Artistic labour in dance and painting: revisiting the theory-practice debate via mimesis (Anukrti) and the abject body

This article will critically explore how the intersection of mimesis and labour may open up another perspective on the much-theorized relationship between practice (prayoga) and theory (śāstra) in dance and painting. Labour or śrama, a loaded term by itself, will be taken in its complex sense of not...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inSouth Asian history and culture Vol. 14; no. 2; pp. 140 - 152
Main Author Mukherji, Parul Dave
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford Routledge 03.04.2023
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
abject body
Artistic labour
Complicity
Dance
Dancers
Dancing
Mimesis
Religion
theory and practice
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Summary:This article will critically explore how the intersection of mimesis and labour may open up another perspective on the much-theorized relationship between practice (prayoga) and theory (śāstra) in dance and painting. Labour or śrama, a loaded term by itself, will be taken in its complex sense of not only involving labour as skill that informs acts of painting, acting-dancing but also as a thematic of representation. Interspersed into these two senses is ritual labour or the labour involving acts of propitiating the divine - a domain not sufficiently thought out beyond the truism that religion pervades all spheres of Indic life. What this mode of inquiry aims to bring out is a tense relationship between manual/artistic labour and ritual labour both as a site of complicity and conflict amongst the actor-dancers and the authors of the treatises.
ISSN:1947-2498
1947-2501
DOI:10.1080/19472498.2022.2142898