, in its own world, with its own audience imported for the evening and released at the end of it. The venue provided the room. It did not provide the meaning. It did not choose; it accommodated.

This is what I mean when I say a rental calendar. Not that the venue is mercenary, though some are, but that it has not done the harder work of developing a point of view. A point of view is not a genre restriction or a mission statement on a website. It is the accumulated evidence of choices made consistently over time, including, and especially, the choices to refuse. An audience can read a programme. What they are reading for, whether they know it or not, is whether someone is thinking, or whether the room just happened.

The curatorial voice is what makes a programme readable as an argument rather than as a list. It is not always explicit. Audiences rarely articulate it to themselves; they simply feel the difference between a stage that chooses and a stage that fills dates. They feel it as a hum of coherence, a sense that even an unfamiliar name on the bill arrived here through a considered door. When that hum is present, the audience’s relationship to the institution changes fundamentally. They are no longer evaluating individual events against a cost-benefit of the evening; they are participating in an ongoing conversation whose full shape they are trusting the curator to hold.

This trust is built slowly and lost quickly, and it is built from two directions: what is programmed and what is refused. Most institutions understand the first and neglect the second. What you say no to is at least as legible as what you say yes to, because refusal is where a curatorial voice becomes specific rather than ambitious. A venue that programmes everything has no identity. A venue that programmes almost everything and occasionally, visibly, does not, has one. The absence is the outline. Audiences learn the shape of a curatorial sensibility at least as much from its edges as from its centre.

The trust, once built, does something important for both sides. For the audience, it provides permission to enter unfamiliar work without needing to have pre-approved it. The new name on the bill is vouched for by the chooser’s track record, the way a friend’s recommendation covers the gap between your knowledge and theirs. You don’t need to have heard of this artist; you need to trust the person who put them here. This is how curators actually develop audiences for difficult, experimental, or culturally distant work: not by explaining the work in programme notes until it is pre-digested, but by having earned enough trust that the audience will follow into the unfamiliar, carrying the belief that the unfamiliar was chosen for a reason.

For the institution, the trust provides something equally valuable: the permission to be wrong. A stage with curatorial identity can survive a season of work that didn’t land, because the audience’s relationship is not with the individual shows but with the sensibility behind them. A rental calendar cannot survive this, because each event has staked its own credibility individually, and a run of weak evenings has no larger argument to retreat into. This is why institutions with strong curatorial identities are more resilient, not despite the aesthetic risk they take but because of it. They have built something the audience can remain loyal to even while disagreeing with a particular choice.

None of this is the normal conversation in India. We have no substantial critical culture around the act of curation itself, as distinct from the work being curated. We review performances. We rarely review programmes, seasons, the intelligence of the selection, the argument a festival made across its five days. This means curators have no external mirror in which to develop their practice, no vocabulary in the public domain for what a curatorial identity is or how to read one. And it means audiences have not been given the tools to understand what they are being offered when a genuine curatorial voice is in the room, which is one reason why so many strong curators in this country go unrecognised in their function even when they are well-known as practitioners.

The deeper problem is structural. Curation in India is routinely treated as decoration, as the tasteful dressing on top of a programme that has already been assembled by committees, by availability, by sponsorship obligations, and by the institutional need to fill seats in a calculably safe way. The curator’s name appears in the brochure, and the curator’s judgment is the last thing consulted. An institution that operates this way has not commissioned a curatorial voice; it has hired a brand, and it will not build trust, because audiences, even without the vocabulary to explain it, can tell the difference between a programme that came from a single intelligence and one that was assembled by competing obligations into legibility.

The antidote is not a strong personality; it is structural commitment. A genuinely curated programme requires one thing above all others, which is that the curatorial logic is permitted to override everything else, the safe booking, the sponsor’s preferred artist, the board member’s favourite genre. This is the commitment most institutions are unwilling to make, because it asks them to cede the definition of quality to a single fallible human judgment, and that feels riskier than the false safety of the committee. But the risk of curation is the only thing that produces the reward of curatorial trust, and curatorial trust is the only thing that converts footfall into audience, attendance into relationship, and a performance space into an institution.

My friend who sat through the ninety minutes she didn’t enjoy had not lost anything. She had received the performance’s full value, which was not the show but the continued evidence that someone was thinking. The show was an argument she disagreed with. The argument was still made. The trust survived the disagreement because it was never based on agreement: it was based on the belief that the disagreement was worth having, in this room, with this work, chosen by this person for this moment.

That is what an audience is. Not a number, not a demographic, not a target to be developed toward a preferred behaviour. An audience is a group of people who have decided to trust a chooser, and who return not because every evening delivers but because the conversation is worth continuing. Building that is the work. The calendar is just the container.

The call usually comes with the word “opportunity” in the first sentence. A festival, a corporate evening, a prestigious stage, a wonderful audience. There is no fee, the voice explains, but the exposure will be tremendous.I have fielded this call many times as a manager, on behalf of the artists I represent, and I want to talk about what is actually being offered, because I have come to believe it is the most dishonest transaction in our sector, and the most politely conducted.

My last essay argued that the free ticket is a trap for audiences. This is the same machine viewed from the other end: what free costs the person on stage.

Start with the arithmetic nobody says aloud. A performance offered “for free” is almost never free for the artist; it is usually performed at a loss. The soloist who accepts an unpaid evening still pays his/her accompanists, because their labour, rightly, is not negotiable even when his/hers apparently is. Add travel, costume, the makeup artist, rehearsal space, and the unpaid weeks of preparation, and the opportunity has a clear price, paid entirely by the one person the evening exists for. Look around the venue that night. The technicians were paid. The printer who made the standees was paid. Nobody offered them exposure. The discount was asked only of the artist, and it was asked because the artist loves the work, which means their love is being used as a rate card.

Then there is the cost that compounds. Every unpaid performance teaches the presenter, and every presenter watching, that this artist’s price is zero. Price anchoring works in one direction only. The organisation that got you free this year will be offended by your invoice next year, and will say the quiet part aloud: but you danced for them without charging. Your generosity becomes the evidence against you.

And what of the currency itself? Consider exposure as money, since that is how it is offered. It can be printed by anyone, in unlimited quantities, at no cost to the printer, which is exactly why so much of it is in circulation. It inflates: the more stages pay in exposure, the less any single exposure buys. It has no exchange rate, no audit, and no redemption counter; nobody from the festival calls six months later to ask what your exposure converted into. The promised room full of programmers and critics is, in my experience, mostly a room full of other artists who were also paid in exposure. And it is not legal tender anywhere an artist has bills. No landlord in this country has ever accepted it.

The economy survives on a handful of true stories. Somewhere, once, an unpaid showcase led to the festival booking that led to the career, and that story is retold until it sounds like a system. What never gets counted are the hundreds of free performances that converted into nothing but the next request to perform free. One winner does not make lottery tickets an income plan, but the sector talks as if it does.

The most serious cost is the one discussed least. Performing for exposure is a luxury good. Only artists with family money, a supportive household, or another income can afford to keep buying opportunity with unpaid labour, year after year, until the buying pays off or doesn’t. So the exposure economy does not merely underpay artists; it decides which artists survive long enough to be seen, and it selects for privilege, not talent. The stages slowly fill with those who could afford to subsidise them. The field loses its artists not at the beginning, when hope is cheap, but in the middle, when fifteen years of collected exposure still cannot be exchanged for rent, and what walks away is the most expensive thing we have: trained, matured, irreplaceable practice.

Which brings me to the question I am asked more than any other, usually quietly, usually by someone young: how do I refuse, when I am new, and I need the opportunity?

First, honestly: I will not pretend refusal is free. It is a luxury unevenly distributed, and the artist who declines knows three others will accept. If you are at the beginning, the burden of fixing this economy is not yours, and anyone who tells you to simply say no from a position of comfort is moralising at the wrong address. But there is a difference between performing free because you chose it and performing free because you were priced at zero by someone else, and that difference can be built with a few habits.

Never refuse; counter. The word no ends the conversation and teaches you nothing. Instead, price the exposure. Ask who exactly will be in the room. Ask whether you will receive professional footage and photographs you own, a named credit, covered travel, an introduction to a specific person, a commitment to a paid booking in the next season. Vague exposure evaporates under specific questions. If they will not put anything concrete behind the word, then the exposure was never real, and you have learned that before spending a month of rehearsal on it.

Ask one more question, gently: is anyone being paid? If the venue is rented, the sound engineer hired, the dinner catered, then there is a budget; what you are negotiating is not whether money exists but where it was decided you rank. And if the event sells tickets or carries sponsors while paying its artists in exposure, you are not being given an opportunity. You are subsidising someone’s revenue.

Decide your free performances in advance, like donations, because that is what they are. Choose a number for the year, two, perhaps three, and spend them deliberately: a cause you believe in, a new work that needs a room before it deserves a fee, a stage you specifically want for reasons you can name. Then the unpaid evening is your gift, given on your terms, and not a price someone else set on your training. Free is fine when the artist sets it. It is extraction when it is set for you and called an opportunity.

And when you do waive a fee, waive it visibly. Send the invoice anyway: fee stated in full, discount shown beneath it, total zero. It takes two extra lines and it changes everything, because the paper now says what the work is worth and records that you, not they, chose to give it. Next year’s negotiation begins from your stated fee, not from your silence. The sentence that goes with it is short and needs no apology: “My fee for an evening of this work is such-and-such. I understand the budget may not allow it this time, so I am happy to offer it as my contribution, and here is the invoice reflecting that.”

The deeper duty sits elsewhere, and I want to end there rather than on the shoulders of the newest dancer in the room. The artists with leverage, the established names who will be booked regardless, set the floor for everyone below them every time they accept or refuse. The institutions that print this currency could retire it tomorrow by writing artists into budgets the way they write in electricians: as a cost of the event existing at all. Exposure persists not because the sector is poor but because it has learned that one line of the budget can always be paid in a currency it prints itself.

If you are ever unsure whether the offer in front of you is real, try a simple test. Offer them their own currency back. Tell them you will gladly waive your fee if they will waive the venue bill, the sound engineer, the catering, and accept your gratitude as payment. The silence that follows is the exchange rate.

Entry free. Registration mandatory.

Those four words sit at the top of event pages across this country, and I have watched what they do. The registrations cross a thousand for a hall that seats six hundred, and everyone congratulates themselves. On the evening itself, four hundred people walk through the door. They drift in late, because nothing was at stake in arriving on time. The phones stay up, because nothing was given up to be here. At the interval, some leave, because leaving costs exactly what entering did. The hall is half full of people who are half present, and the report the next morning says: a thousand registrations. A triumph.

I produce performances for a living, and I want to make a narrow argument, about one habit and what it is quietly costing us. Not about funding in general, not about how artists are treated, just this: the free ticket, the default setting of cultural life in Indian cities, is a trap. It looks like generosity. It behaves like a slow poison.

Start with how we got here. For generations, culture in this country has been something somebody else paid for. The temple paid, the court paid, then the state paid, then the corporate sponsor paid in exchange for a logo wall and a welcome address. Each arrangement had its own dignity and its own politics, but they shared one feature: the audience was never asked to complete the transaction. Art arrived the way streetlight arrives. You walked under it. You did not think about the bill.

