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Dance in the City ed. H. Thomas (London: Macmillan, 1997) pp 68-86
Publisher URL: http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc/doifinder/10.1057/9780230379213

Dirt, noise, traffic: contemporary Indian dance in the western city

Chapter in Dance in the City, a collection of academic writings relating dance practices to the metropolis. Combines ideas of anthropologist Mary Douglas (‘dirt’) with concepts from information/cybernetics theory (‘noise’, ‘traffic’)


The city, the contemporary metropolis, is for many the chosen metaphor for the experience of the modern world. (Chambers, 1994, p.92)

This paper is about human movement – relocation, travel, migration – and the maps that it crosses. It is also about another type of movement – dance – and how it too crosses those maps. I use ‘cross’ in both senses of the word: geographically, as in moving through territories; and rhetorically, as in contesting an argument.

To continue the mapping analogy, the paper will begin with a large scale view – the place of the city in the modern world – and will progressively narrow its focus of time and place to a smaller scale with higher definition, first through a discussion of ethnicity in post-colonial Britain, and then to a reading of some danceworks seen in London in the 1990s.

Dirt, noise, traffic

Cities are dirty, noisy places, not just in a physical sense, but in a cultural one too. Dirt, in anthropologist Mary Douglas’s famous formulation, is matter out of place (Douglas, 1966, p.40): matter is not intrinsically dirty, but only becomes so when it appears where it doesn’t ‘belong’. Dirt is therefore an effect of a socially defined system of classification, a symbolic map of what belongs where. Within this formulation, two types of dirt can be distinguished, one simpler and less unsettling than the other. The first is matter that has a place, but is not in it. It is a foreign body, but we nevertheless recognise where it should be: in its native habitat. The second is matter that has no place, an unclassifiable anomaly, something that does not fit into the symbolic map. This second type of dirt is similar to what in cybernetics is called ‘noise’. Noise is an interference in the communication of information, a disturbance, something that cannot be placed into a recognised pattern. For example, whereas our own language is one in which we perceive order in its streams of sound, and thus imbue it with meaning, a foreign language is noise, sounds without meaning; we don’t recognise a pattern in it. Dirt and noise are, therefore, not things in themselves, but relative terms, disorders that are recognised only through a system of order, types of ‘otherness’.

The city is dirty and noisy because it teems with traffic – physical, economic and cultural. It is a place where a profusion of peoples, goods, histories and languages circulate, intermingle and interfere. A multiplicity of nationalities and ethnicities inhabit and traverse it. The extent of this plurality suggests that ideas of dirt and noise need to be loosened, made more mobile, because

…the very idea of a map, with its implicit dependence upon the survey of a stable terrain, fixed referents and measurement, seems to contradict the palpable flux and fluidity of metropolitan life and cosmopolitan movement…. The fluctuating contexts of languages and desires pierce the logic of cartography and spill over the borders of its tabular, taxonomic, space. (Chambers, 1994, p.92)

Anthropological dirt and cybernetic noise are defined in relation to a single symbolic map – what in anthropology is called a cosmology: a world order, ‘the way things are’. But the ‘flux and fluidity of metropolitan life’ undermines this singularity: whose map is definitive? What is a foreign language in the babble, the Babel, of the contemporary metropolis? Dirt and noise are relative not only to an order; orders themselves are relative.

This is not, however, to say that they are equivalent: some may be dominant, others marginal.1 Rather than a single map or system of representation, it is more useful to think of a hegemonic one, a type of common sense that, though dominant, is nevertheless open to negotiation, opposition and transgression from the alternative orders (or disorders) of subcultures and minorities. Cultural order and disorder, purity and pollution, do not form a fixed terrain; they are more like a landscape of shifting sands, the site of contested meanings, of reorientation and disorientation as well as orientation.

Home and the world

Within the somewhat general terms of this discussion, certain words – map, native, foreign, border, orientation – have been deliberately chosen to prefigure a narrower focus, on nation, race and ethnicity.

Although the geographical boundaries of the United Kingdom may have not changed since the second world war (they are still nearly coterminous with the British Isles), its relation to the rest of the world has altered considerably. Before the war, as Geoffrey Moorhouse remembers, ‘the British Empire seemed practically interchangeable with the British Isles’ (Moorhouse, 1984, p.11) – well, at least to the British. In atlases, half the world was coloured pink; Britain was the source of that colour. It was ‘the roseate age of England’s precedence’ (Rushdie, 1991, p. 129). Since then the pink territory has contracted almost entirely to the size of Great Britain.2 More than that, the pink – perhaps I should say ‘white’? – has become inhabited, largely but not exclusively in its urban centres, by different colours.

