Unmaking Contact
Choreographing South Asian Touch
Price: 575.00 INR
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ISBN:
9780197838624
Paperback
288 pages
235x156mm
Price: 575.00 INR
We sell our titles through other companies
Disclaimer :You will be redirected to a third party website.The sole responsibility of supplies, condition of the product, availability of stock, date of delivery, mode of payment will be as promised by the said third party only. Prices and specifications may vary from the OUP India site.
ISBN:
9780197838624
Paperback
288 pages
Royona Mitra
- Theorizes unmaking as a method, a politics, and an emancipatory mode of enquiry
- Critiques the intersectional power asymmetries across caste, gender, and race that are foundational to the practice of contact improvisation
- Conceptualizes an intersectional, intercultural, and inter-epistemic understanding of “contact” in dance, that may or may not involve touch
- Foregrounds South Asian transnational dance artist: India based contemporary choreographers Akila and Diya Naidu, UK-Pakistan based kathak exponent Nahid Siddiqui, and US-based drag queen LaWhore Vagistan
Rights: OUP USA (INDIAN TERRITORY)
Royona Mitra
Description
Unmaking Contact interrogates “contact”, understood in Global North dance discourse as a shorthand for the movement discipline of contact improvisation (CI) and its characteristic shifting points of weight-sharing between two or more bodies through physical touch, by attending to power asymmetries that are foundational to this practice.
By placing South Asian aesthetics, bodies, discourses, and philosophies on touch at the heart of its interrogation through the lenses of caste, ecology, faith, gender, and sexuality, author Royona Mitra argues for an intersectional, intercultural, and inter-epistemic understanding of contact, that may or may not involve touch. The book shifts and expands understandings of “contact” in dance-making through intercultural epistemologies that examine notions of touch and contact.
In this book the term contact signals both a shorthand for CI and a shift away from it to more expansive choreographic considerations. It becomes an apparatus for dismantling power regimes; it is conjured as a catalyst to examine power in social relations; it appears as a fulcrum of ecological relationality; it arises as critical encounters full of generative and transformative potential; and finally, it manifests as community.
About the author
Royona Mitra is the author of Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism. Her research examines systems of oppression in dance and performance cultures at the intersections of bodies, social power regimes, and choreography as resistance. She contributes to the fields of diaspora and performance, South Asian dance and performance cultures, critical dance studies and performance studies.
Royona Mitra
Table of contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Unmaking Contact
Chapter 1
Contact as Caste Justice: Theenda Theenda (2018) by Akila and The Touch of Death
Chapter 2
Contact as Reframing Sociality: Rorschach Touch (2018) by Diya Naidu and “Normalizing Touch”
Chapter 3
Contact as Ecological Relationality: Mirror Within (2022) by Nahid Siddiqui and Shakila Maan and Touch Without Tactility
Chapter 4
Contact as Adda: Critical Encounters in #KAATENAHINKATTE Instareel (2020) by LaWhore Vagistan and Digital Touching
Afterwords: Against Conclusions
References
Royona Mitra
Description
Unmaking Contact interrogates “contact”, understood in Global North dance discourse as a shorthand for the movement discipline of contact improvisation (CI) and its characteristic shifting points of weight-sharing between two or more bodies through physical touch, by attending to power asymmetries that are foundational to this practice.
By placing South Asian aesthetics, bodies, discourses, and philosophies on touch at the heart of its interrogation through the lenses of caste, ecology, faith, gender, and sexuality, author Royona Mitra argues for an intersectional, intercultural, and inter-epistemic understanding of contact, that may or may not involve touch. The book shifts and expands understandings of “contact” in dance-making through intercultural epistemologies that examine notions of touch and contact.
In this book the term contact signals both a shorthand for CI and a shift away from it to more expansive choreographic considerations. It becomes an apparatus for dismantling power regimes; it is conjured as a catalyst to examine power in social relations; it appears as a fulcrum of ecological relationality; it arises as critical encounters full of generative and transformative potential; and finally, it manifests as community.
About the author
Royona Mitra is the author of Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism. Her research examines systems of oppression in dance and performance cultures at the intersections of bodies, social power regimes, and choreography as resistance. She contributes to the fields of diaspora and performance, South Asian dance and performance cultures, critical dance studies and performance studies.
Table of contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Unmaking Contact
Chapter 1
Contact as Caste Justice: Theenda Theenda (2018) by Akila and The Touch of Death
Chapter 2
Contact as Reframing Sociality: Rorschach Touch (2018) by Diya Naidu and “Normalizing Touch”
Chapter 3
Contact as Ecological Relationality: Mirror Within (2022) by Nahid Siddiqui and Shakila Maan and Touch Without Tactility
Chapter 4
Contact as Adda: Critical Encounters in #KAATENAHINKATTE Instareel (2020) by LaWhore Vagistan and Digital Touching
Afterwords: Against Conclusions
References
Dana Arnold
Cynthia Freeland
Partha Mitter
Matthew Restall
Kathryn Kalinak
Yashodhara Dalmia
Richard M. Eaton & Phillip B. Wagoner
Making Meaning in Indian Cinema
Ravi S. Vasudevan
Antoinette Burton
