Re-Staging Bharatanatyam Examining the Indian ‘Classical’ Dance as a Hybridised Placemaking Activity Across Four Geographic and Virtual Locations

My dissertation examines the ways in which contemporary iterations of Bharatanatyam sustain, question, and challenge ideas about place and place-making in Indian dance while also foregrounding and interpreting the hybridity of the dance form that emerges as it extends beyond its place of origin. Employing qualitative and embodied ethnographic methods, I investigate the multiple ways bharatanatyam is created, curated and promoted to different audiences, in four geographic and digital spaces - Chennai, Dublin, Instagram, and TikTok. Taking into account the affordances of each of these sites, I analyse the relationship between Bharatanatyam and its practitioners at the intersections of immigration and tradition. This research brings several specific trajectories together. While diasporic spaces have long created distinct pockets of the Indian dancescape, alternate online spaces offer new performative contexts for it. Ireland, as a new diasporic location, allows me to evaluate the cultural intricacies of negotiating Indianness as it is happening. TikTok, similarly, offers a new performative platform for diasporic artists. Meanwhile, Chennai, as the epicentre of the dance form since the mid 1900s is displaced by an increasingly important pan-Indian and diasporic network formed through Instagram. My work, using the idea of ‘place’ as a focal point to move between these different contexts, suggests that the structural, aesthetic, social, and cultural frameworks that each of these spaces employ not only affect the identity of the performer and their audience, but subsequently transform the practice in hybridised ways that can question established notions of classicism, authenticity, and nationalism. Looking at specific choreographic and non-choreographic examples that include online self-representation and offline endorsements, I investigate how each of these sites negotiates specific trans-local issues that influence the changing performativity of the form in the rest of the spaces, blurring its boundaries. What emerges overall is a larger picture of the manifold ways for dancers to create identities and communities, with scope for substantial future research into more specific themes.