Sagar-XIX.Pdf

Editorial Board Ishan Chakrabarti – Co-Editor-in-Chief, The University of Texas at Austin Matthew D. Milligan – Co-Editor-in-Chief, The University of Texas at Austin Dan Rudmann – Co-Editor-in-Chief, The University of Texas at Austin Kaitlin Althen – Editor, The University of Texas at Austin Reed Burman – Editor, The University of Texas at Austin Christian Current – Editor, The University of Texas at Austin Cary Curtis – Editor, The University of Texas at Austin Christopher Holland – Editor, The University of Texas at Austin Priya Nelson – Editor, The University of Texas at Austin Natasha Raheja – Editor, The University of Texas at Austin Keely Sutton – Editor, The University of Texas at Austin Faculty Advisor Syed Akbar Hyder, Department of Asian Studies Editorial Advisory Board Richard Barnett, The University of Virginia Manu Bhagavan, Hunter College-CUNY Nandi Bhatia, The University of Western Ontario Purnima Bose, Indiana University Raza Mir, Monmouth University Gyan Prakash, Princeton University Paula Richman, Oberlin College Eleanor Zelliot, Carleton College The University of Texas Editorial Advisory Board Kamran Ali, Department of Anthropology James Brow, Department of Anthropology Barbara Harlow, Department of English Janice Leoshko, Department of Art and Art History W. Roger Louis, Department of History Gail Minault, Department of History Veena Naregal, Department of Radio-Television-Film Sharmila Rudrappa, Department of Sociology Martha Selby, Department of Asian Studies Kamala Visweswaran, Department of Anthropology SAGAR A SOUTH ASIA GRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL Sponsored by South Asia Institute Itty Abraham, Director The University of Texas at Austin Volume 19, Spring 2010 Sagar is published biannually in the fall and spring of each year. The editors are responsible for the final selection of the content of the journal and reserve the right to reject any material deemed inappropriate for publication. Articles presented in the journal do not represent the views of either the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas at Austin or the Sagar editors. Responsibility for the opinions expressed and the accuracy of the facts published in articles and reviews rests solely with the individual authors. Requests for permission to reprint articles should be directed to the individual authors All correspondence regarding subscriptions, advertising, and business should be addressed to: Sagar South Asia Institute The University of Texas at Austin 1 University Station G9300 Austin, TX 78712-0587 USA Sagar is not printed with state funds. Sagar does not discriminate on any basis prohibited by applicable law including but not limited to caste, creed, disability, ethnicity, gender, national origin, race, religion, or sexual orientation. Dear Readers, This issue of Sagar presents selected papers from the Texas Asia Conference held at The University of Texas at Austin in the Fall of 2008. The conference gave graduate students from across the disciplines an opportunity to share their work and meet with other students interested in an academic engagement with Asia. Twenty-seven papers and two keynote addresses were presented at the conference. We wish to thank all those who were involved: presenters, organizers, attendees, faculty, and staff. Sincerely, Ishan Chakrabarti, Matthew D. Milligan, and Dan Rudmann Co-editors in Chief Sagar Volume 19, Spring 2010 TABLE OF CONTENTS ARTICLES Shen Wei Dance Arts: Chinese Representation in Contemporary Dance Ellen Gerdes……………………………………………………………….1-10 A Generation Awakens: Rang de Basanti and its Global Online Publics Katy Hardy……………………………………………………………….11-24 The Pretense of Madness in the Pāśupata Tradition Amy L. Hyne……………………………………………………………..25-40 Kings Without Fanfare: The Bhānḍs of 14 th -19th Century India Claire Pamment…………………………………………………………..41-62 Epidemic Disease East and West: America, Japan, and Eighteenth-Century Medicine Paul Sivitz………………………………………………………………...63-79 Radha Krishna/Krishna Radha: Masculinity, Homosociality and the Malayalam film “Chandupottu” Sonja Thomas…………………………………………………………...80-105 India and the Commonwealth, 1946-1947 Daniel Wold…………………………………………………………...106-126 Shen Wei Dance Arts: Chinese Representation in Contemporary Dance Ellen Gerdes TEMPLE UNIVERSITY Choreographer Shen Wei began his performing career in the Chinese opera and later became a founding member of China’s first modern dance company, the Guandong Modern Dance Company. Since forming Shen Wei Dance Arts in New York City in 2000, Shen has established himself internationally as a visionary choreographer. Although he desires to create original work, he is influenced by his artistic beginnings – Chinese opera still inspires him as evident in his piece Second Visit to the Empress. In some choreographic