Although there is a long history of black people in Britain (see Fryer, 1984; Visram, 1986), the largest scale migration into the nation came during the post-war years, when the British government invited – indeed advertised and campaigned for – British subjects from the West Indies and the Indian subcontinent to fulfil a labour shortage in the post-war reconstruction of the nation. If this reconstruction was envisaged in economic terms, its effects were also cultural: the geographical boundaries of Empire were redrawn as cultural boundaries within the map of Britain, creating, in Salman Rushdie’s phrase, a ‘new Empire within Britain’ (Rushdie 1991, p.129).

Those geographical boundaries had never been simply national ones, however; they were also racial. Moorhouse recalls that there had been a racialised distinction between the settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, which were occupied by ‘cousins’, and the imperial colonies, which were ruled by Britain but inhabited by ‘natives’ (Moorhouse 1984, pp.11-12). The difference between the British and their colonial ‘cousins’ was relative, a difference of degree, whereas that between the British and the ‘natives’ was one of kind. The distinction still obtained in the post-colonial settlement of Britain, and, against a background of Britain’s economic decline, became institutionalised in a series of laws on immigration, nationality, and patriality (Fryer, 1984, pp.372-86), which found their ideological counterpart in an idea of cultural difference: what distinguished the blacks from authentic forms of Britishness came to be seen not as a biological difference, but as a cultural one. Rather than the colonial view of a biological hierarchy of races within the Empire, the post-colonial version offered a racialised picture of cultural difference within Britain. Though the black settlers were physically inside Britain, culturally they were seen as outside:

The old racism stressed the ideology of an imperial family of nations. This has been replaced by an ideology of Britain as a nation of families. The old racism said ‘keep them out’; the new says ‘send them back’ instead. The old took an economic laissez-faire approach to the issue of black citizenship, whereas the new is premised on the qualification and withdrawal of those rights and entitlements…. An idea of blacks as a problem for the national community supplies the continuity between these two different folk theories of race but the definition of that problem varies…. [W]e British blacks are now a problem, not because of any biological inferiority, but because of the extent of the cultural differences which divide us from bona fide Brits. (Gilroy, 1993, p. 56)

From this perspective, British blacks are matter out of place; dirt seems not too emotive a term. In this chill climate, the word ‘immigrant’ becomes almost synonymous with ‘black’ (as in the self-contradictory but nevertheless taken-for-granted phrase ‘second-generation immigrant’), and to be both black and British becomes an implicit contradiction in terms, an impossibly compound identity which is at best an exception to the rule, at worst a violation of it. Gilroy (1987) sums up this rule pithily: ‘there ain’t no black in the Union Jack’.

There is of course a more benevolent, liberal side to the idea of cultural difference: multiculturalism, in which to belong to another culture does not necessarily imply inferiority or exclusion, merely ‘difference’. (Note, however, that the biologistic version – multiracialism – need not imply inferiority either.) There are two problems with this. First, it assigns to different cultures the status described above as ‘at best an exception to the rule’, leaving the rule itself – who the bona fide Brits are – unquestioned. In liberal multiculturalism, ‘dirt’ is expanded into the less pejorative ‘diversity’:

… although there is always an entertainment and encouragement of cultural diversity, there is always also a corresponding containment of it. A transparent norm is constituted, a norm which says that ‘these other cultures are fine, but we must be able to locate them within our own grid’. That is what I mean by a creation of cultural diversity and a containment of cultural difference. (Bhabha, 1990, p.208)3

The second, related problem is that the ghettoisation of ‘other’ cultures into different compartments does not take into account the trafic which crosses the borders between them, both in historical and in social terms. Historically, the British Empire has produced connections as well as separations between Britain and its former imperial subjects – language, dress, food, sport and architecture being obvious examples, but also including literature, music and art. The recent history of Indian classical dance, for example – its nineteenth-century decline and twentieth-century rejuvenation – is intimately interwoven with the British presence in India, as well as the presence of Indian dancers such as Ram Gopal and Uday Shankar in the West (Jeyasingh, 1990, p.34; Rubidge, 1995, p.26). Homi Bhabha, referring to Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, highlights the critical import of this historical trafficking:

