Mapping Critical Dance Studies in India

Urmimala Sarkar Munsi is a social anthropologist specialized in dance studies and a dancer/choreographer. She is A PROFESSOR AND THE CURRENT DEAN, TEACHING critical dance studies and research methodology in performance studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. She is the president of World Dance Alliance Asia Pacific. Her latest books are Uday Shankar and his Transcultural Experimentations: Dancing Modernity, published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2022, and Alice Boner Across Arts and Geographies: Shaping the Dance Art of Uday Shankar, published by the Alice Boner Institute, Varanasi in 2021. She has co-edited the MARG 75th year Readings on Dance in 2022. Her ongoing research on survival strategies for women survivors of sexual violence has yielded many writings, among which the recent most is "Towards a Pedagogic Analysis of Dance and Movement Therapy" in The Routledge Companion to AppliedPerformance, 2021. Her essay "Being Rama: Playing a God in the Changing Times" (published in Paula Richman and Rustom Bharucha edited Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments, 2021) came out of her involvement in the Global Humanities Institute and Melon Foundation funded project "Crisis of Democracy" in 2018-2019.

• Introduction: All that is Dance.- Bodies that Dance: Critical Frames of Reference.- Understanding Categorisation: The ‘Tribal’ ‘Folk’, and the ‘Classical’ Dance Forms.- Patriarchy and the [In]Visible Line of Control: Power Structures and Space Making.- The Modern and the Contemporary in the Context of Dance in India.- To be continued: Thoughts on Dance as Response, Responsibility and Resistance.- Thoughts on Purpose and Criticality.