Three generations of this and the conditioning is complete. I know of people who will spend two thousand rupees on a Friday dinner without blinking and who feel faintly affronted by a five-hundred rupee ticket to watch a dancer who has trained since the age of six. Not because they are misers. Because somewhere along the way they absorbed the idea that art is not the kind of thing one pays for. Dinner has a price. Culture has a sponsor.

This is the first jaw of the trap: every free event teaches the audience that the next event should also be free. The teaching is cumulative and very hard to reverse. A city that has been given culture at no cost for thirty years has not been built into an audience. It has been built into a crowd, and a crowd is a different thing. An audience has a stake. A crowd has an evening out, weather permitting. The crowd registers. The audience attends.

The second jaw is behavioural, and I have watched it operate from the producer’s side of the door. A ticket, even a modest one, is a small act of commitment. It converts a passerby into a participant. You chose this. You set aside the evening, you arrive on time because you have something at stake, you watch differently because watching is now something you are doing rather than something happening near you. I have seen the same work received by a paying house and a passing crowd, and they are not the same artwork. Attention is part of the medium. Price, it turns out, is one of the instruments that tunes it. Remove the price and you have not widened the door. You have lowered the stakes of walking through it.

The third jaw is the one institutions feel last and hardest. An ecosystem of free events runs entirely on other people’s money, and other people’s money comes with other people’s metrics. When no audience anywhere is paying, the only numbers that exist are the funder’s numbers: footfall, reach, registrations, photographs of a full house. The institution learns to optimise for the report rather than the room. Worse, it builds no economy of its own. One sponsor, one ministry, one foundation, however generous, is a monoculture, and monocultures fail all at once. When the sponsor’s priorities shift, and they always shift, there is no audience economy to fall back on, because thirty years of free taught the public that paying was never their part to play. The free ticket does not just cost the institution tonight’s box office. It forecloses the possibility of a box office ever mattering. That is the trap: free feels like a gift, but it is a debt, deferred. The bill arrives the day the sponsor moves on, and a city discovers that in thirty years of full houses, no one ever learned to buy a ticket.

I know the objection, and it deserves better than a wave of the hand. Tickets exclude. India’s inequalities are real, and a paywall in front of culture is a wall like any other. If free events are how a family that has never been inside an auditorium first sees an art form, who am I to begrudge the price of zero?

Except look at who actually fills the free seats. Walk through the crowd at any sponsored cultural evening in Bengaluru and you will find, overwhelmingly, people who could have paid. Free-for-everyone does not reach the excluded; it subsidises the comfortable. Genuine access work looks different. It is targeted, deliberate, sustained: school partnerships, community tickets, performances taken into neighbourhoods rather than crowds bussed toward sponsors. Free-for-everyone is not an access strategy. It is the absence of one, wearing generosity as a costume.

Because there is a difference, a crucial one, between free and affordable. When Ranga Shankara opened in Bengaluru, it kept ticket prices deliberately within reach of almost anyone, and audiences came, and they paid, and the paying mattered. The price was not a barrier. It was a handshake. Subsidy can lower the cost of a ticket without erasing it, and what survives in that small remaining price is the principle: this has value, and you are part of sustaining it. The audience member who pays fifty rupees is not a beneficiary. They are a patron, in the oldest sense of the word, someone in relationship with the work rather than in transaction with an event. And patrons, unlike crowds, are not found. They are created, slowly, by being brought close to the work over years, until they understand its value without needing it explained in someone else’s terms.

A conversation in the sector recently gave me the cleanest way to say what that small price means. Stop asking what the arts do for my money; ask what my money does for the arts. The flip is not rhetorical. It relocates where worth is assumed to sit. The fifty rupees is not a fee extracted from you. It is paid forward, a contribution to a commons, a share you hold in the thing continuing to exist. No registration link can offer you that. Free cannot offer you that. Free offers you an evening; a ticket offers you a relationship.

I am not arguing for a tollbooth in front of every stage. Some things should be free: the procession, the street performance, the festival that belongs to everyone because it happens in space that belongs to everyone. And some people should never be asked to pay, which is exactly why the subsidy should go to them, deliberately, instead of being sprayed across a city that can afford its own tickets. What I am arguing against is the reflex, the default, the four words typed without thought at the top of every event page.

Entry free. Registration mandatory. Four words that promise an open door and have spent decades building a city of passersby. The other offer costs about as much as the coffee afterward, and it comes with something no registration link can hold: a handshake, a stake, a small share in the thing continuing to exist. We should start making it.

A few weeks ago a Bollywood film got Bharatanatyam wrong, and the classical dance world found its voice. Statements were issued. Posts were written. Senior artists who had been silent for years on almost everything else suddenly had a great deal to say about the desecration of the form. It was loud, it was unanimous, and it cost no one anything.

I have my own opinions about that film. But I have come to think the outrage it produced is the most revealing thing about us, and not in the way we would like. We are extraordinarily good at defending the form when the villain is outside the room. We go quiet the moment the problem is one of our own making.

Here is what I mean. In the same few weeks, two things crossed my desk. The first was a festival application that listed, under a heading that read “Your Responsibility,” that the artist must publicize their own performance, gather their own audience, and sell their own tickets. It then added, in case the point was missed, that you should not apply at all if you cannot or will not take enough effort to do so. The second was a message informing artists they had been shortlisted for a festival, and that the participation fee would be eight thousand rupees for a solo and ten thousand for a group. The audience, it clarified, was the artist’s responsibility to bring.

Read those again and notice what they describe. The artist pays for the privilege of performing. The artist does the work of the marketing department. The artist does the work of the box office. And the artist is told, in writing, that their worth as a performer is now measured by their ability to fill a hall. This is not coming from people who do not understand classical dance. It is coming from inside the field, organized often by the very names we hold up as its custodians.

When something like this surfaces, there is a comfortable explanation waiting, and it arrives almost instantly. It goes like this. Society no longer values the classical arts. Public funding has dried up. Parents see dance as a hobby rather than a vocation. Bollywood offers instant glamour while we offer something slower and harder, and the audience has lost the patience for it. The conditions are against us. The artist is forced to sell tickets because the world has abandoned the art. We are, in this telling, noble victims of a coarsening age.

I do not believe this story. I think it is an alibi.

I will grant the facts it rests on. Live performance is genuinely under pressure. Funding for classical dance is thin in India and nearly invisible in places like the UK. Producing serious work is expensive in ways audiences rarely see. All of that is true. But notice what the alibi does with these truths. It takes a real difficulty and uses it to launder a choice. The funding crisis is real. Charging a dancer eight thousand rupees to perform is not a crisis. It is a decision, made by an organizer, accepted by an artist, and excused by exactly this language of societal decline. Every time we say it merely reflects a deeper malaise, we hand the people running this model another year of cover.

The hardest part of the alibi to say out loud is the part about the work itself. We blame the audience for not coming, and we describe them as insufficiently cultivated, as though the problem were a failure of their education rather than ours. But audiences are not staying away because they are too coarse for us. A great many of them are staying away because they are bored. There are only so many times a person can sit through the Ramayana retold through Sita’s eyes, the Mahabharata reframed through Draupadi’s, the same handful of episodes reshuffled, relit, given a fresh subtitle and presented as innovation. Much of the field has been running on a treadmill for decades, producing the same stories on a loop, addressing itself to itself, and then expressing wounded surprise when the room is empty.

This is the complacency I think we have to name plainly, because it is ours and no one else’s. A field that genuinely believed in its own urgency would not be this repetitive. It would not mistake reverence for relevance. It would not assume that because a story is old it is automatically worth retelling in exactly the form it was told last year. The classical artist has, too often, confused fidelity to a form with the refusal to do anything new inside it, and then wrapped that refusal in the language of devotion so that no one is allowed to question it. We have made stagnation sound like piety.

And we have made silence sound like dignity. Here I come back to the seniors, because their quiet is the load-bearing wall of this whole structure. It is not that the most decorated figures in the field cannot see the pay-to-perform model. Many of them organize the festivals that run on it. The reason they say nothing is that the recognition they enjoy flows through a closed loop of awards, invitations, and platforms, and the one act guaranteed to cost them their place in that loop is naming how it works. The people with the most standing to speak are precisely the people with the most to lose by speaking. So the system polices itself into quiet, and the quiet gets called grace.

The younger dancer, meanwhile, pays and performs and says nothing, and we should be honest about why. It is not only the money. It is that admitting you were not paid, or that you paid to perform, feels like admitting you are not in demand. In a field that runs on prestige, that admission costs more than the fee did. So the dancer absorbs the loss and protects the appearance, the organizer counts on exactly that, and the illusion of a thriving scene is maintained by everyone agreeing not to look at the ledger. The false prestige is not a side effect of the problem. It is the thing holding the problem up.

None of this is the audience’s fault. None of it is the parents’ fault. Parents who treat dance as an extracurricular rather than a career are not philistines. They are doing arithmetic. They are looking at a field that cannot reliably pay its own artists, that now openly asks artists to pay it, and they are drawing the obvious conclusion. You cannot construct a structure that announces this is not a viable life and then act betrayed when people believe you.

So let’s put down the alibi. We are not, for the most part, the casualties of a society that stopped caring. We are a field that stopped moving, that learned to call its stillness tradition, that offloaded the cost of its own complacency onto the youngest and least powerful people in it, and that found in the language of cultural decline a way to feel righteous about all of it.

The question is not why society has abandoned the classical arts. The question, the one we keep arranging never to ask, is why we keep giving it so little reason to stay. That question has no comfortable answer, and that is exactly why it is the only one worth sitting with.

There is a quiet, often overlooked craft at the heart of the performing arts: the art of being an audience.

We spend so much time training artists, refining technique, deepening intention, building endurance, that we rarely pause to consider the other half of the exchange. What does it mean to witness well? What does it mean to receive?

In my years of working across performance in various capacities, I have come to believe that audiences are not passive consumers. They are co-creators of the experience. The quality of attention in a room can alter the trajectory of a performance. It can hold, uplift, fracture, or dilute what unfolds on stage. To be a better audience, then, is not about etiquette alone. It is about presence.

Attention is an offering

In a world of fractured focus, attention has become one of the most radical forms of generosity. When we enter a performance space, we enter into an agreement. An artist has spent months, sometimes years, distilling something into that moment. The least we can offer in return is our undivided presence.

This does not simply mean silencing phones, though that is a start. It means arriving mentally: allowing the residue of the day to settle, resisting the urge to interpret, compare, or judge, and instead staying with what is unfolding, even when it feels unfamiliar or uncomfortable. Attention, in this sense, is an act of trust.

Suspending the need to “understand”

Many audiences approach performance with a quiet anxiety: Will I get it? This often stems from a conditioning that art must be decoded, that a correct interpretation is waiting to be unlocked.

But performance does not always operate in linear or literal ways. Sometimes, it asks to be felt before it is understood. Being a better audience means letting go of the immediate need for clarity and allowing ambiguity to exist without rushing to resolve it. It means shifting the question from “What does this mean?” to “What is this doing to me?”

That shift, from interpretation to experience, can open something in us that analysis alone rarely reaches.

Listening beyond the obvious

To watch a performance is also to listen, and not only for sound. It is to notice rhythm, silence, breath, tension, release. It is to observe the relationship between bodies, between space and time, between intention and accident.

Cultivating this sensitivity means learning to perceive not just what is presented, but how it is held. A pause that carries weight. Repetition that becomes insistence. Stillness that speaks louder than movement. This kind of listening requires patience. It asks us to slow our internal tempo to meet the work where it is, rather than pulling it toward us.