The Western metropole must confront its postcolonial history, told by its influx of postwar immigrants and refugees, as an indigenous or native narrative internal to its national identity; and the reason for this is made clear in the stammering, drunken words of Mr ‘Whisky’ Sisodia from The Satanic Verses: ‘The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means.’ (Bhabha, 1994, p.6)

Socially, the distinction is far from clear-cut either: all Britons, black, white or anything else, are subject to British national culture even while it positions them differently. The hegemonic mapping of a (white) cultural identity onto a (British) national one thus produces a more complex experience for those non-whites than the simple idea of cultural difference suggests. Rather, it is an experience of ‘double consciousness’. This is, I think, rather more than Rubidge suggests – being conscious of two cultures at once (Rubidge, 1995, pp. 12, 40); it is also the paradoxical sense of being inside and outside at the same time, what I shall call ‘inexclusion’.

Imaginary homelands

The contradictory experience of inexclusion is the subject matter of Burning Skin, a solo by Canadian dancer Roger Sinha performed in London at the 1993 and 1994 Vivarta Festivals. The work is basically a tea ceremony, in which tea-making is infused into both Indian and Western contexts. Sinha enters dressed in a red robe, and, like a religious supplicant, he places a bowl of water at the front of the stage, to the accompaniment of oriental-sounding synthesiser music. Then, to the sound of wailing electric guitars and thumping drumbeats, he dances a distorted version of Bharata Natyam, jazzing it up with the robotic posturings of the nightclub dancefloor. Moving to one side, he sits at a table. Evoking the gentility of the European drawing room, he pours tea from its pot into a china cup, adding milk from its jug, stirring sugar from its bowl. Seemingly anointed by this experience, he waltzes across the floor and performs a series of rising arabesques lifted straight from the classical ballet vocabulary, to the lilting strains of The Blue Danube. He then narrates the story of a black boy who thought he could turn his skin white by scalding it with boiling water. Sinha had read this story ‘with understanding’: his own skin was ‘a curse and I wanted to be rid of it… I wanted to be just like everyone else’. After describing how his own white childhood friend became a racist skinhead, he moves to the back of the stage, where a circle of kettles are gently boiling, the steam gently rising from their spouts like incense in a shrine. Filling the bowl at the front of the stage from the kettles, he takes off his robe and lifts a steaming white shirt from the bowl; puts it on, buttons it up. The audience winces. He proceeds to don a jacket and tie, now dressed in standard Western outfit: black suit, white shirt, black tie.

This resolution is a brutal image of plurality reduced to a black and white distinction: amidst the flux of cultural references – Eastern, Western, high and popular culture – emerges a boundary, Sinha’s skin, which separates the white from the non-white. Its effect is not simply to confine Sinha to the status of ‘other’ but to split his identity into two. The scalding white shirt ‘inexcludes’ him, physically symbolising the psychological pain of becoming incorporated into a culture which simultaneously defines him as an outsider. It embodies the experience of being defined as matter out place by the homeland in which he grows up.

In his essay ‘Imaginary Homelands’, Salman Rushdie gives two senses to the word ‘homeland’ (Rushdie 1991, pp.9-21). One sense is as a territory to which a group of people are assigned and to which they are confined, as in the South African homelands (counterparts to the aboriginal or Indian reservations of Australia and North America). These are strange inside/outside places: enveloped completely within the national terrain, and defined in relation to it, they form pockets of otherness within it, stains on the map. Burning Skin embodies this sense of homeland, and its trauma: the enveloping white shirt both conceals Sinha’s skin and brands it. Inevitably, one is reminded of the title of Frantz Fanon’s book, Black Skin, White Masks (1967); and this is indeed its subject matter:

It is one thing to position a subject or set of peoples as the Other of a dominant discourse. It is quite another thing to subject them to that ‘knowledge’, not only as a matter of imposed will and domination, [but] by the power of inner compulsion and subjective con-formation to the norm. That is the lesson – the sombre majesty – of Fanon’s insight into the colonising experience in Black Skin, White Masks. (Hall, 1990, p.226)

Hall goes on to add that,

This inner expropriation of cultural identity cripples and deforms. If its silences are not resisted, they produce, in Fanon’s vivid phrase, ‘individuals without an anchor, without horizon, colourless, stateless, rootless – a race of angels’. (Ibid.)

