The dancing body: labour, livelihood and leisure

Abstract

In India, discourses around the dancing body have long been trapped within the historical studies in and around dancers and their dance practices. During the last few decades, however, significant scholarly inroads were made into the domain of dance by shaking up the stereotypes, assertions and labels, shaped and moulded by patriarchy, class, caste and power. In the current times, the body discourse has given many of us tools to focus on socio-culturally excluded and dispossessed performers, whose presence and representation have historically been marginalised in the developing discourses on dance. It is, therefore, time to energise research that can generate new ideas of looking at existing binaries around the dancing body and challenging them as well. This essay is an attempt to bring together emerging issues and discourses around dance and the body that have become central through the cultural politics of the Indian nation-state in the post-independence years. Contemporary discourses around identity politics, survival strategies, neo-liberal dispossessions and the problematic constructions of the commodification of the erotic body vis a vis sexual labour, pleasure, desire and agency of dancers in diverse performing contexts, have helped us frame the focus around labour, leisure and livelihood concerning the concrete everyday existence of the body in dance.