Ahalya Satkunaratnam: The Strategies of Staging War: Performing Bharata Natyam in Colombo Sri Lanka
Attending to the conference theme of “movement,” this paper is an ethnographic study of danced Bharata Natyam movements choreographed in several different sites in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Examining specific danced works choreographed and produced by a single Tamil Bharata Natyam dance choreographer/teacher in Colombo, illuminates nuanced and shifting understandings of history, Tamil identity, Sri Lankan identity, community and home.
In the paper, I look specifically at two choreographies staged in Colombo in 2007. Evoking themes of war and conflict, these choreographies were choreographed and produced by one Tamil Bharata Natyam choreographer/teacher and performed by both ethnically Tamil and Sinhalese female dancers. I illustrate that the spaces in which these pieces were performed, the histories of the sites in which they were performed, and the associated audiences of these sites, deeply influenced the choreographer’s staging of war, responses to war and, correspondingly, multiculturalism and peace. As such, I wish to illuminate the strategic negotiations of centers and peripheries both spatially and politically that are embedded in the choreographies and the performance of them.
Through a close analysis of the choreography and ethnographic methods of writing and analysis, I suggest that conceptions of Tamil identity, history and place are formed strategically by and through the cultural practice of Bharata Natyam. As such, this paper reveals how dance movements through space, and within diverse and varied places in Colombo reveal negotiations of ethnic identity and strategic conceptualizations of ethnic conflict and civil war in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Biographical Statement:
Ahalya Satkunaratnam received her Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies from the Department of Dance at the University of California, Riverside in 2009. She is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Northeastern Illinois University and in Women and Gender Studies at Columbia College Chicago. Her research interests include the political significance of Bharata Natyam as a dance form in Sri Lanka, civil war and cultural production, and dance ethnography.