One way of resisting this silence is to adopt a different set of co-ordinates in order to fill the vacuum of belonging ‘elsewhere’ (‘without an anchor, without horizon’) with a concrete sense of belonging ‘somewhere’. This is Rushdie’s other sense of the term ‘imaginary homeland’, and typically involves a rediscovery of the pre-colonial ‘motherland’ and its heritage. Cultural events and performances form potent symbols for this identification: referring to ‘ethnic’ music, Martin Stokes writes that,

Place, for migrant communities, is something which is constructed through music with an intensity not found elsewhere in their social lives. (Stokes, 1994, p.114)

Classical Indian dance may, and often does, also fulfil a ‘community’ function by providing Indian migrants with a positive sense of belonging, not only by symbolising a valorised heritage to which they can lay claim, but also by providing occasions at which they can meet in an ‘Indian’ context, where a sense of community and identity can be participated in, constructed and affirmed.

This reorientation is a necessary response to the experience of inexclusion. It opposes the imposed definition of being matter out of place by referring to another area of the map on which to belong. Yet, as both Hall and Rushdie point out, this rediscovery of home and identity can only ever be partial (Hall, 1990, p.224; Rushdie 1991, p.10). Rushdie learnt this in the process of writing his novel Midnight’s Children (1981), which, though initially envisaged as a Proustian project of remembrance (of India), inevitably became a broken, fragmentary and even ‘incorrect’ reconstruction of a country that could only exist in his imagination. (Rather than lamenting this as a loss, however, he turned it into the novel’s prime virtue.)

The impossibility of a return home forms the theme of Roger Sinha’s subsequent dance piece, Pehla Safar (‘The First Journey’), a duet for Sinha and fellow Canadian Natasha Bakht (later a dancer with the Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company) which was performed in Britain at the 1994 Vivarta Festival. It depicts Sinha’s problematic return to India (represented by Bakht). Bakht opens the piece as a Bharata Natyam dancer, self-absorbed, raised on a platform and surrounded by mists. Sinha arrives in search of this iconic being. He is carrying a suitcase – rather literally, his ‘cultural baggage’ – and wearing his black suit, white shirt, black tie. Bakht reappears at ground level, now wearing a suit too, no longer the ancient traditional creature he had imagined. Their subsequent duet is a series of mismatches in which his demands for affirmation cannot be met. Their moments of unison are fleeting: when she dances in classical style, he imitates with a distorted version; when he follows her, she turns away; when he touches her, she escapes his grasp. When she takes off her jacket and untucks her shirt into a kurta, he follows suit. But though he can mimic, he cannot fully identify: she is always either more or less than he expects. The ‘India’ he seeks and the ‘India’ he finds are different countries. This is no return of the prodigal son: the piece concludes with Sinha and Bakht in contact, but circling each other, as if Sinha’s search cannot be resolved, must remain unfinished. In one striking image in the piece he photographs her, like a tourist – a symbolic snapshot of the whole encounter.

Burning Skin and Pehla Safar represent two different senses of imaginary homeland, yet there remains a curious connection between them: in both, Sinha dons the outer garments of cultures to which he cannot completely belong (though in different ways). The first homeland is a negative space inside the West to which Sinha is confined; the second is a positive but necessarily incomplete reorientation towards India. One is a vacuum, the other an attempt to fill it, if only to make it habitable. Both accept the simple definition of ‘dirt’ described above: matter that has a place but is not in it. So to construct an imaginary homeland in the East (Pehla Safar) is different from but not incompatible with being confined to one in the West (Burning Skin). Rushdie points out how these two senses of homeland may occupy the same terrain:

To forget that there is a world beyond the community to which we belong, to confine ourselves within narrowly defined cultural frontiers, would be, I believe, to go voluntarily into that form of internal exile which in South Africa is called the ‘homeland’. (Rushdie, 1991, p.19)

– to which one might add that although this internal exile may be a necessary response to the experience of ‘inexclusion’, it can readily be interpreted retrospectively as ‘evidence’ that foreign bodies do indeed belong elsewhere, if not necessarily by race or citizenship, then by personal sentiment, national allegiance or cultural affiliation.