Holding space, collectively

An audience is not a collection of individuals; it is a temporary community. The energy in a room is shared and contagious. Restlessness travels. So does attentiveness.

When we commit to being present, we are not only supporting the artist but supporting one another. We co-create an environment where deeper engagement becomes possible for everyone in the room. This matters especially in live performance, where unpredictability is part of the form. A dropped prop, a missed cue, a moment of raw vulnerability: these are not failures to be judged. They are invitations to witness the human-ness of the practice. A generous audience does not withdraw in such moments. It leans in.

Applause as dialogue

Even something as seemingly reflexive as applause can be reimagined. Rather than a social cue or a formality, it is a response, a continuation of the conversation that began on stage. Applause is not about volume. It is about sincerity: acknowledging what moved us, what unsettled us, what we are still carrying.

Sometimes the most honest response is not immediate at all. It lingers, returns days later, quietly reshaping how we see something. The willingness to sit with that unresolved feeling, rather than rushing toward a verdict, is itself a form of respect.

Beyond the performance

Being a better audience does not end when the lights come up. It extends into how we speak about the work, how we share it, how we engage with artists over time. Do we reduce complex experiences to quick verdicts? Or do we take the time to articulate what we encountered, even when it remains unresolved?

Perhaps the most important shift is this: moving from consumption to participation. When we see ourselves as active participants in the ecology of performance, we are no longer just ticket holders. We become carriers of attention, memory, and meaning, part of what allows the work to exist and resonate in the first place.

To be a better audience is not about perfection. It is about practice. A practice of showing up fully, listening deeply, and allowing art to do its slow, often invisible work within us.

There is a difficult truth one encounters often enough in contemporary Indian performance that it begins to feel structural rather than incidental: some of the most persuasive exoticisation of Indian culture today is not being imposed from outside. It is being performed from within.

Not always cynically. Not always consciously. But often with extraordinary fluency.

Across a certain strain of contemporary Indian dance and performance - particularly work shaped for touring circuits, biennales, residency platforms, grant economies, and international festival contexts - one sees the repeated elevation of aesthetic intensity over intellectual consequence. The work is often beautiful. It may be physically exacting, musically rich, visually sophisticated, atmospherically dense. It may be made by serious and gifted artists. And yet, beneath the polish, the conceptual architecture is frequently startlingly thin.

A half-formed thought, however elegantly staged, remains half-formed.

Increasingly, however, this thinness is not experienced as a problem. It is absorbed into the work’s affective force and mistaken for subtlety. The result is a body of performance that is often not empty, but beautifully underthought.

The Seduction of Formal Intelligence

One of the enduring confusions of contemporary performance discourse is the assumption that formal sophistication implies conceptual depth. It does not.

A well-trained body can produce enormous conviction. A compelling score can generate emotional gravity. Lighting can imply seriousness. Slowness can suggest contemplation. Fragmentation can masquerade as complexity. None of this is inherently fraudulent; all of it can be artistically potent. But none of it, in itself, constitutes thought.

There is a difference between a work that withholds because it has arrived at complexity, and a work that remains vague because it has not done the labour of articulation. There is a difference between mystery and imprecision, density and drift, resonance and projection.

Too much work currently circulating under the sign of seriousness relies on atmosphere to do what dramaturgy, research, or argument should have done.

This is especially visible in performance that gestures toward mythology, memory, ritual, ancestry, the body-as-archive, or some unnamed civilisational wound. The vocabulary is by now familiar: temple bells, inherited silence, feminine energy, rupture, devotion, cosmic cycles, ancestral traces, sacred embodiment. These are not meaningless ideas. But in weaker work, they function less as frameworks than as tonal devices - a set of inherited signals arranged to produce the appearance of depth without the burden of precision.

The work may feel significant because it has been carefully taught how significance should feel.

Spirituality as Aesthetic Alibi

Among the most overused legitimising devices in contemporary Indian performance is the vague invocation of spirituality.

Spirituality, in this context, is extraordinarily useful. It sounds profound without requiring definitional clarity. It resists critique by claiming experiential authority. It travels well across cultural contexts because it offers recognisable “difference” while remaining sufficiently abstract to avoid contradiction. Above all, it lends the work an atmosphere of seriousness that many institutions are eager to endorse.

What is too rarely asked is whether the work is actually in conversation with any disciplined spiritual, philosophical, or ethical tradition at all, or merely borrowing its aura.

To invoke sadhana, bhakti, ritual, transcendence, the sacred feminine, or divine energy is not in itself an artistic achievement. These are not ornamental terms. They belong to dense worlds of practice, contradiction, discipline, and relation. Yet they are increasingly mobilised as soft-focus legitimising language: enough to frame a proposal, enough to hold a post-show conversation, enough to immunise a work against harder questions.

One need not be religious, devotional, or orthodox to make serious work in relation to spiritual frameworks. But one does have to do more than aestheticise them.

There is a difference between engaging a metaphysical vocabulary and merely styling oneself through it.

When Biography Refuses Critique

If spirituality has become one shield, biography has become another.

A striking amount of contemporary performance now arrives pre-framed through personal grief, inherited trauma, family history, marginality, illness, rupture, or loss. Much of this work is sincere. Some of it is necessary. There is nothing artistically lesser about making autobiographical work; indeed, some of the most devastating performance of the last decades has emerged from precisely such material.

But sincerity is not form. Experience is not structure. Pain is not, by itself, an aesthetic proposition.

What has become increasingly difficult to say aloud is that biographical work is often protected from the scrutiny to which all art should be subject. Once a performance is positioned through suffering, audiences and institutions frequently become reluctant to rigorously analyse it. To critique the work’s dramaturgy is mistaken for questioning the legitimacy of the artist’s pain. To say that the structure is weak, the symbolism obvious, or the language underdeveloped can be read as a moral failure of empathy.

This confusion is disastrous.

A work may emerge from real grief and still be theatrically banal. It may be emotionally honest and formally unexamined. It may contain profound lived experience and still fail to transform that experience into art.

Not every wound produces a work. And not every testimony becomes a form.

If anything, autobiographical work demands greater rigour, not less, because it asks to convert life into language, memory into structure, vulnerability into composition. When biography becomes a shield from critique rather than a pressure that sharpens the work, the result is not bravery. It is insulation.

Self-Exoticisation and the Export Economy

It is tempting to attribute all of this to Western appetite: the enduring desire for an “Indian” performance that is textured, mystical, embodied, spiritually suggestive, politically adjacent, and aesthetically digestible. That appetite certainly exists, and one would be naïve to ignore it.

But it is too convenient to imagine that artists are merely trapped within this expectation. Many have learned to inhabit it with strategic sophistication.

They know which images travel. They know which keywords animate curatorial interest. They know how to make complexity legible as atmosphere. They know that a lightly theorised invocation of lineage, ritual, body-memory, and transcendence can circulate more efficiently than a genuinely difficult proposition.

What results is not always caricature. More often, it is managed flattening.

Traditions become textures. Philosophies become programme-note prose. Contradictions disappear. Lineages are abstracted into “heritage.” The difficult labour of history, pedagogy, caste, form, and politics is softened into exportable mysticism.

This is what self-exoticisation often looks like now: not a crude self-caricature, but a polished reduction of one’s own complexity into institutionally legible affect.

And because this work may still be formally accomplished, and often is, it escapes the accusation of superficiality.

Virtuosity as Concealment

Indian performance cultures produce extraordinary performers. That is not in question. The bodily intelligence, musical precision, rhythmic command, and endurance many artists carry are immense.

But virtuosity can also function as concealment.

A powerful body on stage can hold attention long enough to prevent harder questions from being asked. Movement can dazzle where thought is absent. Craft can sustain the illusion of inquiry. One can be deeply skilled and still conceptually careless; aesthetically exacting and intellectually vague.

This is not a call for performance to become thesis-driven, explanatory, or academically overdetermined. It is simply a call to stop mistaking intensity for intelligence.

If a work claims tradition, where is the study, the accountability, the friction of inheritance?

If it claims experimentation, where is the compositional risk?

If it claims spirituality, where is the discipline or ethical relation?

If it claims politics, where is the structural understanding?

If it claims autobiography, where is the transformation of experience into form?

Too much contemporary work wants, all at once, the authority of tradition, the freedom of the contemporary, the aura of spirituality, the urgency of politics, and the moral immunity of personal suffering, without submitting to the labour each of those positions demands.

That is not complexity. It is accumulation.

Toward a More Demanding Culture of Critique

The larger problem is not simply that such work exists. It is that our institutions, audiences, and artistic communities too often lack the courage, or the language, to name it.

The performing arts sector in India remains curiously fragile in the face of critique. Weak work is protected by networks of politeness, cultural pride, ideological alignment, or fear of seeming ungenerous. We have become adept at celebrating intention while refusing to evaluate execution.

But if our artistic vocabularies are becoming more politically charged, more spiritually inflected, more biographically exposed, and more culturally loaded, then they deserve more scrutiny, not less.

Not every work about tradition is rigorous. Not every work about pain is profound. Not every work about spirituality is searching. Not every beautiful work is deep.

And perhaps that is the question worth asking, with greater seriousness and less sentimentality:

At what point does cultural expression become cultural packaging?

The answer is rarely comfortable.
But neither is serious art.

Increasingly, classical dance is turning toward other disciplines as a way of reimagining its contemporary presence. Music, visual art, technology, literature, theory, and curatorial frameworks are being drawn into choreographic processes with growing ease, often positioned as markers of innovation and forward movement. Interdisciplinarity has come to signify relevance, offering inherited forms a way to assert themselves within a cultural moment that values hybridity and experimentation.

Yet the presence of multiple disciplines within a single work does not automatically produce dialogue. What is frequently described as interdisciplinary practice is, in reality, a sharing of space rather than an exchange of ideas. Forms are placed alongside one another, but are rarely asked to meaningfully alter their internal logic in response to the encounter. The intention to collaborate exists, but the conditions required for genuine exchange are often underdeveloped.

Interdisciplinarity is now deeply embedded within institutional and funding structures, shaping how work is conceived and evaluated. Artists are encouraged to demonstrate fluency across forms, to move quickly between mediums, and to produce outcomes that signal breadth. Within this framework, collaboration is often assumed to enrich the work by default.

Sometimes, this assumption holds.

More often, however, collaboration begins with attraction rather than understanding. A classical dance form is paired with technology, movement is placed inside an installation, theory is applied as a conceptual frame, or music is composed around choreography. These gestures can be compelling, but they do not necessarily lead to transformation.

What frequently emerges is not conversation, but layering. Dance exists alongside another discipline without being fundamentally affected by it. Each form remains intact, operating according to its own assumptions. The configuration may appear new, but the thinking beneath it remains unchanged.

Every discipline carries memory. Classical dance forms hold centuries of embodied knowledge, including philosophies of time and rhythm, systems of training and transmission, and ideas of devotion, virtuosity, and discipline. They also carry hierarchies, exclusions, and inherited constraints that continue to shape how bodies move and are seen.

Other disciplines arrive with their own histories. Visual art carries economies of spectatorship and authorship. Music asserts authority over time and structure. Technology brings assumptions of efficiency, novelty, and progress. Theory often introduces abstraction and distance from lived bodily experience.

When these forms meet, they do not arrive as neutral participants. They arrive with weight.

