Contribution long abstract:

I approach bharatanatyam as community-based labour where artists of Indian-origin based in Ireland negotiate with bharatanatyam in various ways as a practice of identity and tradition. In doing so, they introduce classicism as a marker of authenticity, a label that ‘unwrites’ the importance of their personal pedagogies in favour of a more controlled narrative of current ethno-nationalism and casts the form as an 'ethnic' dance in multicultural initiatives. As a genre that is ‘local’ in Tamil Nadu, but transforms into a cosmopolitan activity in the Irish diaspora, bharatanatyam’s diasporic avatar becomes a link to the nation-state of India, while paradoxically welcoming people from all backgrounds to pursue the form by packaging it as a transnational art form. Foregrounding an analysis of embodiment on-stage and off-stage, the paper breaks down 'classical' as a post-national construction in favour of textualisation, and calls for an understanding of diasporic bharatanatyam as a paradoxical translocal identity-making activity by looking at specific choreographic and non-choreographic examples that include self-representation and transgressions. To achieve this, I employ hybridity as a framework that brings attention to these unwritten, deterritorialised spaces through a contrapuntal approach as proposed by Kraidy (2005).