Celluloid Classicism

2019-09-10 Performing Arts

Author : Hari Krishnan
Release : 2019-09-10
Genre : Performing Arts
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 886/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Celluloid Classicism by : Hari Krishnan

Download or read book Celluloid Classicism written by Hari Krishnan. This book was released on 2019-09-10. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of De La Torre Bueno First Book Special Citation, given by DSA, 2021 Celluloid Classicism provides a rich and detailed history of two important modern South Indian cultural forms: Tamil Cinema and Bharatanatyam dance. It addresses representations of dance in the cinema from an interdisciplinary, critical-historical perspective. The intertwined and symbiotic histories of these forms have never received serious scholarly attention. For the most part, historians of South Indian cinema have noted the presence of song and dance sequences in films, but have not historicized them with reference to the simultaneous revival of dance culture among the middle-class in this region. In a parallel manner, historians of dance have excluded deliberations on the influence of cinema in the making of the "classical" forms of modern India. Although the book primarily focuses on the period between the late 1920s and 1950s, it also addresses the persistence of these mid-twentieth century cultural developments into the present. The book rethinks the history of Bharatanatyam in the twentieth century from an interdisciplinary, transmedia standpoint and features 130 archival images.

Celluloid Classicism

2017 Bharata natyam

Author : Hari Krishnan (Choreographer)
Release : 2017
Genre : Bharata natyam
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : /5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Celluloid Classicism by : Hari Krishnan (Choreographer)

Download or read book Celluloid Classicism written by Hari Krishnan (Choreographer). This book was released on 2017. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation investigates how two of the most prominent cultural forms of modern South India—Tamil cinema and Bharatanāṭyam dance—share complex and deeply intertwined histories. It addresses the entangled emergence of these two modern art forms from the 1930s to the 1950s, which were decades marked by distinctly new intermedial modes of cultural production in cosmopolitan Madras. This project unsettles received histories of modern Bharatanāṭyam by arguing that cinema—in all its technological, moral, and visual complexities—bears heavily and irrevocably upon iterations of this “classical” dance. By bringing archival research into conversation with choreographic analysis and ethnography with film performers and Bharatanāṭyam dancers, this work addresses key questions around the fluid and reciprocal exchange of knowledge between film, dance, and stage versions of Bharatanāṭyam during the early decades of the twentieth century. The dissertation includes deliberations on subjects such as the participation of women from the devadāsī (courtesan) community in the cinema, the period of the urban “reinvention” of dance from the standpoint of cinematic history, the impact of the forces of cultural nationalism and regionalism, and the making of new aesthetic vocabularies and techniques for Bharatanāṭyam in the cinema. The work concludes with notes on the persistence of cinema and Bharatanāṭyam as ever-entangled vernacular idioms in the global age of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Taken together, the materials presented in this dissertation provide a detailed cultural history that draws lateral paravisual linkages between the production and circulation of Tamil cinema and Bharatanāṭyam dance.

Dancing Women

2020-10-02 Performing Arts

Author : Usha Iyer
Release : 2020-10-02
Genre : Performing Arts
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 765/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Dancing Women by : Usha Iyer

Download or read book Dancing Women written by Usha Iyer. This book was released on 2020-10-02. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, an ambitious study of two of South Asia's most popular cultural forms cinema and dance historicizes and theorizes the material and cultural production of film dance, a staple attraction of popular Hindi cinema. It explores how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by cinematic dance forms from the 1930s to the 1990s produce unique constructions of gender, sexuality, stardom, and spectacle. By charting discursive shifts through figurations of dancer-actresses, their publicly performed movements, private training, and the cinematic and extra-diegetic narratives woven around their dancing bodies, the book considers the "women's question" via new mobilities corpo-realized by dancing women. Some of the central figures animating this corporeal history are Azurie, Sadhona Bose, Vyjayanthimala, Helen, Waheeda Rehman, Madhuri Dixit, and Saroj Khan, whose performance histories fold and intersect with those of other dancing women, including devadasis and tawaifs, Eurasian actresses, oriental dancers, vamps, choreographers, and backup dancers. Through a material history of the labor of producing on-screen dance, theoretical frameworks that emphasize collaboration, such as the "choreomusicking body" and "dance musicalization," aesthetic approaches to embodiment drawing on treatises like the Natya Sastra and the Abhinaya Darpana, and formal analyses of cine-choreographic "techno-spectacles," Dancing Women offers a variegated, textured history of cinema, dance, and music. Tracing the gestural genealogies of film dance produces a very different narrative of Bombay cinema, and indeed of South Asian cultural modernities, by way of a corporeal history co-choreographed by a network of remarkable dancing women.

Photo-Attractions

2022-11-11 Photography

Author : Ajay Sinha
Release : 2022-11-11
Genre : Photography
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 505/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Photo-Attractions by : Ajay Sinha

Download or read book Photo-Attractions written by Ajay Sinha. This book was released on 2022-11-11. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Spring 1938, an Indian dancer named Ram Gopal and an American writer-photographer named Carl Van Vechten came together for a photoshoot in New York City. Ram Gopal was a pioneer of classical Indian dance and Van Vechten was reputed as a prominent white patron of the African-American movement called the Harlem Renaissance. Photo-Attractions describes the interpersonal desires and expectations of the two men that took shape when the dancer took pose in exotic costumes in front of Van Vechten’s Leica camera. The spectacular images provide a rare and compelling record of an underrepresented history of transcultural exchanges during the interwar years of early-20th century, made briefly visible through photography. Art historian Ajay Sinha uses these hitherto unpublished photographs and archival research to raise provocative and important questions about photographic technology, colonial histories, race, sexuality and transcultural desires. Challenging the assumption that Gopal was merely objectified by Van Vechten’s Orientalist gaze, he explores the ways in which the Indian dancer co-authored the photos. In Sinha’s reading, Van Vechten’s New York studio becomes a promiscuous contact zone between world cultures, where a “photo-erotic” triangle is formed between the American photographer, Indian dancer, and German camera. A groundbreaking study of global modernity, Photo-Attractions brings scholarship on American photography, literature, race and sexual economies into conversation with work on South Asian visual culture, dance, and gender. In these remarkable historical documents, it locates the pleasure taken in cultural difference that still resonates today.

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