Choreographing the Past

This chapter will feature narrative descriptions of performances and choreographies observed in both social and professional dance and addresses the making of embodied memories, which implies questions about what British Bangladeshi women remember through dance. The content of embodied memories, their symbolic component, and significance for the presence will be analysed. The chapter will reveal that dancers predominantly portray tales of women set in heavily romanticised, de-politicised, and de-religionised pasts in rural Bengal, which are conceptualised as “raw memories”. At times, these performative narratives are, however, joined by more complicated memories of the violence of the Independence War in Bangladesh as well as racist and Islamophobic incidences in London. This will allow for an analysis of processes of synthesising pasts into working mnemonic narratives today that build bridges and solidarities among women of different religious and national communities.