Programme
Hari Krishnan
Artistic Director
E/ indance@sympatico.ca
From Gynemimesis to Hypermasculinity: The Multiple Identities of Male Performers of Bharatanatyam
This paper traces a genealogy for the male performer of Bharatanatyam, arguing that the shifting masculinities represented by male dancers index larger tensions between gender roles and expectations, performance practices, and the nation. I begin by examining three instances of gynemimetic male performers of dance at the Thanjavur court during the rule of the last Maratha king, Sivaji II (r. 1833-55), suggesting that in late colonial South India, men were active participants in the cultural production of devadasi dance. Using court records, I demonstrate that they were not merely dance-masters and teachers (nattuvanars) for female performers, but also dancers in the rituals of display in late-colonial Thanjavur. By the 1930s, the dance’s female devadasi practitioners were replaced by urban middle-class performers. Male performers also played a significant role in this transformation, and their performances of Bharatanatyam came to mirror the real gender expectations placed on men in the new nation-state. This new masculinity was affected by Gandhian nationalism, rooted in the ideas of self-control, discipline and sexual abstinence on the one hand, and an emphasis on narrative representations of male deities in the dance repertoire on the other. From the period between 1940 and 1955, a hybrid dance technique, culled from institutional experiments (such as those at Kalakshetra in Adyar) that fused Bharatanatyam movement with abhinaya from Kathakali, came to be seen as the normative movement vocabulary for the male performer of modern Bharatanatyam. While the nineteenth-century male performer of court dance "reproduced an ideal [female] type," the contemporary performer of Bharatanatyam is awkward. He must negotiate the tension between the performance of the new Indian masculinity on the one hand, and the problematic popular representation of modern Bharatanatyam as the "2000-year old temple dance of the handmaids of Hindu Gods" on the other.
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Mr. Krishnan is is a dancer, choreographer, teacher and dance scholar. Trained
by hereditary dance masters including K.P. Kittappa Pillai and R.
Muttukkannammal, he received his M.A. degree in Dance from York University. For
close to a decade, he has been involved with the documentation, translation and
analysis of the last vestiges of hereditary systems of dance in South India. He
is the author of "Inscribing Practice: Reconfigurations and Textualizations of
Devadasi Repertoire in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century South India" in
Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India, ed.
Indira V. Peterson and Davesh Soneji (2007), and “From Gynemimesis to
Hyper-Masculinity: The Shifting Orientations of Male Performers of South Indian
Court Dance” in Dance and Masculinities, ed. Jennifer Fisher and Tony
Shay (forthcoming).