Artist’s Note

The lecture performance invites the audience to reconstruct the viewership of the nautch girl away from the colonial imagination as documented through essentialist images of an east that were both evil & servile, and also, reflect upon the highly selective ways of the creation of oriental archetypes through which the ’otherness' of eastern narratives could be readily identified and adjudged to systemic exclusion from the high art performance discourse.

During my research, I poured over texts on tawaif performers, geishas, kabuki, cabaret dancers & their marginalized identity, studied female characters in western nude paintings and read & conducted interviews with current-day female performers. Parallel to this, I was interested in finding ways to connect how socioeconomic incidents such as the emergence of female voting rights, introduction of the contraceptive pill, institutionalization of dance, the four waves of feminism, independence of colonies, notions of nationalism, populist culture, inequality in cultural participation, the recent #metoo phenomenon and the advent of extreme right-wing governments across the world, have on the female body and especially on the body of the female performer.

These impressions led me to craft a self-reflective voice, in the form of letters exchanged between a contemporary female performer (me) and the past custodian of dance - the courtesan (Umrao), to delve deeper into the discourse on the ‘body of the female performer’ that is persistently contested as a site of entertainment, a site of work, pleasure, abuse, and stigma. And also, to critically examine what it means to be an artist and what kind of art and narratives we, as society and institutions,  privilege over others.