works, such as in Folding, Shen draws specifically from abstract expressionism; in other works like Re-I, he focuses mainly on creating movement from internal energy. As a visual artist in addition to a choreographer, he consistently researches specific ideas in order to create new ways of working with the body in a space that constructs the body as visual art. Through his innovations, he re-contextualizes aesthetic traditions and his own identity as well, shifting from researcher to visual artist, and from Chinese performer to international contemporary choreographer. Although Shen is now an American citizen, the Chinese government honored his success abroad by commissioning him to choreograph for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing. He assisted director Zhang Yimou as the principal choreographer. This invitation framed Shen as a responsible cultural ambassador for China. The opening ceremonies chief visual and special effects designer, Jennifer Wen Ma, explained the reason behind the invitation, “His work may not be overtly Chinese in style, but in philosophy and the principles of the Chinese aesthetics” (Ma qtd. in Bloom, par. 12). In fact, reviews of Shen’s choreography are often quick to mention his Chinese origins and to locate the presumed “Eastern” aspects of his work. He has, however, complicated these observations 2 Ellen Gerdes by proclaiming, “My work isn’t about...being Western or Eastern. I’m exploring the unknown. I’m looking for a new way to communicate” (Shen qtd. in Gladstone, par 18.). In a personal correspondence with me, he reiterated this sentiment: My dancers study my "natural body development technique", a technique I have developed over ten years, along with basic elements of Chinese opera walking and hand gestures. But the work is not tied to Chinese forms any more than any other form. It is a new way of seeing movement that comes from an understanding of certain principles such as internal energy, momentum, continual movement, transfer of energy, and internal rotation (Shen, 2009). Nevertheless, his use of Chinese philosophical and artistic elements contributes to the uniqueness of his choreographic work. He even described his role for the Olympics as “presenter” of Chinese culture, especially in the context of China’s rapid cultural changes after the destruction of the Cultural Revolution, which occurred from roughly 1966 to 1976 (Gordon, Interview). This paper explores three of Shen’s innovative choreographic works as examples of contemporary dance pieces that represent Chinese identity in a post-Cultural Revolution context. Context: Dance and the Cultural Revolution Shen grew up in Hunan province during the Cultural Revolution. During this era, performing arts policy prohibited traditional forms of art and enabled mistreatment of many performing artists, including Shen’s parents. Chinese Opera, a form that combines acrobatics, martial arts, singing, dancing, and speaking, took the form of revolutionary operas/ballets: epic ballets that contain singing, dancing, and plots thick with communist ideology. In one such ballet, The Red Detachment of Women, an all-female army dances with rifles. During the Cultural Revolution, traditional forms of dance were banned from the schools and the streets. Even Yangge folk dance, which initially had been promoted by the Chinese Communist Party at its establishment, was prohibited (Graezer, 31-33). After the Cultural Revolution ended, Shen began studying traditional Chinese opera. He describes the years after the Cultural Revolution as a hurried attempt to re-learn all that was suppressed (Rose, Interview). Shen Wei Dance Arts 3 Currently, professional and non-professional dance in China includes traditional forms suppressed during the Cultural Revolution and forms of foreign origin. In 2005- 2006, I researched dance in China and observed the juxtaposition of forms. One of the prime examples of this phenomenon occurs in city parks in the morning; young couples practice ballroom dance alongside groups of elder men and women practicing folk-dance and taiji. As a foreigner, I found it difficult to find Chinese traditional dance classes in Shanghai. A Chinese teacher who went by the English name, Oliver, at the Jazz-Du-Funk studio identified foreign influences and rapid economic development as causes for the low enrollment of his Chinese dance class. He told me: People needed to satisfy their desire to learn new things, but, in that process, they are temporarily forgetting about their own culture...Chinese dance is not as popular now as jazz or hip-hop dance...In recent history, the leaders were really only thinking of economic development, so, because of that, the folk dance and native Chinese arts were neglected (Personal Interview, 2006).

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