If these histories and internal logics are not deeply investigated, collaboration becomes superficial. Dance is asked to become flexible, legible, or spectacular without being truly understood. Other disciplines are used to frame or enhance movement rather than to interrogate its foundations. In such encounters, nothing is fundamentally shifted, and the disciplines remain unchanged.

This lack of transformation is not always immediately visible, but it is perceptible. It appears in the fracture between what is seen and what is heard, between what the body is doing and what the surrounding elements demand of it. Visually, the work may feel crowded rather than integrated, as though multiple languages are being spoken without translation. Aurally, sound and movement coexist without influencing one another’s timing, texture, or intent. Aesthetically, elements sit side by side, each asserting its own logic, without yielding or reshaping the other.

What fails here is not execution, but attention. Each discipline performs itself rather than responding to the presence of the others. There is no friction, no resistance, no sense that one form has been compelled to reconsider its assumptions. Without this pressure, the encounter remains polite and safe. The work becomes staid not because it lacks skill or ambition, but because nothing is at stake. The viewer senses this quickly. What could have been a site of tension and discovery instead settles into something tepid, visually competent yet conceptually inert.

When disciplines merely coexist, they do not generate new questions. They reaffirm what is already known. The body moves as it always has, sound behaves as expected, and the visual field decorates rather than disrupts. In such cases, interdisciplinarity becomes a strategy of expansion rather than transformation, producing work that is technically accomplished but ultimately unchallenging for both the artists involved and those witnessing it.

Meaningful interdisciplinary work demands a more difficult question. What must each discipline be willing to unlearn in order to meet another honestly?

For disciplines to speak to one another, they must first learn how to listen. Listening requires time and a willingness to remain with uncertainty. It asks for resistance to quick resolution and to forced compatibility.

Deeper investigation requires foundational questioning. How does each discipline understand time? What role does the body play? What is considered skill, labour, authorship, or mastery? Where does authority sit, and how is knowledge transmitted?

Without this level of inquiry, interdisciplinary work risks becoming cosmetic. The surface of the form may change, but its internal logic remains untouched. Dance adopts new aesthetics without allowing its core assumptions to be questioned. Other disciplines borrow the image of the body without engaging its lived, trained, and historical realities.

Interdisciplinarity should not simply expand what a work looks like. It should expand how it thinks.

One of the most significant gaps in current interdisciplinary practice is the absence of space for failure. Failure here does not mean incompetence or lack of effort. It refers to honest experimentation that does not arrive at resolution, and to the acknowledgment that not all encounters will work.

Most artistic structures do not allow for this. Processes are hidden, and experiments are expected to succeed publicly. When something does not work, it is quietly abandoned or aggressively refined until coherence is forced.

Yet there is critical knowledge in what does not work.

When a dance form resists translation into another discipline, that resistance reveals something about both forms. When bodies cannot align with a technological framework, the mismatch exposes assumptions about control, precision, and efficiency. When sound and movement fail to find a shared rhythm, the dissonance points to deeper structural differences.

What if these moments were treated not as problems to be solved, but as material to be examined?

What if failure itself were allowed to become performance, not as spectacle, but as documentation of thinking in real time, and as a visible record of where dialogue broke down and why?

To present failed experiments is not to lower standards. It is to prioritise transparency, rigour, and inquiry over polish and certainty.

Another uncomfortable truth is that not every idea needs to become collaborative. There is increasing pressure to work across disciplines because it signals relevance and innovation. Often, collaboration is driven by opportunity, funding, or trend rather than by a genuine necessity within the work.

Without a shared question, collaboration can flatten practice. It can dilute specificity rather than deepen it. Without time and trust, disciplines are forced to align prematurely, producing work that is neither fully one thing nor the other.

There is integrity in deciding not to collaborate. There is clarity in recognising when an encounter is premature. There is wisdom in allowing a form to remain alone until it understands why it wants company.

Classical dance, in particular, does not always benefit from being placed in dialogue. Sometimes it needs solitude, repetition, and internal questioning. Sometimes it needs to return to its foundations before it can meet another discipline with openness and strength.

Interdisciplinary practice should not exist to prove that disciplines can coexist. It should exist to test limits, expose assumptions, and ask difficult questions.

At its most meaningful, interdisciplinary work transforms everyone involved. It shifts how a discipline understands itself, unsettles habits and hierarchies, and produces not only new work, but new ways of thinking.

This kind of transformation cannot be rushed or forced. It requires conditions that allow misunderstanding, disagreement, and failure to exist without being immediately corrected.

Perhaps the goal is not for disciplines to merge seamlessly, but for them to encounter each other honestly. To listen deeply, to resist when necessary, and to step back when the conversation is not ready.

Only then can dance and other disciplines move beyond sharing space, and begin to engage with one another in ways that are rigorous, ethical, and genuinely transformative.

Carlos Saura is a dancer’s director. He champions movement in his films in a way that only someone in love with the form can. In this essay, we talk of that elusive quality that he brings onto screen; that eye of adoration towards an art form that became his muse.

Saura’s eye is for flamenco. The dance and musical form with roots in Andalusian and (contested) Romani culture has lived many lives. From the first written vestige of the form in the late 18th century, it travelled through tumultuous political and moral unrest during the American-Spanish War of 1898, and was finally institutionalised in the 50s—refined/studied/purified to what we see today. It is perhaps because of its stormy history that the art form has an undeniable richness – a beating heart.

Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding, 1981), Carmen (1983) and El Amor Brujo (1986) formed the holy trinity of Saura’s flamenco trilogy (though his work in documenting the form was by no means limited to this.) Today we unravel two of these three.

The sacred space comes undone in a Saura film. That sacred space is the practice room. Blood Wedding opens in an empty dressing room. A man switches on the lights, airs out the costumes and gets the room ready for our performers. Each dancer dawdles in, sets up their vanities, changes into battle gear–beautifully tailored skirts, pants and shirts–and shuffles into a large, well lit room, with wooden flooring. Here they begin to dance. Blood Wedding, like all dance and all of Saura’s films, begins in the practice room. The film is a picturised dance drama based on Spanish dramatist Frederico Garcia Lorca’s play by the same name. When Leonardo Felix finds out that his ex-lover is going to get married to a man from the same family he killed, he is enraged. What follows is a story of passion, bloodshed and a marriage that goes sour.

Another Saura film. Another practice room.

We see women at work in a dramatically lit practice room. The large mirrors show us the beauty of the flamenco form. The way it sits on the bodies of these magnificent movers. But there stands a man, unhappy, disappointed with what he sees. This is the director of Carmen, a play about Don Jose, a soldier, who falls in love with a ‘gypsy’ woman, Carmen. The director, played by Antonio Gades, is searching for his leading lady. And as luck would have it, real life would soon mirror the life he was constructing on stage. He would find his Carmen, fall hopelessly in love, and lose in the battle for her. Saura’s Carmen would get Saura an Oscar nomination in the year 1984. It would be his most successful film in the trilogy.

The practice room is thus Saura’s first love affair. He shows us by keeping the camera there for more time than is comfortable. He captures the air of the room; a space that holds time differently. Time in terms of rhythm, time in terms of creative thought, time in terms of how long it takes to embody a movement, time it takes for the dance to begin. Saura’s camera is a student to the dance. It follows, mimics and tries to imbibe its movements. We are used to a camera that takes a tantalising approach to capturing dance for the screen—overemphasising the dance of the body. In Saura’s films, we instead see the “becoming” of the dancer. That magical moment when the spine straightens and the dancer comes alive. The moment the mind switches to dance mode. It is important to note that this moment can only be communicated because Saura includes the moments before and after a performance. He shows us the roughness of a dancer in practice and the release of a dancer in performance. Too abstract? Let’s try and see it.

Here is my favourite moment in the opening few scenes of Blood Wedding. Antonio Gades leads his dance troupe in a few warmup exercises. He starts by demonstrating and the dancers behind him mark the same movements before they perform it. And when they begin to perform, notice the glint in the eyes, the way they give in to the bends in the body, the way the spine opposes the floor and how they begin to glide. Each dancer is different because Saura is not here to create a dance of uniformity. He is here to capture individuality.

By including the before and the after of the dance, Saura makes us focus on the mind of the dancer. Not just the allure of a beautiful body moving gracefully.

Capturing practice is a common tool he uses in all his films. I would go so far as to say that Saura loves the practice of dance even more than the stage. And the way we know it is because of the details that he captures. Saura loves uncluttered frames. He keeps his dance rooms monochrome with sufficient light so that your eyes only focus on the different dancers in frame. When they practice we stay wide, watching their full bodies move fully. As we get used to it, he then begins to give us variety, we close in on their feet, the tension between their brows, the way their wrists turn–in a closeup. Most importantly, as they move, the camera moves. The dance becomes cinematic as the camera begins to dance with it. “Cinematic” is often used to describe moments on screen that feel larger than life. By focusing on the minute details of a dancer’s movement, and dancing with it, that small shift in the fingertips or readjustment in the foot looks and feels like magic.

Blood Wedding is an interesting film for its story is told on screen, but the medium through which it is told is in fact the dance. What Saura shows us is a dance drama that he is simply capturing for the screen. But is it really that simple?

In Blood Wedding we see The Groom, played by Juan Antonio Jiménez, getting ready to be married to The Bride, played by my absolute favourite Cristina Hoyos. Antonio Gades, Saura’s forever muse, plays the character of Leonardo, The Bride’s ex-lover and The Groom’s mortal enemy. This film requires the audience’s knowledge of either the original story of the Blood Wedding or knowledge of the dance form itself. Saura plays on the idea of a “film within a film” except here he presents a “dance within a film,” a story within a story. The outer story is that of this dance troupe rehearsing for a show. The piece that they are preparing is Blood Wedding. Once the music begins, we join them as they journey through their rehearsal and thus, the story.

The reason this film is so fascinating is because of the active involvement of the audience. At no point is Saura telling you the story, he is always asking you to interpret the story from the dancer’s movements, much like what one does while watching dance live. It is also perhaps this expectation that drives audiences away from the dance theatre. The expectation that the audience too has to partake in the building of the story is both exhausting and somewhat difficult to do. The question arises “Why do I have to guess what the story is? Why can’t you just tell me?”

Carmen is Saura’s answer to that question. In Carmen, Saura utilises the best of both mediums: dance and film. He, yet again, plays with the idea of two parallel storylines. The film is based on the novella “Carmen” by Prosper Merimee where a soldier falls in love with a Romani woman and goes to extreme measures in his passion for her. In the film, Antonio Gades falls deeply in love with Carmen, the leading lady for his on stage production of Carmen. When they fall deeply in love, Carmen reveals that she is in fact married. The line between the performance and reality blur as Gades kills her, on stage and in reality. Here, not knowing the original text that the film is based on does not reduce the understanding or the enjoyment of watching it. Both the audience in the film and the audience of the film are shown the story of Carmen together.

It is as if Blood Wedding was Carlos testing what the camera and film can do for dance. And when Carmen arrived, he had already captured magic.