‘The community to which we belong’ – what is it? All too often, it appears as a choice between native and foreign (or West and East, white and black, coloniser and colonised):

Either identity A or Not A. But the immigrations had left one feeling one was both, split by a dividing line which might also be seen, paradoxically, as the line along which the pieces join together. A borderline identity, belonging to both sides or neither? (Maharaj, 1991, p.80)

As long as this stark choice of separate, mutually exclusive categories remains – A or Not A – the question of ‘the community to which we belong’, even if posed as ‘both sides or neither?’, will remain unanswerable. (‘Both sides and neither’ would get closer, but remains predicated on an idea of ‘sides’.)

Rather than confining oneself within the homeland of Western ‘inexclusion’ or opposing it with one that derives from an imaginary East, there is another possibility: to challenge the distinction which produces this division. Instead of tolerating an ascribed place as ‘dirt’ or opposing it with reference to another part of the map, this reconstructs that map in order to undermine the boundary upon which those responses are based. This third sense of imaginary homeland is suggested by Rushdie towards the end of his article, and forms the basis of choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh’s own ‘Imaginary Homelands’ essay (1995). Jeyasingh illustrates this with reference to her own dancework entitled, appropriately enough, Making of Maps (1991):

I suppose the first thing I thought about when I made Making of Maps was the question of heritage…. For me, my heritage is a mix of David Bowie, Purcell, Shelley and Anna Pavlova, and it has been mixed as subtly as a samosa has mixed itself into the English cuisine… (Jeyasingh, 1995, p.193)

Apart from these Westerners, her heritage also includes the Indian dance style Bharata Natyam, which she learnt as a child. ‘The reason why,’ she writes, ‘is rooted in certain historical events’. It’s a teasing statement, for instead of the expected answer ‘because I happen to be from India’, she goes on to explain that it was ‘a direct result of the British presence in India’ (ibid.). Already the division between a Western and an Eastern heritage is complicated and blurred: they are intimately implicated with each other.

The starting point for Making of Maps was suggested by a medieval European map made in 1300. On this map, Jerusalem is placed at the centre of the world, with other locations, both historical and mythical, defined in relation to it. It suggests a symbolic map of the world in which the mapmaker lived, expressing his concerns and viewpoint. Jeyasingh took this idea and applied it to herself, as ‘an Indian dancer living in Britain’ (programme note, 1995).

The piece, for five women, opens with one dancer sitting on the floor, her eyes closed, as if travelling within her imagination. That imagination is represented by the other dancers: two of them mark out the stage with the formal spatial designs and directions of Bharata Natyam, while the other pair examine the floor space, pushing themselves across it as if to get the lay of this land. These contrasting styles of movement – the traditional and the exploratory, the defined and the undefined – form the two poles of the imaginary world which the dance invents.

The score too moves between these poles. Its basis is a classical Indian composition by composer and singer R. A. Ramamani. This is incorporated into a score by Alistair MacDonald, which mixes in the everyday sounds of the city street, adding in snippets of radio music, fragments of conversation, the sonorous timbre of the violin, the chiming of church bells.

Against this vivid collage of sound, the dancers first demarcate the stage space in a series of circular formations, and then personalise it, inhabiting it with both classical and idiosyncratic nuances. Sometimes the vocabulary is strictly classical, at other times it is individual. Often both are on stage at the same time, and connections are made between them: a dancer in a classical pose shifts sideways, or is pulled off centre by another, until she overbalances, falls, and rolls. Although the basis of the dance movement is rooted in the objective clarity of a tradition (Bharata Natyam), it is rerouted towards the complexity of urban life, where traditions evolve, merge, disperse.

The piece finishes with the same dancer sitting in a meditative posture as at the beginning, as if still imagining her journey. Around her, the other four dancers face in different directions, hinting at paths that are yet to be mapped, journeys still to be made. The score ends with a soundscape of the city, an open-ended evocation of the flux of everyday life which was, Jeyasingh says, ‘the only way to end the dance’ (Making of Maps education pack, 1993).

By placing herself at the centre of the work, Jeyasingh maps out a configuration in which she is not, by virtue of her Indian background, a foreign body adrift in the modern urban world, but an active participant in its construction. Although Making of Maps is ‘a personal map of an Indian dancer living in Britain’, it is not limited to these beguilingly simple but manifestly inadequate linguistic terms (‘Indian’, ‘Britain’): instead, its starting point is their interdependent complexity, and in the process of transgressing the border between them it transfigures their relation from fixed and separate categories into one that is more fluid, mobile, and contingent.

