Southern Asia at Chicago

April 13, 2012

Sponsored by The Department of Music, COSAS, and presented with Apsara

with Rumya S. Putcha, PhD (The University of Chicago)

WHEN: Friday April 13th
TIME: 12:30pm-1:30pm
WHERE: Fulton Recital Hall, 5845 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL

This workshop examines the ways in which dancers working in multiple and diasporic settings engage with rasa, abhinaya and conventional modes of representation in Indian classical dance. As a historically-informed performance practice, Indian classical dance often focuses on two tropes of feminine expression, bhakti (devotion to God) and rakti (devotion to a lover). In the workshop we will explore how, as female dancers working in a time and space vastly different from that of our contemporaries in India, we engage with our ideas of womanhood as bhakti, rakti or something else entirely through rasa and abhinaya and, in doing so, bring our own deeply personal emotions to bear on an evocation of the self in dance.