PART I

In my third year of learning the Indian Classical Dance form Odissi, I am taught an item from Gīta Govinda—the central poetic text of the Odissi repertoire—known as “Lalita Lavanga lata”, which describes the Hindu goddess Radha pining for the god Krishna. Paralleling the song’s Sanskrit verses, sung languidly by a tenor voice in the springtime Rāg Basant, I render humming bees, fragrant flowers, and other aspects of the verdant natural setting in movement, before coming to a scene of Radha-Krishna lila, or love-play. This part is new to me, and I have to mirror my teacher, who demonstrates the movements in front of the class. She and I are first Krishna, holding a broad open posture and mischievously sprinkling colourful holi powder onto Radha. Then, with a half-turn of our torsos to the left, we switch to playing Radha, jolting in shock, curving our chests inward and coyly covering our face. As Radha, we decorate Krishna’s forehead with sandalwood, then switch back to play Krishna pulling Radha’s sari, then, to Radha rushing to restore our modesty, only for us, once again as Krishna, to embrace her. My teacher tells us to treat the characters as real, such that we are alternately Krishna, youthful and playful lover, and Radha, demure milkmaid who yearns to feel on her body his embrace: “React as if Krishna has just touched you, move as if nothing pleases you more than to decorate his eyebrow…”

I sensed that I must have been the only queer person in my class. I felt the others’ straight alignment like an alliance, which let them indulge in this relationship and joke suggestively about Krishna’s charm. In those moments, I retreated into myself—tensed, silent—and waited for the time to pass. Maybe I couldn’t make this scene at home in my body because ekāhārya abhinaya (playing different characters in succession) was new to me — but I couldn’t deny the other reason: that the way my peers talked about the divine lovers exposed a sudden rift between us, which became transposed onto my own body as friction between will and limbs. Though I wanted to make myself a vessel for the scene, whose beauty I appreciated on my teacher’s body, I couldn’t quell my rising unease when I myself had to perform the idealised Indian femininity and heterosexuality that Odissi demanded. Was I a bad dancer, and should I have squashed my feelings? Right then, I saw my teacher as Odissi’s ideal woman – something which, because I am not and do not want to be, interferes with everything.

To be disorientated is to find oneself unstable, out of place, and in disorder. Experiences of disorientation, like the one I present above, are vital in Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Sara Ahmed’s phenomenologies, but for different reasons. Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (2002/1945) posits that an “instability of (spatial) levels” threatens the perceiving subject’s basic sense of continuity and “communication with the world”, thus producing “giddiness and nausea” that must be overcome by reunifying the subject and its spatial environment (p. 296). Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006), however,  values queer (odd, strange) moments and is premised upon the reality of queer (non-normative gender and/or sexualities) bodily experiences. So here, it is precisely in disorientation—when bodies fail to “inhabit spaces that… extend their shape”—that they have the ability to make those spaces appear strange or oblique (p.160). A disorientated body can “create disorientation in others” by revealing that the latter’s impressions of stability and coherence within a particular space or system was given by a history of “past approaches” rather than a natural, essential relation to it (Ahmed, p. 91). Hence, disorientation can be an important call for critical reflection and change.

In this essay, I take up Ahmed’s call to stay with moments of disorientation, specifically within my experience of learning the Indian Classical Dance (ICD) form Odissi, in order to critically examine the conditions that produced them and extract from their emotional potency greater self-understanding. In the experience presented above, my orientation was lost when the social and aesthetic dance space did not “extend” my “shape”, but instead turned oblique and pressed upon me. Ahmed’s claim that the significance of sexual orientation exceeds the love object, or “who” is “delimit[ed]” as “available for love” (p. 127), and affects one’s spatial inhabitation of their own bodies and the world, articulates a reality many queer people know: that our bodily experiences even outside the domain of love and attraction are shaped by our queerness. This is especially true of my experience of dancing Odissi, an activity that involves my whole body in an intentional, conscious, and sustained experience of itself. 