What guides our eyes in these films is Saura’s camera that winds in and out of the dance making it come to life. There is such beauty in capturing the capacity of the body. He does so by taking away the allure; the makeup, the costume, the large acrobatic movements, the seemingly impossible; he presents the dancer without the decoration and invites the audience to see the beauty in that stripped state. He guides your attention, like any good dancer would, to the parts of the body that is telling the story and the parts of the body that are there for beauty. He presents it in a manner so raw that you wonder whether it is a documentary or a film

It is important that the form he loves so dearly is flamenco. As a dancer of a different genre one cannot fully comment on the skills nor the technical elements involved, however, the energy the form produces is unmistakeable—it is intense. Flamenco looks as though the movement arises from a pit in the stomach. A fiery energy rising through an erect spine. The softness is not in the contraction in the body, it is in the suppleness of the limbs. The fierceness is in the space between the brows and the strength with which the wrists are held. The chest strikes you as both proud and dangerous. Flamenco brings a character to the screen. A character that no other form can fully encompass. Though heavy in technique, what the dancers in Carlos Saura’s films leave you with is this rich intensity. Like melting dark chocolate; slightly bitter to taste, warm, with a touch of chilli.

Eshna Benegal is a dancer, writer and dance researcher. She writes on her love for movies and dancing on The Deep Cut. You can also find her on social media here.

Sources: YouTube/MUSICAPABLO Marie, YouTube/24 lies per second, The Criterion Collection

In the current vocabulary of dance, theatre, performance art, and even contemporary spirituality, embody has become one of those words that appears everywhere. Dancers are told to “embody the music,” actors are urged to “embody the role,” facilitators invite participants to “embody their truth,” and choreographers speak of “embodying ideas.” The word rolls off the tongue with a sense of depth and mystery, and it seems to offer instant legitimacy to any artistic statement.

But herein lies the problem: embody is used so often and so vaguely that it risks becoming a hollow aesthetic flourish, a verbal accessory rather than a precise descriptor. In many contexts, it’s unclear what the speaker actually means. Is “embody” about mastering a set of movements? About deeply feeling an emotion? About entering a trance state? About channelling a deity? Or is it simply a poetic stand-in for “perform” or “express”?

To critique the overuse of embody, we first need to unpack its actual meanings, historical roots, and how it operates in different traditions of dance and ritual. Then, we can begin to offer more precise language and a framework that allows us to speak about embodiment in ways that are both rigorous and respectful.

Where “Embody” Comes From

The English word embody originates from the 17th century, combining the prefix em- (meaning “into” or “in”) with body. Its literal meaning is “to give a body to,” or “to make tangible.” In its earliest uses, it referred to giving physical form to abstract concepts:

“The nation embodies the principles of liberty.” - Here, the “nation” is the tangible vessel for an intangible idea.

The term later expanded into the arts, where the “body” in question became not only the physical human body but also any medium; a sculpture might embody an ideal, a song might embody a mood, a gesture might embody a story.

By the late 20th century, the rise of somatic practices, performance studies, and cross-cultural performance discourse brought embody into the language of dance and theatre in a more literal way: the human body as the vessel for meaning, memory, and transformation.

Embodiment in Dance: From Physicalisation to Ontology

When dancers and teachers use the word embody, they are often pointing to a continuum of possibilities. At its most surface level, it may mean physicalising an idea — turning an image, rhythm, or feeling into movement. At its deepest, it can mean becoming the idea so fully that the boundaries between “dancer” and “subject” dissolve.

1. Physicalisation

At this end of the spectrum, embodiment means rendering an abstract idea into physical form. A choreographer says “embody the wind,” and the dancer sways, spirals, and extends their arms as if pushed by a breeze. This is symbolic and representational: the body is showing something external to itself.

2. Integration

Here, the movement is no longer imposed from the outside but is internalised into the dancer’s own physical vocabulary. The dancer doesn’t just show the wind; they move as if their own tissue and breath patterns have been affected by it. The imagery has been absorbed into muscle memory.

3. Lived Knowledge

In somatic and ritual contexts, embodiment refers to a kind of knowing that is not purely cognitive. Knowledge is stored in muscle, fascia, breath rhythms, and reflexes. The body remembers patterns of oppression, joy, resistance, or devotion. A dancer embodying grief is not “acting” it but accessing a cellular memory of grief.

4. Ontological Transformation

In certain ritual dances, embodiment can mean becoming something other, a deity, ancestor, or archetype, in a way that is understood as real within the cosmology of the community. Here, embodiment is not metaphorical; it is a change of state. The dancer does not depict the goddess; they are the goddess, if only for the duration of the rite.

Embodiment in Ritual and Spiritual Contexts

In ritual settings, embodiment often holds sacred weight. In possession rituals, trance dances, and devotional performances, the dancer’s body becomes the site where the divine or ancestral is made present. This is not just artistic interpretation. It is an act of metaphysical hospitality.

Even outside of overtly religious contexts, rituals of theatre and community performance may treat embodiment as a means of connecting with collective memory. A performer might embody a historical figure not through exact imitation, but by letting the posture, rhythms, and affect of that figure reorganise their own body from the inside out.

The Overuse Problem

The trouble with embody today is not that it’s a bad word; it’s that it’s become an art-world filler word, a linguistic shortcut that suggests artistic depth without demanding specificity. This overuse manifests in several ways:

1. Loss of Precision

If embody can describe both a student imitating a swaying tree and a priestess entering trance to channel an ancestral spirit, the word’s meaning becomes so broad it loses usefulness. Without qualifiers, it’s impossible to know which is intended.

Example:

• A choreographer says, “In this section, I want you to embody freedom.”
  Does this mean:

  • Move freely within the set choreography?

  • Portray the idea of freedom symbolically?

  • Access a personal memory of freedom and let it inform the movement?

  • Enter a ritual state where you become the spirit of freedom?

The instruction sounds profound but is functionally ambiguous, leaving dancers to guess which layer is meant.

2. Inflated Rhetoric

Sometimes embody is used to make ordinary actions sound elevated. In marketing copy or artist statements, it becomes a kind of performance jargon.

Example:

• “Our work embodies the themes of resilience and love.”
  In practice, this might mean that the choreography happens to explore those themes, but the claim of “embodiment” lends it a veneer of conceptual depth without explaining the how. The word becomes a decorative flourish rather than a meaningful description of process.

3. Cross-Cultural Slippage

In many non-Western traditions, embodiment is not metaphorical, it’s ontological. To “embody” a deity, ancestor, or spirit is to make them present in the here and now, often in ways the community understands as real and sacred. When this language is imported into contemporary arts contexts without its cultural framework, it can flatten and misrepresent what’s actually happening.

Example:

• In Balinese dance, certain characters, such as Rangda (the demon queen) or Barong (the protective spirit), are understood to carry real spiritual presence when performed in temple ceremonies. When a contemporary choreographer outside Bali uses “embodying Rangda” to describe a purely theatrical portrayal with no ritual context, the term detaches from its original cosmological weight. What in Bali might involve ritual preparation, offerings, and community belief becomes, in this transplanted context, a dramatic character study. The word “embody” in this case collapses the difference between sacred invocation and theatrical interpretation.

4. Pedagogical Confusion

In teaching environments, embody can create a false sense of instruction. Students are told to “embody the music” or “embody your character,” but without concrete tools, the feedback loop is vague. A student may mimic an outer form but never develop the inner connectivity or somatic integration implied by the term.

Example:

• A Kathak student is told to “embody Radha’s longing.” Without guidance, they might just elongate their gestures or soften their eyes, but that is still acting out longing, not letting it arise from an integrated emotional and physical state. The feedback has rhetorical weight but no actionable clarity.

5. Dilution Through Trendiness

Words in the arts often go through trend cycles. Liminal, interrogate, resilience, and now embody are all examples. As they become fashionable, they appear in grant applications, festival blurbs, workshop titles, and panel discussions whether or not they truly apply. Over time, the word’s impact diminishes; it becomes part of the arts’ background noise.

Example:

• A festival programme might list five different performances all claiming to “embody resistance.” The phrase sounds urgent, but without detail, it tells us little about what makes each work distinct or how resistance actually manifests in the body.

In all of these cases, the problem is not that embody is wrong; it’s that it’s under-specified. A word that should open up a world of nuance instead becomes a convenient way to avoid describing the complexity of process. Ironically, this undermines the very depth that artists hope the term will convey.

Towards a More Precise Vocabulary

Instead of reaching automatically for embody, artists and educators can consider what they actually mean and choose words that convey it more accurately. Some possibilities:

• Express – To make visible or audible through artistic means.

• Depict – To represent visually or through movement.

• Inhabit – To take on the qualities of a character, image, or idea from within.

• Channel – To allow something (energy, emotion, entity) to move through you.

• Integrate – To internalise a movement or quality until it is part of your own physical repertoire.

• Manifest – To bring something into tangible form or presence.

• Personify – To give human qualities to an abstract concept or to act as its representative.

Each of these has a slightly different emphasis, and using them with care can create far richer conversations about process and performance.

The Embodiment Spectrum: A Framework for Artistic Conversations

To make embody useful again, we can map it along a spectrum that distinguishes its different depths and modes. This spectrum can be used in choreography discussions, teaching, dramaturgy, or cross-disciplinary collaborations.

This spectrum does two things:

• It allows for clarity: instead of saying “embody the wind,” a teacher might say, “Work at level 2 — physicalise the wind’s force through your whole spine.”

• It respects context: when a ritual practitioner says “embody,” we can understand whether they mean integration (level 3) or ontological transformation (level 5).

Why This Matters

Language shapes not only how we talk about art but how we make it. When embody becomes a vague, all-purpose term, we lose the ability to articulate the nuances of physical and creative process. Worse, we risk flattening the difference between mimetic performance and sacred transformation, between symbolic gesture and lived memory.

Precision is not the enemy of poetry. In fact, when we are clear about whether we are depicting, inhabiting, integrating, or channeling, we make more space for the mystery of art to actually be experienced, not just name-dropped.

If we want our artistic conversations to have both rigor and soul, we need to treat embody as a precious word, one we use with intention, backed by clarity, and always situated in the context from which we borrow it.

The next time you feel tempted to say “embody,” pause and ask:

• What exactly do I mean here?

• What is the depth of transformation I’m pointing to?

• Am I speaking about representation, integration, lived knowledge, or actual ontological change?

If we can do that, embody will stop being an empty buzzword and return to being what it should be: a word that honours the deep and varied ways the body can give life to ideas, memories, and presences.

In “classical” Indian dance traditions, abhinaya, the performative mode of expression, has been codified as the art of evoking emotion through gesture, facial expression, and narrative representation. Rooted in foundational texts like the Nāṭyaśāstra, it is frequently taught and transmitted as a system of clearly defined emotional states (bhāva) designed to elicit specific sentiments (rasa) in the viewer. But within this codified aesthetic constraint runs another possibility unobtrusively—a possibility that resists codification, eschews explicit spectacle, and re-describes abhinaya as a porous, affective space shaped in a large part by lived experience.

This alternative approach doesn't seek to re-enact divine or mythological narratives with emotional fidelity. Instead, it poses a crucial question: what happens when the emotional body is treated not as a mere instrument of portrayal, but as an active site of inquiry? What does it actually become when abhinaya is not a representation of feeling, but a process in and of itself—contingent, somatic and clearly political?

When viewed through this particular lens, abhinaya moves considerably away from its traditional role as a vehicle for recognisable storytelling, and becomes, instead, a methodology of presence. It prioritises doubt over certainty, deferral over immediate resolution, and embodiment over explicit meaning. Emotion in this instance is not to be mimed or copied, but rather something to be heard attentively as it actually arises, often unpredictable, frequently incomplete, and sometimes, untranslatable.

