Red-Stained Feet: Probing the Ground on which Women Dance in Contemporary Bengal

Abstract

Charged with rethinking the construct of World Histories of Dance, I wonder about the possibility of constructing histories of dancing bodies across wide terrains of time and space, histories that can only be charted through trace — stilled images in sculptures, paintings, photographs; descriptions in texts; memories; and only recently, the late nineteenth century onwards, through recordings — always, a necessarily selective project. What indeed are the possibilities for creating a ‘historical’ narrative from tracing those shifts within dancing bodies, marking changes in forums, alterations in costumes, and swings in context? For whom might these histories be important? And what inequities rise in the necessarily selective recordings of ‘world’ dance histories, as the inevitable consequence of the uneven concentration of capital and resources in particular geopolitical locations? These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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