I first started learning Odissi in 2018 in Singapore, and subsequently studied with two teachers based in Cambridge and Bedford respectively. Incidentally, all my teachers had learnt Odissi from Madhavi Mudgal, a disciple of Kelucharan Mohapatra (1926–2004)—one of the major pioneers of classical Odissi—and as a result, taught  me a similar style of dance. Throughout my four years in Odissi, I have felt the effort of moulding my body into shapes signifying idealised womanhood and enacting narratives organised by heterosexual love differently from my straight and gender-conforming peers, even if they have moments of disorientation of their own in dance. And yet, these uncomfortable sensations arising from the conflict between my bodily reality and the heteronormative character of Odissi have had no outlet in what tends to be an equally heteronormative dance-learning space. The matter is somewhat alleviated in scholarly discourse, where queer readings or critiques of dance performance practices have emerged across the various ICD forms: for example, Gulati et al., (2014) identify a lineage of queer Odissi dance from its pre-colonial Mahari (female temple dancer) ancestor to present-day choreographer Ratikant Mohapatra; in Kuchipudi and Bharatanatyam respectively, Harshita Mruthinti Kamath (2019) and Azzarelli and de Concini (2016) explore spaces of gender/sexual subversion and queer agency within each form; and regarding Kathak, the group of dancer-scholars known as Post Natyam Collective (2016) critique purist ideas of ICD while bringing to light the repressed syncretism and homoeroticism in the past and present practice of Kathak.

The emerging tradition of queer scholarship that such works constitute is significant, yet it stands against the authoritative view that the Indian arts are fundamentally abstract, non-literal and impersonal – and thus opposed to identity politics and autobiographical performance. Following the aesthetician Abhinavagupta’s authoritative rasa theory (the predominant interpretive paradigm for Indian aesthetics) (950-1016 CE), Bhattacharya (1930) claims that the generation of rasa or flavour/essence in art is possible only when performer and audience transcend individuality and eliminate direct identification with the artwork. This view is reiterated by gurus who, for instance, tell their students that the “perfect dancer’s…physical self should slip away before the audience’s eyes” (Chatterjea, 1996, p. 75) and also manifests in prominent ICD scholarship (Coorlawala, 1996; Shah, 1998) as the act of reading dance solely or primarily according to philosophical and theoretical paradigms. Given the belief that subjectivity and personal interests are barriers that must be overcome rather than elements enriching rasa, dancers’ personal experiences are normally treated as inessential to dance interpretation, and the subjectivity of queer dancers—a marginalised minority within the demographic invested in ICD—are even less investigated.

In this paper, I respond to the invisibility, and, as I suggest, erasure of queer dancing bodies in Odissi by writing an auto-ethnographic queer phenomenology of my experiences in this dance form. I evaluate these as important sources of knowledge that defamiliarise conventions of classical Odissi, asking: how can the disorientating quality of my experiences productively offer alternative interpretations of Odissi? And why do these interpretations matter? I use auto-ethnography as my mode of investigation, taking inspiration from anthropologist Pallabi Chakravorty (2004) and ethnomusicologist Deborah Wong (2019), who have written auto-ethnographically on their gendered and racialised experiences of Kathak dance and Taiko drumming respectively. I choose auto-ethnography as it aligns with phenomenology’s ethos of bringing what is in the background to the foreground; furthermore, this method allows me to theorise directly from/about my own sensations, emotions, and thoughts, and to surface felt queer meanings in the experience of learning Odissi which are foreclosed by compulsory heterosexuality. My discussion revolves around the concept of mirroring, which is at once a rich metaphor in Indian aesthetics, the main vehicle of teaching and learning Odissi, and an unexpected site for the negotiation of gender(ed) identities and relationships. I conclude by analysing the poetics of disidentification (Muñoz) with ICD through the work of Post Natyam Collective, and finally, discussing disidentification as a strategy in my own learning of dance. 

Dance as Discourse 

Though they are shrouded by an aura of ancientness, the now nine “Classical” Dances were modern inventions which only became officially recognised after India’s independence from Britain in 1947. Due to dance’s representational capacity and integration of religious, philosophical and artistic domains, it was perceived by dance revivalists and later the postcolonial state to be able to express a national Indian identity; furthermore, given that British colonisers had previously banned temple dances under the Anti-Nautch movement of the 1890s, the revival of Indian dance would symbolically affirm “the authentic sanskritized Hindu spirit of India's past (...) that had been maligned by colonial rule” (Chakravorty, 2000, p. 113). But to represent a unified national culture, these disparate regional practices had to be sanitised—by aligning female dancers with the “chaste Indian woman” ideal—in order for them “to fit the Hindu nationalist agenda” (Mitra, 2006, p. 74). 