In this understanding, the dancer is not simply performing a character as an external persona. Instead, they are working with emotional textures and subtleties as they organically manifest within the body: grief that subtly arrives with a breath, longing that lingers in the very weight of a glance, tenderness that flickers in the fingertips even before a gesture has fully formed. These are not merely performative choices for recognition or applause; they are deep investigations. They serve as invitations to genuinely feel, rather than simply to show.

This method, at its core, underscores the body not as a perfected vessel of tradition, but as a living archive: one that contains memory, displacement, contradiction, and intense desire. For artists who move through multiple cultural inheritances, complex religious histories, or diverse gendered and queer positions, abhinaya is a necessary tool to make sense of both connection and alienation. These narratives in question are seldom fixed; instead, they are constantly refracted through questions of faith, home, silence, and disruption.

This reframing has significant implications. Firstly, it upends the dominant aesthetic of resolution so prevalent in classical storytelling. The classical narrative arc from separation to eventual union, from yearning/desire to ultimate divine gratification is no longer central. What if there is no union? What if exile is permanent? What if the beloved is never met, or indeed, is not even desired in the first place? Rather than resolving internal contradictions, this kind of abhinaya creates an active space for their presence. It sustains emotional ambiguity, allows narrative suspension, and creates meaningful affective gaps.

Secondly, it repositions the performance itself not just as a display of virtuosity but as an authentic act of public feeling. This is an extremely progressive act in contemporary cultural economies which tend to favour immediate understanding and unapologetic assertion of self. To be feeling on stage without closure, without complete coherence, and without being neatly framed for cultural recognition is an act of resistance in and of itself. This model interrupts the transactional rhythm of performance-as-entertainment. It boldly centres vulnerability, interiority, and even a quiet refusal.

Thirdly, it purposefully flips upside down the codified structures that have been built. The classical form has traditionally been shielded by notions of purity, of body, training, lineage, and scripture. But emotional truth necessarily resists these rigid boundaries. It transcends the established forms. It insists upon being felt in truth, not merely structured. And this very insistence allows for a different type of dance, a dance that prioritizes true connection over formal representation.

In such work, abhinaya subtly becomes a kind of soft politics no longer loud and declarative, but deeply intimate. A politics that does not yell, but rather breathes. A politics not of ideological abstraction, but of simple being. In showing up, again and again, to the incomplete feeling, to the unspoken memory, to the gesture that stubbornly refuses to resolve into a neat metaphor.

For many practitioners of today’s times, especially those who refuse the rigid binary of classical versus contemporary, this is the very space in which their artistic inquiry truly unfolds. The choice is not an absolute adherence to tradition versus an entire rejection of it, but a constant, thoughtful engagement with its inevitable contradictions, visible fractures, and oftentimes unspoken lacunae. Abhinaya, in this evolving context, becomes a way of feeling through form, rather than merely conforming to it.

This is not a rejection of classical dance, but rather a reimagining of its rich possibilities. It asks: Can one genuinely make room for the untrained emotion, the unruly breath, the glance that doesn't arrive precisely on cue? And can one truly allow feeling to lead, rather than simply follow? Can one really trust the body's own intelligence, not just its cultivated technique?

To work in this manner is not to abandon rigour; it is to fundamentally relocate it. To root rigour not in mere reproduction, but in authentic presence. In asking harder, more probing questions of what it truly means to feel, to witness, to carry, to survive. Abhinaya moves from being a mere performative lexicon to a larger terrain to be crossed; sometimes barefoot, sometimes in silence, and always with intent

And perhaps, in this thoughtful walking, there is a whole other possibility: a dance that is not just about myth or distant memory, but one that is actively engaged with the moment, in this very moment, in this very body, with all its tacit knowing.

Over the past decade, a phrase has become fashionable in performance listings, festival brochures, and even workshop titles: “Sufi Kathak.”

The words are seductive. They conjure an image of graceful spins and percussive footwork entwined with mystical poetry and the devotional fervour of Sufism. They promise audiences the best of both worlds — the depth of spiritual tradition and the virtuosity of classical dance.

But the truth is simpler, and perhaps less glamorous: there is no such form as “Sufi Kathak.”

This is not to say that Kathak cannot draw from Sufi poetry or music. It can, and often does, with stunning results. But calling this thematic combination a new form distorts the history of both traditions.

To understand why, we must first separate the two strands of this hybridised label and understand each on its own terms.

Kathak is one of the eight recognised classical dance forms of India. Its name comes from the Sanskrit kathā (story) and kathākār (storyteller). In its earliest form, Kathak was a devotional art, used in temples of North India to narrate stories from the Ramayān, Mahābharāt, and the Bhagvat Purān. Dancer-storytellers used gesture (mudrā), expression (abhinay), and rhythmic footwork (tatkār) to embody divine narratives. From the 16th century onwards, Kathak developed in the courts of Mughal and regional rulers. Persian poetry, music, and aesthetics entered the repertoire. The form became more secular, incorporating nritta (pure dance) and stylised nritya (expressive storytelling). The signature spins (chakkars), intricate rhythmic cycles (taal), and improvisational skill we see today were refined in this era.

Despite these changes, Kathak has always remained a movement language, a codified grammar of steps, rhythms, and gestures. It is not a belief system or a philosophy, but an art form that can host many different themes and narratives.

Sufism (tasawwuf) is the mystical dimension of Islam. While Islamic law (shariā) governs outward practice, Sufism is concerned with the inner journey (tariqā) — the transformation of the heart through love, remembrance, and surrender to God. Sufis believe that divine truth (haqeeqa) is not reached merely through intellectual study or ritual compliance, but through direct experience of God. This path often involves:

• Remembrance (zikr): repeating divine names to still the mind.

• Samā: listening to spiritually charged poetry and music.

• Service (khidmat): acts of compassion and humility.

• Symbolic ritual: such as the Mevlevi dervishes’ whirling, representing spiritual ascent.

Sufism has produced some of the world’s most beloved poetry in Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, and other languages, from masters like Rumi, Amir Khusrau, Bulleh Shah, and Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai. These verses, often called kalām, express the longing for union with the Divine, the annihilation of the self (fanā), and the intoxication of divine love (ishq-e-haqeeqi).

Kathak and Sufism inhabit different worlds: one is a performing art, the other a spiritual discipline. But they can, and often do, intersect artistically.

A Kathak dancer might interpret a Sufi poem in movement embodying metaphors of longing, surrender, and divine union. The music might be a qawwāli or a naat. The abhinaya might draw from the imagery of the tavern, the cupbearer, or the moonlit night, all common Sufi symbols.

But this is still Kathak. The form’s grammar, its tatkār, chakkars, tihāī, paran, gat, and abhinay, remains unchanged. What shifts is the theme.

In the same way that Bharatanatyam performed to Christian hymns remains Bharatanatyam, or Odissi interpreting Japanese haiku remains Odissi, Kathak performed to Sufi verse remains Kathak. The adjective “Sufi” here describes the source material, not the dance form.

The Problem with “Sufi Kathak”

The popularity of the phrase Sufi Kathak is easy to understand. It is short, appealing, and exotic to the uninitiated. But its problems run deeper than a simple misnomer.

1. Historical Inaccuracy
   There has never been a codified form in which Kathak was developed, practised, or transmitted as a formal part of Sufi ritual or philosophy. While Kathak has historically incorporated Persian and Central Asian influences, it did so through courtly patronage, not Sufi orders. To suggest that Sufi Kathak has an established lineage is to rewrite history without evidence.

2. Philosophical Confusion
   Sufism is not a performance tradition. Its relationship to music and poetry is functional. They are tools for inner transformation, not ends in themselves. Kathak, by contrast, is a performance art. Collapsing the two risks implying that dancing Kathak is itself a recognised Sufi practice, which is not the case.

3. Cultural Flattening
   The term “Sufi Kathak” reduces both traditions to surface aesthetics: Sufism becomes “whirling and poetry”; Kathak becomes “spins and hand gestures.” In reality, both carry deep systems of knowledge, discipline, and context that are obscured when merged into a marketing label.

4. Pedagogical Impact
   For students and emerging artists, hearing the term repeatedly can create the impression that Sufi Kathak is a legitimate sub-style within Kathak. This leads to a generation of practitioners growing up with blurred boundaries and a diluted understanding of both traditions.

5. Commercialisation of Spirituality
   The label capitalises on Sufism’s aura of mysticism to enhance the appeal of a performance, regardless of whether the work engages with Sufi philosophy in a meaningful way. This can slide into “spiritual tourism” consuming spiritual aesthetics without their ethical or philosophical substance.

Sufi Kathak is not just a harmless fusion term. It is a loaded label that distorts history, misinforms audiences, and risks turning both Sufism and Kathak into decorative motifs stripped of their depth.

What a Sufi Kalām Really Is

A kalām in Arabic literally means “speech” or “utterance.” In Islamic scholarship, ‘ilm al-kalām refers to theological discourse, reasoned argument, about the tenets of faith.

In the Sufi context, however, kalām refers to a poetic composition, usually in verse, that conveys mystical, devotional, or philosophical meaning, often authored by a Sufi saint or poet.

Defining features of a Sufi kalām typically include:

• Central Theme of Divine Love – The Kalām expresses ishq-e-haqeeqi (love for the Divine) rather than worldly love, often using the metaphor of a human lover yearning for the Beloved.

• Symbolism and Allegory – Imagery such as wine, intoxication, the tavern, or the journey is used as a metaphor for spiritual ecstasy, surrender, or the mystical path.

• Quest for Union – A recurring motif is the seeker’s yearning for fanā (annihilation of the self in God) and baqā (abiding in God).

• Mystical and Ethical Guidance – Many Kalāms guide the reader or listener toward humility, detachment from material desires, and remembrance (zikr) of the Divine.

• Origin in Sufi Thought – Authored by a recognised Sufi saint, poet, or practitioner deeply embedded in Sufi philosophy, rather than merely in the linguistic or cultural context of Islam.

What a Sufi Kalām is Not

Not every poem in Urdu, Persian, or Arabic is a Sufi kalām. For example:

• An Urdu nazm may be purely romantic or political.

• A Persian qasida might be an ode to a ruler.

• Arabic hamd (praise of God) or naat (praise of the Prophet) may be devotional but not mystical in the Sufi sense.

• Many Islamic texts are doctrinal or legal, without mystical allegory.

Mislabeling everything in these languages as “Sufi” flattens the diversity of their literary traditions and strips Sufi kalām of its unique spiritual depth.

Kathak and Sufism can converse in deeply moving ways. The chakkar of a Kathak dancer, though structurally different from a Mevlevi dervish’s whirl, can still evoke a turning towards the Beloved. The percussive tatkar can converse with the driving pulse of a qawwāli. Abhinaya can explore the surrender and longing central to Sufi metaphors.

But these are moments of dialogue, not evidence of a merged form. Just as two rivers may meet and mingle without losing their names, Kathak and Sufism can share space while retaining their identities.

Art flourishes when it is both imaginative and truthful. Imagination allows us to blend and experiment; truth anchors us in respect for the traditions we inherit.

Sufism and Kathak are not interchangeable. One is a spiritual path, the other a classical dance form. But when they meet with clarity and integrity, they can illuminate each other in extraordinary ways.

Let us resist the temptation of catchy but inaccurate labels. Instead, let us frame our work in ways that honour both the mystics whose words inspire us, and the storytellers whose steps carry those words into motion.

