Guest Speakers: Stephen Hughes, T.M. Krishna, Hari Krishnan, Nrithya Pillai, Davesh Soneji, Yoshitaka Terada, Yashoda Thakore and Amanda Weidman

10:00 AM - 11:00 AM (Pacific Time)

ABSTRACT

Since the time of their reinvention in the 1920s and 1930s, the most prominent so-called “classical” arts of South India – Bharatanatyam dance and Karnatak music – have lived a fractured, uneasy life in the modern world. On one hand, they have become symbols of deep cultural nationalism and heritage politics for a select group of performers and commentators, and on the other, they recurrently embody early twentieth-century histories of social erasure, cultural exclusion, and censorship. This event – curated in the form of two interlocked panels – juxtaposes critical historical and social analysis with autobiographical voices. It hopes to highlight the deep imbrications of caste, class, economy, and artmaking in modern South India and its diaspora through thoughtful and progressive deliberations.

The performers and academics on the panels have each, in their own ways, given us new ways of thinking about the pasts and futures of dance and music in this region. They are among the scholarly and artistic figures who have brought issues of critical social history and social inequity in the arts into global public discourse (in some cases, over the span of several decades). Collectively, they also represent a range of social identities: hereditary and non-hereditary performers, Bahujan and Savarna individuals, LGBTQ individuals, South Asians from various regions of India and persons of non-South Asian origin.

GUEST SPEAKERS

Stephen Hughes

T.M. Krishna

Hari Krishnan

Nrithya Pillai

Davesh Soneji

Yoshitaka Terada 

Yashoda Thakore

Amanda Weidman

Moderated by Professor Anna Morcom 
(Mohindar Brar Sambhi Chair of Indian Music, UCLA Department of Music)

 THIS EVENT WILL BE ACCESSIBLE ONLY TO REGISTERED PARTICIPANTS

REGISTER

SPEAKERS

STEPHEN HUGHES

Stephen Hughes earned his BA in Anthropology (Hon) and Philosophy at Bates College, Lewiston, Maine, US and went on to complete an MA and PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology at The University of Chicago. Over the course of the last thirty years his work has focused on Tamil speaking south India. He has worked on various research projects relating to the history and ethnography of media including Tamil cinema, film exhibition, drama, music, gramophone, radio, popular publishing, election campaigns and the emergence of satellite TV.  He taught at SOAS, University of London for 23 years where his teaching has focused on the Anthropology of Media, ethnographic and documentary film, social theory and South Asia.  He is currently employed as a Film Officer and Film Festival Director at the Royal Anthropological Institute.

 T.M. KRISHNA

T.M. KRISHNA. As a vocalist in the Karnatik tradition, T.M. Krishna’s musicality eludes standard analyses. Uncommon in his rendition of music and original in his interpretation of it, Krishna is at once strong and subtle, manifestly traditional and stunningly innovative. As a public intellectual, Krishna speaks and writes about issues affecting the human condition and about matters cultural. Krishna has started and is involved in many organizations whose work is spread across the whole spectrum of music and culture. He has co-authored Voices Within: Carnatic Music – Passing on an Inheritance, a book dedicated to the greats of Karnatik music. His path-breaking book A Southern Music – The Karnatik Story, published by Harper Collins in 2013 was a first-of-its-kind philosophical, aesthetic and socio-political exploration of Karnatik Music. For this he was awarded the 2014 Tata Literature Award for Best First Book in the non-fiction category. He is the driving force behind the Chennai Kalai Theru Vizha (formerly Urur Olcott Kuppam Vizha) and the Svanubhava initiative. In 2016, Krishna received the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award in recognition of ‘his forceful commitment as artist and advocate to art’s power to heal India’s deep social divisions’. In 2017 he received the Indira Gandhi Award for National Integration Award for his services in promoting and preserving national integration in the country. In 2017, he has also received the Professor V Aravindakshan Memorial Award for connecting Carnatic music with the common man.