In the case of Odissi, this included the marginalisation of the Mahari (female temple dancers) as Odissi’s historical ancestor in favour of the Gotipuas (boys who cross-dress as girls in dance) (Gulati et al., 2014, p. 124). Since Gotipuas fell outside the normative gender binary and the Mahari existed outside the acceptable framework of Indian womanhood in the eyes of British colonisers and Indian elites, Odissi has rather queer origins regardless of which ancestor one draws its lineage from. However, both figures are absent from the classical Odissi taught today, which reflects the programme of heterosexual, religious-themed Radha-Krishna love that Mahari and Gotipua practices contained without the elements of non-normative gender and sexualities that were so essential to them. Thus, Odissi is in itself a hegemonic discourse that embodies Hindu-nationalist and heteropatriarchal agendas while eclipsing artistic practices and actors that do not conform as easily to the state’s ideal image of India.

In Odissi classrooms, movements are typically taught through the pedagogical mode of mirroring, a form of learning-by-reproduction whereby a teacher demonstrates movements on their body “mirrored” from students, for instance, raising their left hand when students should raise their right. Students see the front of the teacher’s body, and in copying/mirroring them, learn the required movements in their correct orientation. The scene of pedagogical mirroring is the basis of my exploration because it is central to the practical learning of Odissi, and because, as its reputation as a pure and authentic Indian practice attests, this mirroring has been invested with the ability to faithfully reproduce a fixed set of aesthetics, values, and discourses onto a continuous chain of bodies from ancient times through the present and into the future. 

However, that Odissi is haunted by the spectre of queerness, that it has gone through stages of appropriation and that is diversely practised throughout the world means its reproduction is unstable, and that on a practical level, pedagogical mirroring contains an irresolvable yet productive tension between mimesis and alterity, copying and resignification. The following section will explicate this tension in the modality of student-teacher mirroring, firstly in relation to its objective of gendered cultural reproduction from a sociological perspective, and secondly as a site of queer bodily experience from a phenomenological perspective.

PART II

Pedagogical Mirroring as Gendered Cultural Reproduction

Following the Hindu belief that the cosmic dance of Lord Shiva instigated the movement of the universe, the aesthetic treatise Abhinaya Darpaṇa (The Mirror of Gesture, circa. 1000 AD) maintains that the “laws of dancing” are thought to hold a “mirror” to divine gestures (Coomaraswamy, 1917, p. 13). The Vedic Upaniṣads state that humans and God are reflections of each other, and only in the unity of these reflections the whole Self – a formulation corroborated by artworks in the bhakti devotional tradition which feature mirrors as devices that show this mortal-divine identity by revealing God (Krishna) as an image of the mortal subject (Radha) gazing into it. In this rich symbolic context, dancers act as mirrors which reflect and manifest divine forms as well as vehicles of spiritual transcendence for the audience. But for all the mirrors that frame dance conceptually, none are present in its physical practice. Unlike most Western dance forms, mirrors are intentionally excluded from Odissi and other ICD studios and pedagogies because, as my first teacher said in an interview, “we are supposed to feel what we do, not see what we do” (Dancing without Mirrors, 2016). To get to that point, however—to even know what to do and how to do it—our eyes have to first follow the origin of movement: the teacher. 

Because there are no mirrors in class, my teacher faces us and “mirrors” movements she wants to teach us on her own body, starting every step on the left side as we start on the right. Because there are no mirrors in class, I, too, substitute my teacher’s body for a mirror. But I soon realise that I am the mirror image – not the origin of movement but the figure which operates at a delay, prone to flaws in reproduction. My goal is to imitate my teacher perfectly, and so become her perfect mirror-image. Then, I imagine, I will be able to move in synchronicity with her and the other students to the intricate bols (rhythms) of Odissi items, expending adrenaline and giving off heat, breath, and energy in the shared studio space. In short, I will belong to a vertical historical lineage of Odissi; a social and artistic community in the studio; and the live multi-sensorial experience of group dancing I can now only witness as a spectator…

