In August 2015, Ketu H. Katrak’s chapter, “The Post Natyam Collective: Innovating Indian Dance and Theater via Abhinaya and Multimedia,” was published in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater.  This book brings together border-crossing scholarship on the intersections of dance and theater, taking corporeality as an idea that unites the work and embodiment as a negotiation of power dynamics.

Here’s an excerpt:

“In line with these contemporary notions of fragmented subjectivity and its implications for gender politics, the Post Natyam Collective’s postmodern recuperation of history highlights their firmly political stance against bodily assaults on women, in the eighteenth century or today.  Their approach effectively breaks a linear narrative line from past to present that is further reinforced by the overall work’s fragmented structure; the segments of SUNOH! move between and among different time periods and spaces, drawing subtle and evocative links often left to the audience’s imagination.” (310-11)

photo: Andrei Andreev

photo: Michael Burr

photo: Andrei Andreev

Katrak, Ketu.  2015.  “The Post Natyam Collective: Innovating Indian Dance and Theater via Abhinaya and Multimedia.”  In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, ed. Nadine George-Graves.  Oxford University Press: 303-25.