Unmaking Contact: Choreographic Touch at the Intersections of Race, Caste, and Gender

Abstract

This article interrogates “contact,” understood by Global North contemporary dance discourse as choreography that is mobilized by shifting points of physical touch between two or more bodies, by attending to inherent, and often ignored, power asymmetries that are foundational to such choreographic practices. This “unmaking of contact” is undertaken by deploying the lenses of race, caste, and gender in order to argue for an intersectional, intercultural and inter-epistemic understanding of “choreographic touch” that may or may not involve tactility. It starts by examining contact improvisation (CI), and its now ubiquitous choreographic manifestation of partnering, as an aesthetic that can work in colonizing ways on South Asian dancers who train in primarily solo classical dance forms. The article then moves on to place South Asian bodies, philosophies, and discourses at the heart of its interrogation of choreographic touch, and foregrounds the culturally specific politics and powers that govern them.

Responsible Knowing in Partnering

“…Tracking enables partners to move from a position of independence to an interdependence that opens aesthetic, epistemic, and ethical possibilities within interaction. Royona Mitra, in her recent work on "Unmaking Contact" raises an important point about the preconditions of dancing together (notably in contact improvisation), such that establishing relation (contact) may be unfeasible given the background histories of participants (Mitra 2021). This point is particularly relevant when considering how individuals approach encountering and maintaining their interaction in dancing together.…”

Towards Decolonial Choreographies of Co-Resistance

“…Within this context, our work together across differences could be described as an "Im/possible Choreography" enmeshed within the paradoxical convergence of the possible with the impossible (Perazzo Domm 2019, p. 8). To unmake histories and legacies of oppressive and unethical contact, we needed to enter into relations or make contact through different tools and mechanisms on differencecentered terms (Mitra 2021). These have included a Nishnaabeg ethics of non-interference that upholds mutual respect, self-determination, and sovereignty (Simpson 2011(Simpson , 2017 and a disability justice ethic that leads with disability to disrupt ableist practices and embrace difference-led decision-making and artistic approaches to research .…”

“…By celebrating difference, the choreographies we co-create challenge ableist-colonial practices that aim to fold different embodiments into sameness and rank them against ableist-colonial aesthetic standards for bodily appearance and movement (Rice et al 2021c). The choreographies that we surface in our learning platform push against the colonial-eugenic compulsion still evident in many university programs that involve the study of movement, including dance programs (Mitra 2021), kinesiology and physical education (Bailey et al forthcoming a, forthcoming b; Bessey et al forthcoming), public and preventative health care (Rice et al forthcoming, 2015;Viscardis et al 2019), and rehabilitation (Gibson et al 2020).…”

Crowded Choreographies: From Assembly to Association and Back Again

“…11.Royona Mitra makes a necessary intervention to discourse on contact improvisation by acknowledging its colonial residues (2021). …”