The image of students mirroring, assimilating, and to some extent becoming their teachers reveals most explicitly the latent function of arts education: cultural reproduction. In ICD, the reproduction of culture is deeply gendered, such that, firstly, the dance forms themselves are perceived to cultivate “chaste, spiritual, and ‘respectable’” women (Chakravorty, 2000, p. 49); secondly, that performing ICD well involves the proper performance of femininity and masculinity; and thirdly, that these intra- and meta-dance performances of gender represent authentic Indianness. Thus, Chakravorty (2004) writes that “the practice or ritual of Kathak…in a classroom setting” instils a (South Asian) “cultural memory” or structure of feeling and influences gender identity formation in students (p. 3); Chakravorty’s student interviewee substantiates this by saying she could only perform Kathak successfully when she lost her sense of self and “merge[d] with Radha”, at which point she felt like “every woman, the eternal woman” – who is in fact a very particular Hindu construction defined by being Krishna’s beloved (p. 13). Clearly, this dancer’s loaded statement encapsulates ways in which the pedagogical mirroring of teacher and student bespeaks enculturation at a deeper level, where a class-based habitus, cis-heteronormative bodily orientation and cultural identification are fused and instilled in generations of dancers. 

With this in mind, I argue that learning Odissi functions as an index of symbolic capital among Indians because Odissi specifies and inculcates, in the idealised aesthetic realm, an exemplary habitus/orientation for women within a dominant Hindu-nationalist heteropatriarchal framework. Being a woman in Odissi means being able to show off and perform one’s body in public in a socially accepted way; to wield symbols associated with divine forms; to perform femininities and masculinities modelled after deities, and, ultimately, to perform heterosexuality: latent or existent desire for a man. Although one dancer may portray both a man and a woman in performance, these categories are cemented by compulsory heterosexuality, such that when they portray a woman, only men are reachable as love objects, and vice versa. Hence, regarding Coorlawala’s (1996) claim that the switch between male/female characters in ekāhārya abhinaya “[changes] the locus of the power to construct the love object” such that “both males and females can enter the performed narrative” (p. 23), we must qualify that only heterosexual males and females can enter the performed narrative and the locus of power never shifts to homosexual subjects. 

The uniqueness of Odissi’s gendered discourse is twofold. First, it is expressed in the aesthetic realm, which is understood as an ideal model of social life (Shah, 1998, p. 9). Second, it is actually multi-sited, meaning that Odissi aesthetics are reinforced by interlocking discourses and their significance exceeds the artworks in which they appear. Compulsory heterosexuality, in the form of Radha and Krishna’s love, will not be de-centred because it does not only occupy the status of artistic plot but of spiritual metaphor: in bhakti philosophy, with which the art form is aligned, devotees can only attain spiritual union with the divine when they “[transform] into Radha” (as Chakravorty’s student affirmed), since it is believed that the “sexual union of Radha and Krishna metaphorically emulates the devotional yearning of the…devotee to merge with the divine” (Sarkar, 2017, p. 21-22). Some may find it radical that men are also supposed to enter the female modality of Radha to achieve spiritual transcendence, but this is after all only because she is made synonymous with the passive beloved vis-à-vis the active male lover. Evidently, then, such metaphorical gender fluidity and liberation comes at the price of reinforcing fixed heterosexual gender roles. 

This all causes one to wonder: if pedagogical mirroring simply facilitates the process of becoming a woman in Odissi, a figure who is constrained by heteropatriarchal, religious, mythological, and aesthetic strictures to possibly an even greater degree than she is in life, what is in this practice for queer and gender non-conforming women? Why do they—we—actively choose to participate in this dance form? 

Imperfect Mirrors, Counter-Productive Sites

My desire to become my teacher’s perfect mirror image requires immense focus. I need to match our limbs (her shoulder-my shoulder; her foot-my foot) and maintain this constant kinaesthetic and visual awareness as we move in and out of various stances in real time. But while she, holding in her body decades of practice, can always keep the clarity and integrity of each Chouka and Tribhangi—the two basic Odissi positions—even after an hour of dancing, physical exhaustion loosens my body’s grasp on them, causing me to slip out of the dynamic parallel relationship we had as I slip out of the line of bodies for a break. 