Configurations or collaborations?

If Making of Maps is explicitly concerned with interrogating, obscuring, restructuring or dissolving the boundary between India and Britain, other works by Jeyasingh presume this remapping in order to focus on a more specific subject: a narrative sequence, for example (Correspondences), or the relations between different styles of moving (Raid). The understanding of a dancework does not, however, derive solely from the choreography (or the choreographer, for that matter), but also from the prior knowledge and concerns that we bring to it, for example the received ideas of race and culture referred to at the beginning of this chapter. From within these terms, Jeyasingh’s work appears as problematic, difficult to place: dirt of the unsettling kind that cannot be located on the current map. One way of replacing it on this map is to interpret the interferences, the ‘noise’ that her choreography produces, from within the language of multiculturalism. Perhaps the clearest illustration of this is Jeyasingh’s early work Configurations.

During the 1991 tour of Jeyasingh’s company, two local newspapers misprinted ‘Configurations’ as ‘Collaborations’ (Harrow Observer, 22 October 1991; Ealing and Acton Gazette, 23 October 1991).4 The slippage between these two words is revealing: it is symptomatic of the different ways that the work is understood, and highlights a contest over definitions.

Originally choreographed in 1988 as a solo, Configurations was reworked for a duet, a trio, and finally as a quartet; it is this last version to which I refer. Configurations is for the most part an exploration of the formal qualities (nritta) of Bharata Natyam: how the steps, gestures and positions of the traditionally solo style can be composed into group designs and spatial patterns. Phrases are dissected, repeated and varied in different directions, and the dancers move in and out of unison through the devices of canon, symmetry and opposition – formal procedures which create a highly articulated texture of time and space; a sparkling, crystalline geometry. Its aesthetic impulse is modernist (the structure of the dance is its own subject), and, with its classical basis, it could be likened to the impulse behind, say, Ashton’s Scènes de ballet or Balanchine’s formalist work.

Balanchine liked to work closely with music, and in Configurations Jeyasingh does the same. Traditionally, the precise, complex rhythms of Bharata Natyam footwork are matched by the musical accompaniment; here, instead of traditional music, Jeyasingh used a commissioned score from Michael Nyman, whose systematic methods of composition corresponded well with the mathematical permutations of Bharata Natyam footwork. The score was in fact composed to the dance, and Jeyasingh was ‘very disciplined’ with Nyman in setting its metres. The result is a dance in which the rhythms of the music and the movement correspond almost note-for-step.

Yet while Balanchine and, say, Stravinsky were granted the status of individual artists working together from within their separate fields of choreography and music, Configurations was understood not as an artistic collaboration but as a cultural one. On one level, nothing could be more self-evident: Jeyasingh’s choreography remains largely within a recognisable classical Indian style, while Nyman’s music is very much part of the Western contemporary music scene. Yet this division into parts is nowhere to be found within the aesthetic qualities of the dancework itself, for there could scarcely be a more intimate unity of music and dance. Rather, it is based upon a prior knowledge of what constitutes the East and the West.

If Configurations allowed a relatively easy separation of East with dance and West with music, Jeyasingh’s later work has complicated this division. She has extended her exploration of Bharata Natyam both in terms of structure (a project initiated by Configurations) and in terms of vocabulary, for example by using the floor, by distorting its iconic poses, by adding everyday movement, or movement from sport, martial arts, and yoga. She has commissioned a piece from modernist (white) British choreographer Richard Alston, with whom she shares many aesthetic concerns (Delicious Arbour, to music by Purcell); and in Making of Maps, Romance*…with footnotes, Raid, and Duets With Automobiles (a short television film directed by Terry Braun) she has used scores which cut and mix a Western and an Eastern composition. Although this intermingling of cultural references has confounded the easy separation of Eastern and Western heritages, there has nevertheless remained in reviews of her work a concern to discern and classify Eastern and Western influences.

The conception of Jeyasingh’s work as a cross-cultural hybrid has become something of a commonplace, though it is one that she has vigorously contested (and if it is less common now than five years ago, this in no small part due to Jeyasingh herself, who has been – of necessity, I suspect – rather more vocal than many other choreographers). But it would be too easy, I think, to dismiss this conception as simply ‘wrong’, for it seems to be almost a self-evident truism: yes, there is both East and West in her work. A more useful approach would be to see it as a disagreement over the how the word ‘hybrid’ is understood.

