I specialise in the performing arts, cultural history and art of South and Southeast Asia, especially India and Indonesia and more recently, Cambodia.
I am interested in furthering research into the Asian arts, broadly conceived, inclusive of dance performance, as part of a trans-disciplinary analysis of visual culture, embracing areas such as media, uniting the visual and auditory image, body and environment into one single artistic form of communication and reflecting the blurring of the boundaries between the concepts and practices of ‘fine’ and ‘performing’ arts. I am also interested in issues of heritage, mediatization, representation, popular and high culture, in the context of Asian visual and performative expressions, transnationally.
I describe much of my work as transdisciplinary, in the sense highlighted by art historian Griselda Pollock: a transformative encounter which, through a reflexive approach, creates environments for research as networks of creative interaction and translation, blurring disciplinary boundaries.
My work on South and Southeast Asian visual and performing arts is wholly sustained by my interest in archaeology and archaeological theory. My archaeological interest links up with my media interest and the issue of performance mediatization and the consequent production of artefacts of performance – affecting current notions of materiality, and of visual and material culture. It is also connected with my interest in heritage issues: what constitutes heritage and how this is constructed.
I have a PhD in Art and Archaeology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. For my thesis I researched representations of dance performance in the reliefs of Javanese Hindu /Buddhist temples of the "classical period"exploring reconstructions of dance movements from archaeological records, simultaneously engaging with issues of cross-cultural interaction and relocation of cultural and artistic practices, in the past and in the present. My doctoral thesis was published in 1997 as a monograph with the title Prambanan: sculpture and dance in ancient Java. A study in dance iconography (White Lotus Press, Bangkok), with a subvention from the Mark Fitch Fund, Oxford.
I was Senior Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford, from 2000 to 2002 working on a virtual exploration of the ninth century Prambanan temple site and its dance imagery and earlier, I was at the Oriental Institute and a member of Wolfson College, Oxford, researching Javanese images of Siva, their classification and the representation of the male body in ancient Javanese art, with the help of a Wingate Scholarship. A research article relating to that project is now in Ars Orientalis, vol.33, 2003, Smithsonian.
Following my involvement, since 2002, with the AHRC Research Centre for Crosscultural Music and Dance Performance, a Centre involving three UK institutions (Roehampton, SOAS and University of Surrey), my research interests have focused on contemporary dance practices of Indonesia. With additional funding from the ASEASUK British Academy Committee for Southeast Asia I have been researching strategies of resistance to dominant culture through choreography which questions silences and erasures in the re-imagining of women and have been investigating transgendered performance, looking at the work of Ni Madé Pujawati in London and Didik Nini Thowok in Java.
My current research however marks a return to the analysis of the visual and I have recently curated a photographic exhibition on the theme of photographing Asian Dance Theatre, at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS (from Jan to March 2009).
I am Reader in Visual Culture at the School of Arts, Roehampton University London, contributing to a number of undergraduate and postgraduate modules of its Dance Studies programme and, earlier, of its Art History programme and I am also Research Associate of the Centre for Media and Film Studies, SOAS.
I was, from 2002 to 2007, on the editorial board (and a regular contributor) of the magazine pulse, an international publication focused on South Asian dance.
My non-academic interests include Bikram yoga, of which I am a keen practitioner. I love haute couture (but cannot afford to wear it!)- from the early twentieth century clothes of Poiret to the work of contemporaries such as John Galliano - and I collect - hunt and scavenge for would be more appropriate ways of describing my activities - vintage clothing (which I do wear, when I can). I have always fancied myself as a designer and one of these days I will stage my very own show...
RECENT AND CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS
1. Dance and the Temple
Funded with a generous grant from the Getty Research Program for the Arts and Humanities, this was an international collaboration with Dr Pinna Indorf and Dr John Miksic (National University of Singapore), Professor Dr Edi Sedyawati (University of Indonesia, Jakarta), Terry Braun, Braunarts, London and Javanese dancer/choreographer Mugiyono. The project entailed a virtual exploration of the Prambanan temple complex, built in Central Java in the 9th century CE . The site was simultaneously investigated as archaeology, architecture, art history and dance, using computer technology. The project ended in July 2002 and a website relating to it is now hosted by CASA, National University of Singapore. Dance animations for this project were made by Eduardo Carrillo.
