Classicism,Post-Classicism and Ranjabati Sircar’s Work:

Abstract

This essay discusses contemporary dance in India, foregrounding the link between dance and politics. The author proposes that contemporary dance in today’s India can be seen as a continuum, marked by tension and rupture. It embraces, on the one hand, ‘classicism’ – strictly speaking ‘neo-classicism’ – and, on the other, an ideological move away from this ‘classicism’, which constitutes itself into an heterogeneous movement motivated by a search for new dance languages. These new languages, growing out of ‘traditional’ roots (variously defined), claim to be sustained by the ‘classicism’ of Indian dance. This movement can be referred to, for convenience, as ‘post-classicism’. This ‘post-classicism’ is otherwise known as ‘Contemporary’ dance, with a capital ‘c’, in accordance with a western model. Dance in today’s India, whether ‘classical’ or ‘post-classical’, is wholly entangled with the issue of an Indian religious and secular identity, increasingly dominated by a Hinduizing discourse, and this informs the artistic choices of dance artists. The essay discusses the work of Ranjabati Sircar, here seen as ‘post-classical’, against this scenario, and begins to reflect on the impact that Ranjabati Sircar’s choreography and her cosmopolitanism has had on dance in contexts other than India, such as the British South Asian diaspora.