A Glossary for Clarity

Here’s a short reference guide to terms used in this discussion:

In a world increasingly governed by acceleration—where time is monetised and speed equated with value—the concept of stillness appears almost revolutionary. Within “classical” Indian dance too, the stage reflects this cultural velocity: rhythms accelerate, compositions become more virtuosic, and innovation is frequently equated with contemporaneity. In such a climate, Thehraav, the act of slowing down, lingering, inhabiting, becomes a quiet refusal.

Far from being a void, Thehraav is a rich fullness. It is not the absence of movement but the depth of presence within it. Not a break in performance, but its very pulse.

In contemporary interpretations of classical dance, Thehraav functions not merely as a temporal device but as a philosophical stance. It counters the pervasive demand for constant entertainment, explanation, and spectacle. Rather than narrating a story, it foregrounds presence itself. The focus shifts from what is being said to how it is inhabited; thereby transmuting performance into an act of seeing rather than showing.

The body in “classical” Indian dance has long been the site of storytelling through gesture, breath, rhythm, and gaze. Within these vocabularies, however, are moments of stillness often overlooked: the pause between two jathis, the breath before a mudra shifts, the lingering glance. These are not interruptions, but essential spaces—positories of rasa and memory.

Thehraav demands an ethics of attention. It calls for not only technical rigour but also an inward receptivity. It resists the impulse to anticipate, dazzle, or conclude. The rigour here resides not in spectacle but in attentive listening — to breath, to silence, to the shifting weight of the body.

Prevailing ideas of virtuosity defined by speed, symmetry, and seamlessness are quietly questioned. In a digital age where dance is consumed in hyper-edited clips, Thehraav is a counter-practice. It asserts that beauty may reside not in a climactic moment, but in the unspectacular, the sustained, the felt.

Slowness in this context is not inefficiency, but rather depth. The tempo is no longer determined by external metrics but by the breath itself, marking a return to natural temporality. The dancer is no longer doing but existing, sensing, feeling, and being.

For the viewer too, Thehraav alters perception. It asks for active presence, not passive reception. The audience does not merely observe but is implicated, mirroring the stillness, sensing the weight of breath, being moved without motion. Performance thus becomes a ritual of shared presence.

In this way, Thehraav defies aesthetic expectations as well as cultural norms. It challenges the valorising of constant progress, productivity, and transcendence. Instead, it creates space for the unheroic, the tender, the unresolved.

There is a feminist inflection here as well. Thehraav counters the gendered expectations often placed on performance; the expectation to be perpetually pleasing, overtly emotive, or perfect. Stillness becomes a site of resistance. Vulnerability, a form of power. Slowness, a radical gesture.

At its core, Thehraav is breath. Not as a mere decoration, but as an anchor. In most choreography, the breath is often edited out, concealed beneath rhythm and gesture. Here, it returns as central, reclaiming its place as the source of rhythm, timing, and presence.

Rasa, in traditional theory, isn't simply produced by action but by shared affective experience. In Thehraav, rasa is allowed to steep, much like tea, until what is savoured is not mere performance, but genuine feeling.

To dwell in stillness is to accept uncertainty. To let go of the need for resolution. To allow space to be incomplete. It demands unlearning. It requires a shedding of performative layers both for dancer and audience.

And yet this unknowing is not emptiness. It is a fullness, a shared act of staying. Of being with. Of trusting presence over perfection.

In a time where art is asked to constantly innovate, explain, and impress, Thehraav offers something rare: the courage to pause. The strength to stay. The grace to simply breathe.

On a rainy Saturday night, AntiSocial in Lower Parel, a once-industrial district now transformed into a vibrant urban haunt for millennials, shimmered with an irrepressible energy. The atmosphere was thick with glitter, pulsating music, and audacious declarations of selfhood. The recently concluded Drag Ball, a highly anticipated celebration of queer artistry, performance, and resistance, drew together drag queens and kings, voguing enthusiasts, and eager party-goers under one pulsating roof. While it might appear, on the surface, to be an import from New York's 1980s ballroom culture, this phenomenon is, in fact, part of a much older continuum; a performance archive that India knows intimately but is only now learning to reinterpret through a queer lens.

Drag in India today might be experiencing a renaissance, but it is far from new. To truly grasp the flamboyant spectacle of a contemporary queer Indian drag ball, one must delve into the deeper cultural foundations that lie beneath — a rich, often unacknowledged, tradition of cross-dressing, gender fluidity, and queerness deeply embedded within Indian performing arts.

Long before the terms "drag queen" and "drag king" entered India's queer lexicon, the Indian stage was already brimming with fluid gender portrayals. From the ancient epics to diverse folk theatre traditions, from classical dance forms to spiritual rituals, the blurring of gender was not merely tolerated, it was frequently an essential element.

In classical traditions such as Kuchipudi, Kathakali, Yakshagana, Therukoothu, and Kutiyattam, cross-dressing was the norm. These were exclusively male traditions where men underwent rigorous training to embody both masculine and feminine roles with profound emotional and physical nuance. Performing femininity in these art forms was not an act of mockery but one of mastery. A male Kathakali artist donning the minukku (refined) make-up to portray a female character was required to embody grace, delicacy, and interiority, often through years of arduous practice.

In the northern Hindi belt, Nautanki and Swang traditions frequently relied on men playing female characters; sometimes due to the necessary exclusion of women from the stage, but also as a highly developed aesthetic of gender mimicry. Such performances were immensely popular among rural audiences and were rarely questioned on moral or gendered grounds.

Similarly, in Parsi theatre, which emerged in the 19th century under colonial modernity, the practice of female impersonation was commonplace. As women were discouraged or prohibited from performing, male actors would perform as heroines, adopting high-pitched voices and expressive gestures, thereby laying the groundwork for melodramatic performance styles that ultimately influenced Hindi cinema.

Yet, whilst cross-dressing was common, queerness as an identity was not always visible or accepted. Many of these performances were framed within ritual, caste, or religious boundaries, seen not as expressions of sexual or gender deviance, but as cultural norms. The performer may have been in drag, but the individual remained unacknowledged, or deliberately silenced, in terms of their gender identity or desire.

Beyond the theatrical stage, India has long harboured communities where gender variance was lived, not merely performed.

The Hijra community, historically recognised as a third gender in South Asia, has occupied both marginal and sacred spaces within Indian society. With roles in blessing childbirths and weddings, Hijras embody femininity through saris, make-up, and performance, but not as imitation. Rather, theirs is a lived identity, often entailing social exile, gender transition, and profound communal kinship.

Likewise, in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, Jogappas are individuals assigned male at birth who adopt feminine roles and clothing as part of religious devotion to the goddess Yellamma. Their performances encompassing song, dance, and ritual are imbued with divinity, queerness, and ambiguity. They are both performers and prophets. However, these communities whilst visible have historically been excluded from mainstream cultural recognition. Their gender variance was typically framed as sacred or folkloric, rather than "artistic."

Whilst India possesses a vast legacy of gender-fluid performance, the global drag movement, particularly the ballroom culture of Black and Latinx queer communities in Harlem during the 1980s, has inspired a distinct kind of drag in contemporary India. With the advent of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the pervasive influence of streaming culture, urban Indian queer individuals have discovered novel avenues for identity expression: wigs, corsets, voguing, contouring, lip-syncs, and captivating runway walks.

Drag queens such as Rani KoHEnur (Sushant Divgikar), Tropical Marca, Lush Monsoon, and Glorious Luna are pioneers of this new-age Indian drag. Their performances draw from global drag vocabularies but remain profoundly rooted in Indian aesthetic, linguistic, and musical traditions. They perform to both Madonna and Lata Mangeshkar, Beyoncé and Rekha; often within the same electrifying act.

However, at the Drag Ball in AntiSocial, Lower Parel, this rich cultural hybridity was missing. A traditional runway layout, clearly inspired by American balls, set the stage for an evening of explosive gender play. While it was both camp and catharsis, one witnessed a drag queen dressed in Indian attire booed by the judges, for what one could assume clearly, because they were the only one in an Indian attire.

One of the most exciting developments within the Indian drag scene is the emergence of drag kings — performers assigned female at birth who embody masculinity on stage. This is not simply a reversal of cross-dressing, but a potent critique of how masculinity itself is constructed and consumed.

Artists like Alfie, Beta Niyati, and Teekha Lal utilise bindis and beards, sherwanis and swagger to explore what it truly means to be a man, to wield power, to ridicule patriarchy through stylised performance. Some integrate masculinity with queerness, others with satire, whilst others still infuse it with softness. Their emergence has significantly expanded the spectrum of Indian drag beyond traditional femme glamour.

Furthermore, non-binary and genderfluid performers are increasingly rejecting the binary of king and queen altogether. For them, drag is not merely a costume to be donned and doffed; it is a lens through which they perceive the world, a fluid mask through which truth often emerges.

Despite its revolutionary potential, drag in India today is not immune to criticism. The current urban drag circuit, largely concentrated in Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Delhi, is frequently dominated by English-speaking, upper-caste, middle-class individuals. Access to quality costumes, professional make-up, suitable rehearsal spaces, and prominent club platforms remains costly. The aesthetics of Western drag — contouring, corsets, and specific beauty standards — can sometimes inadvertently alienate performers from marginalised backgrounds.

Moreover, traditional performers like the Hijras, trans women, and folk artists are still often excluded from mainstream queer drag spaces. Their performances, whilst older and arguably more rooted, are sometimes perceived as "crude," "non-modern," or "non-aesthetic."

However, concerted efforts are now being made to bridge these disparities. Initiatives like Dragvanti, founded by Patruni Sastry, are actively creating platforms for vernacular drag, fostering inclusive drag pedagogy, and facilitating dialogues between urban and rural performers. Collaborations between drag artists and classical dancers, theatre artists, and community elders are helping to re-infuse the Indian drag scene with essential historical depth and intersectionality.

Drag is not just about performing gender; it is about reclaiming narratives. In a society where queer individuals are often told they do not belong in public spaces, drag boldly places them at the very centre. On the runway, the queer body becomes impossible to overlook. The stage, once a site of ritual exclusion, transforms into a site of revolutionary inclusion.

In this manner, drag also serves as an archive. Each performance, each thumka, each knowing wink, each heartfelt lip-sync revives forgotten histories: of male dancers once revered, of Hijras once respected, of goddesses once invoked. Drag not only imagines new futures; it profoundly remembers old freedoms.

As drag continues to flourish in India, it must resist the temptation to become elitist, merely performative, or disconnected from its grassroots. It must remember its ancestors — the devadasis, the folk artists, the Hijra performers, and build forward with their stories as its foundational scaffolding.

Drag must also continually ask: Who is truly allowed to perform? Who genuinely gets compensated? Who receives a prominent platform? And how can drag evolve from simply a night at the club into a vital space for collective healing and radical joy?

The drag ball at AntiSocial is not an end; it is a beginning. A beginning of an India where queerness no longer lurks in footnotes. Where gender is not a rigid script but a vibrant song: improvised, irreverent, and irrepressibly loud.

“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you... It means that you do not fall for shallow and easy solutions—it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.” - Adrienne Rich

I often describe myself through a growing list of roles: artist, curator, producer, educator, and artist manager. This isn't a calculated list, but rather a natural reflection of how I navigate the arts – moving through forms, disciplines, institutions, ideas, and people. Early in my career, the boundaries between creating art and thinking about art simply dissolved. I have come to accept that I lead an interwoven life, one that defies a single definition. Each role isn't a departure but an extension of the others. As I complete 13 years working "behind the scenes," I reflect on the permeable spaces between disciplines, roles, and responsibilities. It is about being sustained by multiplicity, by speaking many artistic "languages." Yet, it also involves acknowledging the friction, limitations, and exhaustion that accompany such a life.