In the moments I can’t keep up with her, I feel the difference between us as a kind of physical distance: at once the global distance between perimeters of stacked but misaligned shapes, which can be resolved if one is moulded into the other, and the linear distance between our bodies in space, which can only be resolved by contact. I attribute to these hours of training the ability to bridge both distances, but they are not enough – too slow to press my body into shape, too short to allow my teacher and myself to impress upon each other not only as dancers but as people. Perhaps it is my desire to be like my teacher that is frustrated, a feeling nearly indistinguishable from desire for her. Aren’t these just two types of possession?

People come to and stay in dance for diverse reasons: its gendered aspects can be to one person an incidental by-product of training, and to another a key reason for learning dance. As a lesbian whose sexuality, gender identity and presentation are anomalous in an Odissi learning context, I am hyper-aware of the aspects of Odissi that reinforce sex-gender coherence—such as costume—that code dancers as female, and that legibly express femininity—such as symbolic gestures, and the lāsya or graceful style of dancing. They are a source of anxiety for me because they are entangled with the construction of women as heterosexual, and, on a personal level, because I had failed to acquire many of these aspects of femininity naturally and/or repudiated them all my life. Hence, I experience dancing Odissi as a paradoxical self-imposition of norms similar to those I tried to escape, which I am now making myself cultivate. But I also experience it as a liberating way of accessing femininity both as a repressed part of myself and as an object of desire.

Drawing upon these personal sensations and thoughts, existent queer ICD scholarship, and Post Natyam Collective’s artistic work, I suggest that many queer women’s relationships to the gendered aspects of ICD can be understood as one of disidentification, an attitude or mode of action that “neither opts to assimilate within…nor strictly opposes” dominant ideology, but “works on and against” it (Muñoz, 1999, p. 11). In the context of our discussion on mirroring, we can understand disidentification as a form of imperfect mirroring or a troubled reproduction of a particular representation, system or ideology, which is for many queer people both an inevitable result of contact with such “objects” and a conscious practice that defies the binary of total acceptance/rejection that we are pressured to choose between when such contact occurs. Moving beyond my own experiences, I now direct attention to Post Natyam Collective’s piece of poeticised autobiography rapture/rupture (2016) in order to theorise a possible collective experience and politics of disidentification shared by queer women in ICD.

“Erupting with Otherness” in rapture/rupture 

rapture/rupture is a contemporary classical piece which thematises the homoeroticism of mirroring. Its movement discourse appropriates Kathak abhinaya, the unique expressive idiom of Indian Classical Dance comprising bodily movements and facial and hand gestures, in service of an unprecedented agenda: the representation of lesbian love and loss. In portraying this theme, rapture/rupture also reconfigures the concept and practice of viraha, an affect of love-in-separation which traditionally characterises Radha and Krishna’s love. 

The piece begins within Kathak conventions, as a Hindustani sarangi introduces the Rag over a drone, and the solo dancer Cynthia Ling Lee sits demurely on the floor in traditional Kathak costume. The recited poem, written in first-person from the dancer’s perspective, begins by tracing her attempt to mirror her guru in class, which she imagines as her guru’s subjectivity “opening up inside” her. However, this transformative process is hindered by the dancer’s sexual and ethnic identity as a queer Taiwanese American woman, which erupts uncontrollably in her body as she dances Kathak. 

On stage, Lee first performs prototypical Kathak femininity with ease, portraying a woman in love with imagery from the world of abhinaya: a rotating kaṭakāmukha mudra (hand gesture) at her chest to signify her beating heart, an open pataka palm in front of her face to show a mirror and then a kārtarimukha tracing the line of her gaze into it. Subtly and fleetingly, Lee uses the technique of ekāhārya abhinaya to play her guru demonstrating Kathak movements confidently, and then, with a half-turn of her torso, herself copying hesitantly. In doing this, she transplants the invisible mirror between her guru and herself in the classroom into the centre of her body, “between” the two opposite sex characters (usually Radha and Krishna) one normally plays in these contexts. 

From here, more disruptions are introduced to Kathak’s symbolic world, such as Lee’s own body. Struggling to sustain her performance of the ideal Kathak woman, Lee drops the veil to reveal her short hair, and erupts into spasmodic and masculine-coded movements. The recitation, spilling a litany of the dancer’s failures, accelerates then fragments into an inchoate mixture of previous lines. Unable to be constricted by her Kathak costume any longer, Lee strips it off and changes into straight trousers and a grey unisex Chinese-style blouse. Finally, in the comfort of self-chosen clothes and a personalised movement idiom, Lee’s storm of movement, the music, and the recitation relaxes. The poem ends with the well-worn refrain “Beloved, our love was not enough”, and as the lights dim, the dancer emerges from the drama – no doubt scathed from the ordeal, but still intact, uncompromising, and new. 

