ERIC Number: EJ1352354
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2022
Pages: 17
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1464-7893
EISSN: EISSN-1470-1111
"A Difficult Whole": Reading Ananya Chatterjea's "Mohona, Estuaries of Desire"
Sarkar, Kaustavi
Research in Dance Education, v23 n2 p160-176 2022
This article elucidates a pedagogical formulation delineating the collaborative, relational, and process-oriented nature of viewing dance as a practice-as-research (PaR) enquiry emanating in the field of South Asian Dance Studies. Being an "Odissi" practitioner, an Indian classical dance form from the eastern Indian state of Odisha, I account for my perspective as my embodied learning gets in the way of how I analyze "Mohona: Estuaries of Desire," a dance-theater production by Ananya Dance Theatre (ADT) that premiered on 20-21 September 2013 in Minneapolis. "Mohona" is directed by dance-scholar-activist, Ananya Chatterjea, Artistic Director of ADT and a trained "Odissi" dancer. "Mohona" means "estuary" in Bengali and refers to confluence of the river with the ocean. I see Chatterjea's work as a confluence of various elements because the choreography draws movement from "Odissi" and other Indian somatic practices like "Yoga" and "Chhau." Architect Robert Venturi inspires me to think of contemporary Indian dance as "difficulty unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion." Through a combination of choreographic analysis and PaR, I read "Mohona" as a self-reflexive phenomenon where theory and practice are imbricated within each other into Venturi's "difficult whole."
Descriptors: Dance Education, Teaching Methods, Dance, Indians, Theater Arts, Activism, Researchers, Indo European Languages, Foreign Countries, Physical Activities, Theory Practice Relationship, Action Research
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: India; Minnesota (Minneapolis)
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A