Virginia Woolf famously wrote about a room of one's own. I often ponder what it means to inhabit a house of many rooms. The artist in me resides in the room of the body – moving, sensing, remembering. The curator lives in the room of the "other," thinking through context, curation as care, and the choreography of ideas and people. The educator occupies the room of words, dialogue, and doubt. The producer operates in the machine room, holding the structure and navigating systems. And somewhere, quietly, the artist manager tends to the invisible labour that keeps everything cohesive.

Moving between these rooms daily means adjusting to different registers of language, emotion, and pace. It entails understanding intimacy and infrastructure in equal measure, and recognising that choreography can exist on a stage as much as in a spreadsheet. But most of all, it means dissolving the hierarchy between these spaces. The romantic notion of the singular genius creating in solitude has always been a myth, according to me. I have found that wearing multiple hats is not only a strategic adaptation to a precarious ecosystem but also a source of deep nourishment. The movement between roles fosters cross-pollination between disciplines.

To wear many hats isn't just about survival in the fragmented arts economy; it is also an act of refusal. A refusal to be reduced to a single identity, a single practice, a single politics. I am drawn to the porous edges where disciplines blend into one another. The philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant writes about opacity as a right; the right to remain unknowable, to resist transparency. For me, multiplicity is a form of opacity. It insists that we are plural beings, made of entanglements.

The joy of multiplicity lies in its generativity. Cross-medium work has made me more attentive to process, slowing me down and deepening my curiosity. It resists the pressure for constant outputs and deliverables, allowing failure to be generative. A rehearsal can inform a lecture, a teaching session can spark a new work, and a curatorial framework can illuminate a personal question. These acts aren't compartmentalised; they leak into, feed, and transform each other. Multiplicity creates a valuable feedback loop where I have come to prioritise slowness, dialogue, and care. In a world that champions outcomes, deliverables, and visibility, I find myself cherishing small, quiet acts: a conversation that shifts perspective, a student who finds their voice, an artist who feels supported.

This interdependence fosters a unique perspective, bridging the macro and the micro. I understand institutions from the inside, but I also recognise the fragility of individual artistic impulses. This multivalence is powerful, creating space for solidarity, innovation, and reflection. It helps build ecologies rather than silos. Indeed, I view this as an integral part of my artistic labour.

However, multiplicity can easily lead to fragmentation. When every role demands care, attention, and presence, burnout looms. There are moments when I feel stretched too thin, when artistic clarity is lost in a sea of emails, timelines, and meetings. The labour of producing and curating often overshadows the act of creating.

There is also the risk of becoming instrumentalised. Institutions frequently valorise the "multi-hyphenate" as a neoliberal ideal, the adaptable, efficient, always-on worker. The same flexibility that once felt empowering can be weaponised into unpaid labour, boundary-less availability, and burnout. As Sara Ahmed writes in Living a Feminist Life, "The work you do to open the door for others becomes the reason why your own work is not taken seriously." This tension resonates deeply; the more I am seen as a facilitator, the more invisible my own creative work becomes.

Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves." Multiplicity has taught me to live the question, to embrace uncertainty, and to understand that clarity isn't always the goal. Some truths emerge only through practice, not articulation.

I have learned that mastery is a myth, and that failure isn't the opposite of success but a method. To be a good teacher is also to be a learner. To curate is to serve something larger than personal taste. To manage artists is not to control them, but to protect the fragility of their visions. I have also learned that one doesn't have to choose; it is perfectly acceptable to be several things at once. Art isn't a fixed identity; it is a method, a way of being in the world.

I believe the future of artistic practice lies in this entanglement – not in silos of specialisation, but in constellations of care. Multiplicity can be a methodology, not a burden. It can be a way of staying in motion, in dialogue, and in transformation.

If I were to name my method, I might call it weaving. Weaving roles, disciplines, and forms. Weaving people and ideas. Weaving myself back together when I feel frayed. This isn't about multitasking; it is about being porous, about letting the world in, about refusing the tidy boxes capitalism would place us in.

Weaving is also about time. It is slow, demands presence, and honours repetition. In many ways, it is like choreography – a structure for movement, a way to hold contradiction with grace. Multiplicity isn't perfect, nor is it easy. But it is alive. To wear many hats is, perhaps, to reject simplicity. It is to insist on a complex, messy, and deeply alive artistic life. And that, I believe, is something worth nourishing.

As an interfaith, multilingual practitioner born in Gujarat to a Zoroastrian mother and Muslim father, whose relationship to the “classical” has never been straightforward or untroubled, my work emerges from a space of tension, inheritance, and inquiry—a space where the classical collides with the contemporary, where ritual meets rupture, and where questions of identity, belonging, and history are never far from the dancing body. I work with Indian temple dances not as a devotional practice, nor as an inherited tradition, but as a movement language, a kinetic lexicon, capable of holding multiple truths, multiple lineages, and multiple contradictions.

In many ways, my practice is a sustained attempt to make sense of that position. Since the rapid rise of Hindutva in this country, I ask: What does it mean for someone like me to dance Bharatanatyam, a form that has been both appropriated and sanctified, erased and celebrated, vilified and elevated? What happens when a body like mine, formed by cross-cultural influences and shaped by what I like to call the minority experience, enters a space historically shaped by caste privilege, ritual orthodoxy, and nationalist aesthetics? Is it even possible for me to perform Bharatanatyam without confronting its past and if so, how do I do it with integrity?

These are not just philosophical questions. They are urgent political ones.

In context of the ongoing, necessary and long overdue reckonings in South Asian dance, my work seeks not only to critique but to reimagine it. I do not offer Bharatanatyam as a sacred inheritance to be preserved; I offer it as a space to be troubled, questioned, and reconfigured. I approach it not as a fixed form but as a movement vocabulary, one that can hold lived experience, difference, doubt, and dissonance.

A central inquiry in my work is the question: Can or should Indian temple dances become secular?

This is not a provocation for its own sake. It is an investigation into the possibilities of form and the ethics of belonging. Bharatanatyam, as it is most widely practiced today, is often tethered to a specific religious iconography rooted in Hindu mythology, replete with gestural storytelling drawn from Hindu epics. For someone like me, who does not share those theological affiliations, what does it mean to dance these stories? Can the form be separated from its content? And if so, what remains?

I am not interested in iconoclasm for spectacle. Rather, I seek to unburden Bharatanatyam of its exclusivist frameworks to dance “without the gods,” not as a rejection, but as a reorientation. In doing so, I center absence over presence, suggestion over declaration, breath over invocation. My performances often take place in minimalist, non-proscenium spaces. There is only the body, its memory, its pulse. In this emptiness, I find new possibilities.

This approach aligns with a concept, that I was introduced to during my training in Kathak, that anchors my practice: Thehraav. Thehraav is a deliberate deceleration of time in the body, a refusal to comply with the virtuosic tempo and ornate spectacle that often defines classical performance. Thehraav is not slowness for aesthetic effect; it is slowness as resistance. It is an invitation to stay with the discomfort, to witness without consumption, to move without the need to dazzle.

In a cultural economy that demands speed, polish, and constant innovation, Thehraav is a subversive act. It invites both dancer and viewer into a space of reflection, vulnerability, and stillness. It draws attention to the micro-movements of the body, to the spaces between gestures, to the breath before the action. It asks: What if the performance is not about narrative at all, but about presence? What if the story is about the act of witnessing itself?

My practice is also deeply influenced by language—spoken, sonic, and architectural. Each site of performance carries its own texture, rhythm, and resonance. A mosque’s echo changes the way I hear a footfall. A Zoroastrian hymn disrupts the cadence of an adi talam; and in that awkwardness, new vocabularies emerge.

I work with what I call “sonic dissonance”, placing unfamiliar languages and rhythms into the Bharatanatyam and Kathak framework to challenge its narrative logic. Similarly, I let architectural spaces guide my movement. I have performed in abandoned dargahs, playgrounds, conference rooms, galleries, and museums. The absence of the stage is not a lack; it is a fertile ground for reimagining form. Each shift in space and sound alters the dancing body’s relationship to memory, power, and lineage.

Secularism, for me, is not to erase the sacred, but to reposition it so it no longer excludes. The sacred becomes one of many entry points, not the only one. For me, secularism is not a negation of the sacred, but a space of radical multiplicity.

Is my work secular? I am not sure. I would say it is post-devotional. It does not reject the sacred, but it refuses its exclusivity. It acknowledges the political valence of the sacred, how it has been weaponized to exclude, sanctify, and silence. My practice lives in the in-between—between the sacred and the secular, between dancer and viewer, between belonging and exile.

This in-betweenness is not a failure of definition. It is a stance. A radical act.

As a non-Hindu dancing a historically Hindu temple form, I hold this ambiguity with care. I recognize the risk of appropriation, but also the urgency of reclamation. I do not perform the classical as tradition. I offer it as a site of plural, shifting, embodied knowledge. A body that holds multiple lineages, religions, languages, and silences must also find a form that can reflect that plurality.

My practice is deeply indebted to the critical interventions of scholars and artists who have challenged the very foundations of South Asian dance studies. Their work compels me to ask not just how we dance, but who gets to define what dance is, who gets to be seen, and whose stories are being told.

I believe we must move beyond tokenistic inclusion and toward structural reimagining. The classical cannot be a preserve of the privileged. It must be a space of collective reckoning, radical hospitality, and imaginative freedom. If we are to dismantle oppressive hierarchies in the arts, we must begin by reexamining the very forms we claim to cherish.

My work does not resolve these tensions. It dances within them.

And in that unresolved space, something new becomes possible.

The article title is inspired from an exploration with Mandeep Raikhy, as a part of his The Secular Project (2020).

This article was a part of a roundtable conference “Dancing on Violent Ground: Unsettling the State of South Asian Dance Studies” curated by Prof. Anurima Banerji (UCLA, US), Prof. Anusha Kedhar (University of California, Riverside, US), and Prof. Royona Mitra (Brunel University, UK).

Abstract: In recent years, South Asian dance studies has been forced to confront historical and ongoing inequities in the field, especially with regards to caste and its intersections with class, gender, religion, indigeneity, and nationhood, among other analytics. These challenges to the field have unsettled the state of South Asian dance ecologies in important and necessary ways. Inspired by the critical work of Dalit and Bahujan anti-caste scholars, artists, and activists such as Shailaja Paik, Nrithya Pillai, Brahma Prakash, and Thenmozhi Soundararajan, and thinking with dance scholar Arabella Stanger’s concept of “critical negativity”, this roundtable of intergenerational, interdisciplinary, international, interfaith, and intercaste scholars will examine the “violent ground” on which South Asian dance studies has been built. How does (caste) power operate in both overt and covert ways? What constitutes “dance” in our discipline and who gets to define it? Whose bodies and voices are missing from the scene? What other aspects of South Asian dance praxis still need to be unsettled? This roundtable gathering will bring together tenured and untenured faculty, graduate students, and independent scholars to reflect not only on the current state of South Asian dance studies, but also how we might annihilate caste and other oppressive structures in our field, towards more equitable futures.