Judith/Jack Halberstam (2011) writes that “failing is something queers…have always done exceptionally well” because dominant definitions of success in heteronormative and capitalist societies have been built around the heterosexual nuclear family. Recognising this, failure can be understood not as a sign of defeat but “a way of refusing to acquiesce to dominant logics of power… and as a form of critique” (p. 89). Crucially, while rapture/rupture is premised upon the failure of the subject—borne of her gendered and cultural queerness—it also reflexively recognises the failure of her love objects to be worthy of her: Kathak, which limited her body’s capacities; the Beloved teacher, who did not accept her; and finally, her and Lee’s love, which could not shut out the world’s interference, were “not enough.” Thus, the piece shows that queer failure is contingent on specific, non-natural expectations imposed by dominant forces—here an ICD discourse that demands “purist notions of culture, race, nation, religion, and femininity” (Croft et al., p. 46)—and critiques them. As such, the melancholy infusing rapture/rupture is not only borne of unrequited love, but of the bad fit and mutual failure which causes one to disidentify with that which one loves in the first place. 

Here, disidentification, a rehabilitative gesture, is radical. Early in the piece, one can feel the dancer’s earnest desire to identify with her guru through mirroring, to incorporate her gendered image and subjectivity into herself as a means of (as Lee writes retrospectively) symbolically enacting “union with a same-sex beloved” and accessing “a more whole self” (Croft et al., p. 61). This dual function of mirroring is a direct reference to the bhakti poetics, in which only Radha, the one looking into the mirror, and her love object Krishna, also her mirror-image, constitute the whole self. While the affective quality of mirroring in bhakti is retained in rapture/rupture, the piece radically departs from the former by setting up the mirror between a female disciple and her female guru, as is the case in most ICD learning contexts, and not the divine heterosexual lovers on an abstract symbolic plane. By reconfiguring ekāhārya abhinaya and its rich symbolism in this way, Lee refuses a concept of wholeness constituted of essentialised masculine and feminine elements joined by heterosexual union, in favour of a new queer selfhood formed from an impossible relationship in ICD—the erotic relationship between two women, teacher and student—which she accords the same weight and inevitability as Radha and Krishna’s in such a fleeting moment. 

However, compulsory heterosexuality prevents this interpretation of mirroring from existing, let alone being legitimate in an ICD learning context. The prohibition on mixing gender identification and sexual desire is explained by Judith Butler (1995) as such: heterosexuality forces subjects’ latent/existent homosexual attachments to live under the sign of their own prohibition, “as unlivable passion and ungrievable loss” (p. 168). Thus, a female subject, for example, can only “incorporate that homosexuality as an identification with [femininity]”, a femininity that will be “haunted by the love it cannot grieve” (p. 170). 

In Disidentifications (1999), Jose Esteban Muñoz poses the question of how a hypothetical queer colonised woman could possibly stay with Frantz Fanon’s anticolonial politics despite his homophobic and misogynistic views. Here, I want to rephrase Muñoz’s question to ask: “what process can keep an identification with [Indian Classical Dance], [its] politics, [its] work possible for this woman?” (Muñoz, p.9). rapture/rupture constitutes a reply: to make ICD work for Post Natyam Collective’s lesbian subject, the will to embody ICD femininity must be recognised as a “[residue of] same-sex attachment(s)” (Croft et al., p. 57) which the subject needs to recuperate truthfully, under the signs of both identification and desire. In expressing the prohibited passion under its proper name before grieving its loss, rapture/rupture completes the perennially disrupted cycle of mourning for lesbian love, and as such provides closure for the performer and other sympathetic subjects, even if this closure is steeped in the more fundamental disappointment of being unable to fully identify with ICD within its accepted locus of meaning in the first place. Alas, this disappointment, lingering long after the final refrain, is one that strategies of disidentificatory appropriation cannot fully assuage. And in the end, Beloved, Our love was not enough.