2. Dance and the Architecture of the Hindu Temple: Exploring Form and Transformation
Funded by the AHRB (now AHRC) with a Small Grant in the Creative and Performing Arts, this project began in September 2002 as a collaboration between the Centre for Dance Research, Roehampton University and PRASADA, De Montfort University, Leicester. I worked with Professor Adam Hardy , the architectural students of PRASADA and bharatanatyam dancer Vena Ramphal. The project ended with an installation at Trinity, De Montfort, in March 2003.
3. Interpreting and (Re) Constructing Dance and Music Heritage
This is one of the projects of the AHRC Research Centre for Crosscultural Music and Dance Performance. It ran from September 2003 to December 2005 and it involved an investigation of heritage through the choreographic process. Co-ordinated by me, this project has had performers (Balinese dancer Ni Madé Pujawati, Javanese performance maker Sardono W. Kusumo, Lila Cita Gamelan and others) and academic researchers from both SOAS and Roehampton (Dr Mark Hobart, Dr David Hughes, Dr Barley Norton) working together to explore the contemporary context of dance and music performance in Britain and Indonesia as it relates to discourses about heritage. In the context of this project we have used animation and motion capture for documentation of movement, working together with animator Eduardo Carrillo. A DVD relating to this project was edited by Sarah Bilby and Niall Stuchfield in 2007. I am also finalising a series of papers, based on this research, dealing with the Indonesian kontemporer genre of dance performance, focusing on dance and political resistance under the Soeharto military regime and tracing a history of resistance, through performance, to the depoliticization and commoditization of culture under the New Order.
4. Performing Konarak, Performing Hirapur. Documenting the odissi of Guru Surendranath Jena
Funded by the British Academy with two consecutive grants in 2004 and 2005, this project looks at the 'transgressive' (i.e. because it does not conform to the accepted classical canon) odissi of Guru Surendranath Jena, inspired by the temple sites of Konarak and Hirapur, in Orissa. The outcome of this research is a DVD (2007) entitled Performing Konarak, Performing Hirapur. Documenting the odissi of Guru Surendranath Jena, edited by award winning British film maker Rajyashree Ramamurthi and by Sarah Bilby and produced by the AHRC Research Centre for Crosscultural Music and Dance Performance. Also see Performing Konarak, Performing Hirapur a project hosted by this Stanford collaboratory where additional papers and images relating to Konarak and Hirapur have been uploaded.
Recent publications
2008 Indonesian dance performance in Britain. Transnational futures? in Dance. Transcending borders. Urmimala Sarkar Munsi ed. World Dance Alliance - Asia Pacific/Tulika Books, New Delhi
2007 ReConstructing and RePresenting dance: exploring the dance/archaeology conjunction epublication, Metamedia collaboratory, Stanford University
2005 Indonesian Performing Arts. Tradition and Transition, online version of edited essays in Contemporary Theatre Review vol 11 and 12 (first published 2001)
2005 Rock Corridor: Buddhism with a contemporary Javanese inflection through a site specific performance in Tokyo. Indonesia and the Malay World 33,95 pp. 19-36
2004 Dance in the British South Asian diaspora: redefining classicism. Postcolonial Text vol 1, 1 (online journal)
2004 Bharat natya, Keywords in South Asian Studies series, Centre of South Asian Studies, SOAS, University of London
2003 Classicism, post-classicism and Ranjabati Sircar's work: re-defining the terms of Indian contemporary dance discourses South Asian Research 23,2 pp. 154-169
2002 Archaeology for dance: an approach to dance education Research in Dance Education 3, n.2, pp 143-154
2002 South Asian dances in museums: culture, education and patronage in the diaspora in Dance in South Asia. New approaches, politics and aesthetics. Conference Proceedings March 2002, Swarthmore College, pp 9-15
