In Contemporary Indian Dance, Katu Katrak, professor of comparative literature and drama, looks at a new language of dance on the global stage. This language unfolds at the intersection of classical Indian dance forms with yoga, pan-Asian dance and martial arts traditions as well as modern and postmodern dance, and theatrical tools that result in hybrid dance creations. The book also discusses how themes like ethnicity, gender and sexuality are inspired by an artists' geographical location.

Examining today's phenomena of globalization and diaspora that impact artists in India and worldwide, Contemporary Indian Dance includes images of creative choreography from selected artists and pioneers that has impact and reverberates in "an ancestry of gesture" in the work of emerging choreographers. An interdisciplinary and comparative approach makes visible inter-connections among artists in sites around the globe.

Katrak, born in Bombay, India, is founding chair of UCI's Department of Asian American Studies. She is also the author of Politics of the Female Body: Postcolonial Women Writers: Wole Soyinka and Modern Tragedy, and essays published in the fields of dance, drama and performance, South Asian Literary and Cultural Expression, and Postcolonial and Diaspora Literature and Culture.

-Emily Stone, School of Humanities
 

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