Traditional Dance/Mixed Genealogies

A Study in Diasporic Odissi

Abstract

This article reflects on a collaborative project entitled Devotions (2021), in which a small team of artists choreographed Western classical opera and oratorio songs with Odissi abhinaya. As dramaturg, I delve into the process of creating a choreo-musical language for this project and the ethical, stylistic and practical factors made among our desires, stakeholders, and extant performance possibilities. Finally, I offer a reading of our staged performance in relation to discourses that frame diasporic Indian dance today. Through Devotions, I propose a framework for understanding practices of diasporic Odissi beyond the familiar binaries of tradition/modernity, classical/contemporary, authenticity/inauthenticity that arguably impose a limit on the collective imagination of the form’s evolution. Instead, drawing from diaspora’s queer, nonreproductive and impure energies, I insist on Odissi’s existentially mixed genealogy and bring this to bear upon how we understand new works. Thus, I offer Devotions (in theory and practice) as an attempt at performing mixed genealogies – an act which subverts the racialized logics guarding dance’s (re)production by celebrating the existentially mixed and open-ended nature of all artistic genealogies.