ONGOING ARTISTIC RESEARCH

'Naachnewali: The Dancing Girl’ is a practice-based research that explores, locates and unpacks the complex identity and agency of the brown female performing body.

Set within the artistic practices of choreography, epistolary writing, performance and pedagogy; the research stems from the artist’s viewing of her own performing body as an archive, carrying layers of histories, memories and professional lineage. This two-subject position of ‘being the object of the study’ and ‘critically engaging with the object of the study’ is the foundation of this research. By analysing the body of the naachnewali or the brown dancing girl which is persistently contested as a site of entertainment, a site of work, honour, and abuse; this artistic research focuses in finding ways to decolonize and re-identify the dancing girl in her present-day authenticity.

The ongoing research began with a lecture performance ‘Umrao&Me’ (2018) that takes the history of an iconic 19th century tawaif performer - Umrao Jaan, a courtesan from North India, as a point of departure to unpack accounts of marginalisation, coloniality, patriarchal society, body shaming, morality & religion, censorship and commodification of the arts through a series of letters written by the artist to the courtesan. Taking the epistolary approach again, the second performance ‘Me&You: In a Dialogue’ (2020) was crafted. Me&You is collective hyper-text reading performance that delves deeper into the above inquiries interweaving biography, autobiography, comment, critique, rebuke, lament as a conversation between me and you.

The research project is supported by THIRD, Das Graduate School from 2019-2022 and the above mentioned performances have been funded by Makersfonds Gemeente Tilburg, Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, DansBrabant, Korzo Theatre, and Tilburg Dansstad.

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