Unmaking Contact Choreographing South Asian Touch

Unmaking Contact interrogates “contact”, understood in Global North dance discourse as a shorthand for the movement discipline of contact improvisation (CI) and its characteristic shifting points of weight-sharing between two or more bodies through physical touch, by attending to power asymmetries that are foundational to this practice.

By placing South Asian aesthetics, bodies, discourses, and philosophies on touch at the heart of its interrogation through the lenses of caste, ecology, faith, gender, and sexuality, author Royona Mitra argues for an intersectional, intercultural, and inter-epistemic understanding of contact, that may or may not involve touch. The book shifts and expands understandings of “contact” in dance-making through intercultural epistemologies that examine notions of touch and contact.

In this book the term contact signals both a shorthand for CI and a shift away from it to more expansive choreographic considerations. It becomes an apparatus for dismantling power regimes; it is conjured as a catalyst to examine power in social relations; it appears as a fulcrum of ecological relationality; it arises as critical encounters full of generative and transformative potential; and finally, it manifests as community.

Royona Mitra is Professor of Dance and Performance Cultures at Brunel University London, UK. She is the author of Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism. Her research examines systems of oppression in dance and performance cultures at the intersections of bodies, social power regimes, and choreography as resistance. She contributes to the fields of diaspora and performance, South Asian dance and performance cultures, critical dance studies and performance studies.

Acknowledgments
Preface

Introduction: Unmaking Contact

Chapter 1
Contact as Caste Justice: Theenda Theenda (2018) by Akila and The Touch of Death

Chapter 2
Contact as Reframing Sociality: Rorschach Touch (2018) by Diya Naidu and “Normalizing Touch”

Chapter 3
Contact as Ecological Relationality: Mirror Within (2022) by Nahid Siddiqui and Shakila Maan and Touch Without Tactility

Chapter 4
Contact as Adda: Critical Encounters in #KAATENAHINKATTE Instareel (2020) by LaWhore Vagistan and Digital Touching

Afterwords: Against Conclusions

References