As the starting inspiration for our newest creative project, we would like to grapple with the artistic legacy of the courtesans of the Indian subcontinent, creating choreographic translations informed by our positionalities as contemporary women with Indian dance training living in an age of globalization.
The courtesans were interdisciplinary performance artists long before such a term was coined: dancers-actors-singers who performed love songs for both gods and human patrons. Their artistic legacy has deeply informed the Indian classical performing arts, particularly in the realm of abhinaya, a complex and subtle form of acting whereby the dancer interprets poetic texts with gesture and facial expression. At the same time, in modern-day practice, the courtesans' contributions have been masked, and their art has been sanitized, domesticated, and de-eroticized to suit a modern patriarchal and Hindu nationalist agenda.
So how does the courtesans’ rich and troubled artistic legacy inform us today? We are interested in exploring the possibilities of re-routing the poetry of South Asian courtesans through internet age technologies, translating them through the specifics of our geographic locales.
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