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BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART).

A range of dance genres, from the traditional to the innovative, co-exist as  representations of  "Indianness" in India,  and beyond. Identities onstage and in films, morph as colonial, national, and global contexts change.  This course zooms from micro to macro views of twentieth century staged dances as culturally inflected discourse. We review how Indian classical dance aligns with the oldest of performance texts, and with lively discourses (rasa as a performance aesthetic, Orientalism, nationalism,  global recirculations) through the ages, not only in India but also in Europe, Britain and America. Throughout the course, we ask:-  How is culture embodied? How do historical texts configure dance today? How might they affect our thinking on mind-body, practice-theory, and traditional-contemporary divides?  How does bodily patterning influence the ways that we experience our surroundings and vice versa?  Can cultural imaginaries  instigate action? How is gender is performed?  What are dance discourses?