Bodies that Dance: Critical Frames of Reference

Bodies are repositories—whether we like it or not. I, for oneAesthetics, exist in a body that hardly remembers a time when it did not carry any signature dance training. I am told I expressed the desire to enter a dance school when I was three years old. A year later I was taken to a dance school, where I was greeted by the sounds of ghungroo (the ankle bells). I remember shivering in anticipation of being able to move with those bells jingling around my ankles, and also imagining dressing up in colourful dresses and ornaments. Before learning to dance, I was imagining the appearance (and the body) I shall soon be able to acquire through dance. I have refered to different empirical examples of preparing dancing bodies as formally skilled or prepared through socialization, “through a range of different relations with the concepts of labour, effort, deviance, dedication, precarity, and resistance” by asking: What are the embodied references to dancing bodies in India? When does a body appear to be dancing? What does a body have to do to be recognized as a dancing body in the Indian dance ecologyDance ecology? How is the dancing body to be read as tool as well as the space for ongoing social/cultural/political/and economic negotiations?