RECAST(E)ING SOUTH/ASIAN DANCE AND PERFORMANCE

Usha Iyer

“Writing a History of Film Dance without Films: Song Booklets and an Archival Hermeneutic of Speculation”

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Description

This talk is an introspective analysis of my use of song booklets—on account of the absence of the films themselves—to write a history of women’s participation in Indian film dance in the 1930s and 1940s. Through text and illustration, the song booklet invites the film dance historian to develop a sense of the sonic and movement vocabularies of lost films, activating a multisensorial, intermedial imagination and reading of the past. Since gestural, corporeal histories are harder to retrieve, accounting for the work required to reanimate these dancing bodies foregrounds the speculative nature of these histories. My archival search for two dancer-actresses, Sadhona Bose and Azurie, leads me to understand how the process of writing women’s histories recasts archives as records of relationality, governed by erasures, laced with accidents, and filled with unstable epistemologies. These once-famous, now-forgotten dancing stars show us how writing women into history alters how we do history.

Bio

Usha Iyer is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. Their book, Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2020), examines constructions of gender, stardom, sexuality, and spectacle in Hindi cinema through women’s labor, collaborative networks, and gestural genealogies to produce a corporeal history of South Asian cultural modernities. Their next project studies the affective engagements of Caribbean spectators with Indian cinema and the impact of Caribbean performance forms on Indian film industries. Dr. Iyer is Associate Editor of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. Their essays have appeared and are forthcoming in Camera Obscura, South Asian Popular Culture, Figurations in Indian Film, and The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory, among others.

This talk is part of the 2021-2022 UCR Department of Dance Colloquium. For more information about the series, please see here.

As we strive to constantly renew our commitments to social and racial justice as a department, we acknowledge and recognize our responsibility to the original and current caretakers of the land where UC Riverside is located: The Cahuilla, Tongva, Luiseño, and Serrano peoples (see full land acknowledgement). The life of our department and the upkeep of our facilities are maintained by the labor of so many people to whom we are grateful. Special thanks to Melanie Ramiro, Performing Arts Marketing Specialist, and Lily Chan Szeto, Department of Dance Event Specialist.