Sharira.
What is particularly interesting in this performance is that it being not only about the body and it’s corporeal contours within a given choreography but also the sexed body and it’s tussles, intimacies, desires mapped out in a performance space. The performance, in my opinion hinges largely towards a kind of choreographic shift in dance that prioritises the bodily over tradition and the traditional; as also contemporary and contemporariness.
During the performance, the two bodies engage in choreographic convolutions, in an almost carnal graph, of a departure or a return of the body to it’s bodily inseparability. The shape of a posture, the twirl of a gesture, patterns that make possible the viewing of the corporeal in its crudest …show more content…
However, there was a great level of agency exercised by the female body, often displaying metaphors of sexuality, of desires that are carved out of the flesh and resonate within the flesh. It’s a challenge to heteronormative codes of dance practice in India that bind the female body in a fixed framework of sexuality. ‘Sharira’ releases the female body, In a certain way magnifying the spectator’s imagination of the female body on stage. One could notice a specific choreographic focus on the pelvic area of the female dancer( Tishani Doshi )on stage, and if I can just quote Chandralekha here as she beautifully explains the process,
“Tishani, when you open your legs, it must look like you’re opening a jewel-box. Do it slowly, slower, there must be some tension, a feeling of suspense..”( Mitra, R. The Parting Pelvis:Temporality, Sexuality, and Indian Womanhood in Chandralekha’s Sharira (2001)Dance Research Journal. Volume 46, Number 2, August 2014. pp. 4-19). This choreographic strategy of slowness coupled with a particular focus on a female sexual organ demystifies the female body on stage, that the female body is more than cultural notions of procreation, that is not something to be merely etched on a male body, but to be an arbitrary agent of wilful pleasures and
What is particularly interesting in this performance is that it being not only about the body and it’s corporeal contours within a given choreography but also the sexed body and it’s tussles, intimacies, desires mapped out in a performance space. The performance, in my opinion hinges largely towards a kind of choreographic shift in dance that prioritises the bodily over tradition and the traditional; as also contemporary and contemporariness.
During the performance, the two bodies engage in choreographic convolutions, in an almost carnal graph, of a departure or a return of the body to it’s bodily inseparability. The shape of a posture, the twirl of a gesture, patterns that make possible the viewing of the corporeal in its crudest …show more content…
However, there was a great level of agency exercised by the female body, often displaying metaphors of sexuality, of desires that are carved out of the flesh and resonate within the flesh. It’s a challenge to heteronormative codes of dance practice in India that bind the female body in a fixed framework of sexuality. ‘Sharira’ releases the female body, In a certain way magnifying the spectator’s imagination of the female body on stage. One could notice a specific choreographic focus on the pelvic area of the female dancer( Tishani Doshi )on stage, and if I can just quote Chandralekha here as she beautifully explains the process,
“Tishani, when you open your legs, it must look like you’re opening a jewel-box. Do it slowly, slower, there must be some tension, a feeling of suspense..”( Mitra, R. The Parting Pelvis:Temporality, Sexuality, and Indian Womanhood in Chandralekha’s Sharira (2001)Dance Research Journal. Volume 46, Number 2, August 2014. pp. 4-19). This choreographic strategy of slowness coupled with a particular focus on a female sexual organ demystifies the female body on stage, that the female body is more than cultural notions of procreation, that is not something to be merely etched on a male body, but to be an arbitrary agent of wilful pleasures and