HARI KRISHNAN

Professor Hari Krishnan is Chair and Professor of Dance at Wesleyan University and is also the artistic director of Toronto based company, inDANCE. He is a dancer, choreographer, and scholar whose work focuses on Bharatanatyam, post-colonial dance, queer dance, and the interface between dance and film studies. His work includes choreographies, performances, and writings that bridge theory and practice, interrogating the boundaries between contemporary and traditional dance forms, and engaging critically with questions of gender, sexuality, and race. His bold and transgressive choreographies have been featured at esteemed national and international venues. He is a Bessie Award (NYC) nominee in the Outstanding Performance category where he was described by The New York Times as a dancer who “has the speaking eyes, the flourishing gesture, the cascading and pounding rhythm to make Bharatanatyam compelling, even with an isolated finger”. Krishnan's monograph, Celluloid Classicism: Early Tamil Cinema and the Making of Modern Bharatanatyam (Wesleyan University Press, 2019) recently won a special citation from the 2020 de la Torre Bueno© First Book Award Committee of the Dance Studies Association. The book has been hailed as “an invaluable addition to scholarship on Bharatanatyam.”

 YOSHITAKA TERADA

Terada Yoshitaka, Professor Emeritus at the National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku) and the Graduate University of Advanced Studies (Sokendai), holds an MA. and a PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Washington. His research areas include India, Philippines, Japan and Asian America. He is particularly interested in the roles of performing arts for minority individuals and communities in maintaining their identity and negotiating with the majority/mainstream culture. For the past twenty years, Terada has also experimented on filmmaking methods and produced more than 30 films on musical traditions from diverse locations, including two on South Indian music. He is currently exploring how audiovisual documentation can help safeguard the performing arts in danger.

NRITHYA PILLAI

Nrithya Pillai is a dancer, dance composer, singer, writer, speaker, and dance instructor who proudly claims her nattuvanar-devadasi lineage. Following the legacy of her maternal grandfather Swamimalai Rajarathnam Pillai, she consciously preserves and reanimates the rich repertoire and the teaching and choreographic practices of her celebrated ancestors, who include V. Meenakshisundaram Pillai, T.K Swaminatha Pillai and Padmashri Vazhuvoor B. Ramiah Pillai. Carving out her own space as a performer with impeccable training and vast creativity, Nrithya represents a new kind of artistic and intellectual engagement with the troubled history of Bharathanatyam. She vigorously challenges the power relationships and ideologies that made the form unavailable to women of her community, and advocates fiercely for the restoration of credit for Bharathanatyam technique, repertoire, and philosophy to the hereditary community of practitioners. Nrithya’s voice, raised against casteism in the contemporary dance world, is unique in the field today, and her message against historical misrepresentation is relevant and powerful.

 DAVESH SONEJI

Davesh Soneji is Associate Professor in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests lie at the intersections of social and cultural history, religion, and anthropology. For the past two decades, he has produced research that focuses primarily on religion and the performing arts in South India, but also includes work on gender, class, caste, and colonialism. He is best known for his work on the social history of professional female artists in Tamil and Telugu-speaking South India and is author of Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India (University of Chicago Press, 2012), which was awarded the 2013 Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize from The Association for Asian Studies (AAS). He is also editor of Bharatanatyam: A Reader (Oxford University Press, 2010; 2012) and co-editor, with Indira Viswanathan Peterson, of Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India (Oxford University Press, 2008).

He is presently co-editing another volume entitled Dance and the Early South Indian Cinema (forthcoming). Prof. Soneji has recently held positions as Visiting Professor at the Central University of Hyderabad in India, as well as Le Centre d'Études de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud (CEIAS) in Paris. Prior to coming to the University of Pennsylvania, Prof. Soneji taught at McGill University in Montreal, Canada for over twelve years. His new book project, Sundry Ragas: Genealogies of Musical Pluralism in Modern South India foregrounds histories of raga-based music that did not become part of “canonical Karnatak music” as it was conceived and mobilized in the second decade of the twentieth-century in Madras. Drawing on a range of textual and material histories, the book demonstrates how the music of the modern Tamil theatre, Tamil Islamic, Catholic, and even Jain music, courtesan music, and the music of the wider para-Tamil Indian Ocean world all constituted the soundscape of what he terms “popular raga-based music” in this region.