…

Queer dancers know that pedagogical mirroring is not deterministic. Instead, mirroring femininity in ICD learning contexts can be a strategy that people like myself use to align our gender identities with our guru and peers, and dance class itself a ritual in which we willingly practise that alignment in order to rehabilitate lost or renounced parts of ourselves. Furthermore, as rapture/rupture has shown, such performances of femininity within ICD learning spaces do not have to be read as signs of a willing assimilation or successful cultural reproduction of authentic Indianness, but as acts which generously encompass dancers’ erotic desires for such femininity, disidentificatory feelings, complex and varied relationships with gender and race, and even sheer pleasure of movement – in other words, a world of internal difference. 

While we can think of the imperative to mirror as producing from the outset the possibility of failed mimesis and its negative, alterity (Taussig, 1993), it is also true that alterity, difference, and duplicity can exist even within the body that appears to successfully copy the other, potentially as a sign of resistance to complete identification with it. Going further, mine and Post Natyam members’ experiences show that the resistance which our bodies embody against identification with ICD forms and its concomitant ideology is also felt as our bodies’ resistance to performing these very movements perfectly. We feel this resistance as the physical pain of twisting our limbs into uncomfortable shapes and the emotional pain of disidentification. Watching Cynthia Ling Lee, watching myself, dancing Odissi is the act in which the bivalence of the word “resistance” as counterforce to power and as friction that results in debility always strikes me.

Disidentifying with Odissi

Let us return to the scene that opened this essay, and to the critical question, now turned on myself: what process can keep an identification with Odissi, its politics, its work possible for me? This is not a question that I turn over in a contemplative mood, distanced from the visceral scene of dancing. Instead, it points to a rapid self-searching process that occurs at the moment I am disorientated in the studio, unable to “fully identify or to form…that ‘just-as-if’ relationship” (Muñoz, p. 7). As my teacher and peers half-ironically joke about the attributes of Krishna and their own lovers, thoughts trip over one another in my mind: do I think of myself as a neutral and pliant template for the unfolding of stories that have nothing to do with me? Should I see abhinaya as a purely formal exercise, to protect my feelings and Odissi’s narratives from sullying each other, or should I try to find the Krishna and Radha within me, two characters who when united point toward a gender-transcendent self? Does it matter which route I go down, as long as I can execute the performance? Or does my ability to perform well in fact rely on the route? 

But then, we resume dancing, the doing of the deed takes over, and there is no time, space, and energy for my internal monologue. I am focussing on the dynamic of my right-hand’s movement as I “spray” “Radha” with holi powder, then on synchronising my torso’s half-turn with a complete change in body language: I shrink my frame, raise my hands to cover my face to show I am surprised, shy, and protesting, while my face hints that I secretly like it: Are you going to do it again? Then, out of nowhere, I am transported into a memory of being at a holi celebration a few years ago with my friends in an open field. Aiming at one another’s cheap white t-shirts, hair, and uncovered skin, we threw coloured powder, laughing and running. When I saw that our colours were exhausted, I unclenched my muscles, caught my breath and relaxed into a sense of security, but without warning, the person who is now my partner crept up behind me to pour the largest chunk of green into my hair. Mouth falling in shock, I screamed, uncontrollably happy, retaliating with my final colours. 

I know that we are not Radha and Krishna, that we can never be them, and that I do not want to “become” Radha as long as this is the case. But I also know that in their narrative exists a truth that exceeds them, that is felt in experiences that—as of now—struggle to find a place in Odissi classrooms. Queer Phenomenology closes on the question of “what our orientation toward queer moments of disorientation will be” (Ahmed, 179), and how queer people regain balance in an oblique straight world. As for myself, I do not join my peers in contributing anecdotes of love but hold my memory privately in my body as I learn and perfect this Radha-Krishna scene, dissatisfied that it can only live under the sign of heterosexual love but also, finally finding a way to make it more at home in my body, which has in living already rehearsed it. I also write this essay, which briefly attempts to contrast how learning Odissi feels in mine and sympathetic bodies with discourses that dominate its public interpretation. Thus, I disidentify with Odissi while practising it and loving it deeply, in order to make my life in dance liveable, and to create, with dance as an essential component, a liveable life.

References

Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Duke University Press. 

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