Dancing and listening : Odissi across cultures

I want to take the opportunity afforded by this conference on post-colonial writing to reflect upon the oral aspects of the transmission of knowledge in a research interview.I want to view the interview as a singular event of narration. I want to use the theme or 'content' of my interview with a young Bengali-Australian dancer to draw attention tothe interview 'form'. The interview occurred because of my interest in how this dancer had come to learn Odissi dance, how knowledge of Odissi had passed to her. In retrospect, I am trying to see myself as someone to whom, through the face-to-face interview, knowledge was 'passed' orally, not textually. I am trying to think about it in terms of some of the principles of orality discussed by Walter Ong (1982), and through the concept of 'enunciation' which foregrounds not the content of a statement but the 'position of the speaking subject in the statement.'

Dance is an oral culture. It is a set of practices transmitted from body to body. You cannot learn dancing from a book. The western researcher however learns a lot about dance of other cultures from books and articles. From my own reading I have been alerted to, and become conversant with, many of the complex negotiations of gendered, historical, national, class and aesthetic meanings at work in Classical Indian Dance practices.

I learned something of the limits of literacy, however, through the experience of interviewing Sunita (not her real name) about her learning and background in Odissi dance. She has had Odissi knowledge passed on to her in a quasi-traditional guru-sisya relationship. Her authority is in her dancing - she now embodies Odissi dance in her person - and her experience is in the oral modes of transmitting dancing knowledge. Through her telling me, through remembering out loud she was reenacting or rehearsing the 'orality' of her dance knowledge.

In my conversation with Sunita, then, wasn't it a question not of what she might say about Odissi, of what discourses she might deploy, but of what she as the subject of her own enunciations might say to me? It was also a question of how I might have listened to her and what I was able to hear.

Dancing and listening : Odissi across cultures

This paper discusses issues that arose for me when I interviewed an Odissi dancer about her learning this Indian dance form, travelling as she did from Australia to Orissa to spend several months of each year over an 11-year period to live with her guru, the late Sanjukta Panigrahi. The issues I discuss are the problems associated with making a text from a live encounter, and the choice of perspectives used in analysing that text. Drawing on discussions by ethnographers, anthropologists and others about the role of poetics in intercultural research, and on my own dance experience, I reflect on my ‘positioning’ in the various stages of the research. I go on to propose that the live, the temporal and what is remembered in the body are important, potentially poetic modalities of knowledge, which can easily be elided in academically validated ways of thinking and doing.

Louise Lightfoot and Rajkumar Priyagopal Singh: the first Manipuri dance tour of Australia, 1951

Manipur, a small state in the North-Eastern corner of India, is traditionally regarded as the home of gandharvas (the celestial dancers). Manipuri is one of the 11 dance styles recognized by the Ministry of Culture of India that have incorporated various key techniques mentioned in the ancient treatises like the Natya Shastra and Bharatarnava and has been placed under 'a common heritage' called Indian classical dance forms (shastriya nritya) - Bharata Natyam, Kathak, Kathakali, Kuchipudi, Manipuri, Mohiniyattam, Odissi, Sattriya, Chhau, Gaudiya Nritya, and Thang Ta. In 1951 Louise Lightfoot, the 'Australian mother of Kathakali' dance, visited the remote mountain state of Manipur to learn more about Manipuri dance. Soon she was successful in persuading and bringing eminent exponents of Manipuri dancing style Jagoi, Rajkumar Priyagopal Singh and Lakshman Singh, to tour Australia. Priyagopal, with the help of Lightfoot and their international tours, to some extent, de-provincialized and also popularized the Manipuri dance and paved the way for other dancers from North-eastern region of India in the International art world. Through this paper I attempt to highlight the contribution of Lightfoot in the promotion of Manipuri dance and in Australia. I here also engage explicitly with Priyagopal and Lightfoot's unusual dance collaboration and trace the historical journey and reception of a Manipuri dance in Australia. © 2014 © 2014 Taylor & Francis.

Louise Lightfoot and Ibetombi Devi: the second Manipuri Dance Tour of Australia, 1957

Manipur, a small state in the North-Eastern India, is traditionally regarded in the Indian classics and epics such as Ramayana and Mahabharata as the home of gandharvas (the celestial dancers). Manipuri is one of the eleven dance styles of India that have incorporated various techniques mentioned in such ancient treatises as the Natya Shastra and Bharatarnava and has been placed by Sangeet Natak Akademi within ‘a common heritage’ of Indian classical dance forms (shastriya nritya): Bharatanatyam, Kathak, Kathakali, Kuchipudi, Manipuri, Mohiniyattam, Odissi, Sattriya, Chhau, Gaudiya Nritya, and Thang Ta. In the late-1950s Louise Lightfoot, the ‘Australian mother of Kathakali,’ visited Manipur to study and research different styles of Manipuri dance. There she met Ibetombi Devi, the daughter of a Manipuri Princess; she had started dancing at the age of four and by the age of twelve, she had become the only female dancer to perform the Meitei Pung Cholom on stage––a form of dance traditionally performed by Manipuri men accompanied by the beating of the pung (drum). In 1957, at the age of 20, Ibetombi became the first Manipuri female dancer to travel to Australia. This paper addresses Ibetombi Devi’s cross-cultural dance collaboration in Australia with her impresario, Louise Lightfoot, and the impression she and her co-dancer, Ananda Shivaram, made upon audiences.