 YASHODA THAKORE

Yashoda Thakore is an exponent of Kuchipudi and Devadasi Nrityam (the repertoire of the hereditary women dancers) and reinforces her repertoire with her understanding and practice of Yoga. After 14 years of training in Kuchipudi under Sobha Naidu, Yashoda began to reclaim the art of her family by training under the Kalavantulu women, particularly Annabattula Mangatayaru and Leelasai. Besides being a consummate performer and choreographer with all the National Festivals to her credit, Yashoda works relentlessly with the hereditary women dancers on the social, historical and aesthetic aspects of the Devadasi repertoire. Yashoda edited the stories of the 20th Century Telugu poet, Malladi Ramakrishna Sastry. This book, Keligopalam also features the handwritten notes the poet had painstakingly made from the Kalavantulu ladies, preserving them for posterity.

Her workshops on dance at Russia were received with appreciation. Censorship and Women Resistance in the Performing Arts, From Continental Asia to Insular Southeast Asia, May 2014 and Temple, Court, Salon, Stage: Crafting Dance Repertoire in South India, June 2015 were conferences by Centre for South Asian Studies, Paris where she presented papers and performed. The IFTR at the University of Hyderabad and NrittaRatnavali Conclave by Nartanam (2018), Hyderabad were amongst the other venues that played host to Yashoda’s presentations. The University of Pennsylvania invited her as Artist in Residence. Her presentation there with Prof. Davesh Soneji and Prof. Harikrishnan on South Indian Dance in Critical Context was received with appreciation (2019). She was also invited to perform at the prestigious Navaratri Festival, Wesleyan University(2019). The University of Hyderabad invited her as part of the Distinguished Lecture Series along with Professor Davesh Soneji. University of California, Los Angeles hosted her talk in Feb 2020. The IIT, Hyderabad hosted her workshops on dance and on yoga on various occasions. Yashoda is now Chair, Department of Kuchipudi, University of Silicon Andhra, California where she teaches dance history, theory, and practice to graduate students. She was conferred the Bangalore Nagaratnamma award in 2017 by the Samskruti Organisation, Guntur and the Ugadi Puraskaram by the Government of Andhra Pradesh.

 AMANDA WEIDMAN

Amanda Weidman (Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bryn Mawr College) is a socio-cultural anthropologist with interests in performance, music, media, voice and sound studies, and linguistic anthropology. Her work has centered around classical and popular film music in South India. She has been a student and performer of Karnatic classical violin for the past 27 years.

Her first book, Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern (Duke University Press, 2006) examined the politics of Karnatic music’s transformation into a high art “classical” tradition in the 20th century. Her second book, Brought to Life by the Voice (University of California Press, forthcoming 2021), is based on research in and around the Tamil film industry. It examines playback singing as a powerful and ubiquitous element of aural public culture that has shaped the complex dynamics of postcolonial gendered subjectivity, politicized ethnolinguistic identity, and neoliberal transformation in South India.

MODERATOR

 ANNA MORCOM

Anna Morcom is the Mohindar Brar Sambhi Chair of Indian Music in the Department of Ethnomusicology, UCLA. Her work focuses on Indian and Tibetan music and dance from a variety of perspectives including politics, nationalism, modern history, media, gender, and economy and development, following doctoral research on Hindi film music. She has written three books, the most recent, Illicit worlds of Indian dance: Cultures of exclusion (2013, C. Hurst and Co; OUP New York) was awarded the Alan Merriam prize of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM). Her current research focuses on the economic anthropological study of music, the contemporary ecosystem of Hindustani music, and new age-style Tibetan Buddhist chanting music. 

For any questions, please email us at CISA

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Sponsor(s): Center for India and South Asia, World Arts & Cultures/Dance, Ethnomusicology, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television