Hybridity, as Robert Young observes (1995, p.21) is itself a hybrid term. At its simplest, it implies the merging of two separate entities into a single compound, the resultant hybrid being made up of its component parts. This view corresponds to the idea of multiculturalism described above, in which separate cultures are seen as coexisting together:

Today the notion is often proposed of a new cultural hybridity in Britain, a transmutation of British culture into a compounded, composite mode. The condition of that transformation is held out to be the preservation of a degree of cultural and ethnic difference. (Young, 1995, p.23)

The critical concern to separate and demarcate the East and the West within Jeyasingh’s choreography is an example of this ‘multiculturalist’ approach. What she objects to is not, I think, that the idea that there is East and West in her work, but the simplistic way those ‘elements’ are defined.

Underpinning this definition is an association of the West with modernity: the experimental, individual, progressive, and new is seen as implicitly Western, while the traditional, religious, ethnic and exotic is assigned to the East.5 Take, for example, this statement: ‘Shobana Jeyasingh is our leading experimentalist in blending classical Indian dance with contemporary Western music and ideas’ (Time Out, 9 October 1991). The contemporary is Western (not just its music, but its ideas), while the classical is Indian. Or this: ‘Jeyasingh reappears as a choreographer on a voyage of discovery in the world of European contemporary dance . . . at the temple of experimental dance, the Place Theatre’ (Morning Star, 12 March 1993). Contemporary dance is a European phenomenon which this non-European ‘discovers’, in appropriately orientalist fashion, in a temple. The same review goes on to reinforce the company’s status as visitors to this European temple: ‘The company, still swinging their amazing pigtails, flexing their delicate fingers and stamping their flawless feet, remain indisputably Indian’. Or this: in order to make Indian dancing ‘easily accessible to Western eyes’, ‘the traditions of ancient lands had been sacrificed to the new cities’ (Guardian, 18 October 1991).

These reviews express in more sophisticated language a common audience response: either that the dance looks more ‘Indian’ than ‘contemporary’ (as if they were mutually exclusive categories), or that its modernism is a Westernisation and hence a corruption (a ‘sacrifice’) of Indian tradition. The celebration of cultural diversity in Jeyasingh’s work thus becomes a containment of the ‘other’ culture within the narrow confines of tradition:

… AfroAsian artists are removed from the authentic space or experiences of the modern age. As a result, all signs of modernity in their work become in-authentic representations (Araeen, 1991, p. 19)

The possibility that an Indian classical tradition can in itself form a basis for experiment is overlooked: that the use of the floor in Making of Maps may derive from the Bharata Natyam style – with its low centre of gravity and strong downward pull – rather than from the influence of Western contemporary dance; that the multi-directionality which Jeyasingh investigates may arise from its articulate spatial structure, clear directions, and strong visual design rather than from the influence of Merce Cunningham.

The ‘contemporisation’ of Bharata Natyam is not necessarily therefore a Westernisation. This is not to deny that Jeyasingh may cite influences from Western contemporary or indeed classical dance (which are as much a part of her environment as of any other British choreographer); it is to object to the commonplace notion that modernism, experimentation and invention can only be borrowed from the West, so that modernity is seen not as a confluence of different heritages, but as the influence of one upon another.

This multiculturalist understanding of hybridity is rather literally ‘commonplace’: two separate entities, the East and the West, share the same space. It is a straightforward idea which presupposes the existence of the East and the West as separate categories, each with its own essential qualities, and reinforces them as such. Robert Young (1995) argues that the idea of hybridity was central to nineteenth-century racial theory, for it was through hybridity that separate races were defined. Here, hybridity is used to separate and define cultures. That these cultural divisions are also racial ones suggests that this strategy is not so far removed from the racial ideologies of the last century as many would like to think. The celebration of Jeyasingh’s work as a cross-cultural hybrid may thus do no more than affirm the divisions – cultural and racial (the two are often conflated) – which she implicitly or (in Making of Maps) explicitly contests.

There is, however, another sense of hybridity, in which the hybrid is not seen as a compound of separate parts, but a new form that is incompatible with the division which defines them as separate parts. This is a more unsettling sense, for the hybrid cannot be placed on the map of prior knowledge. From within that map it is registered as a disturbance, an anomaly, ‘noise’; fusion is seen as confusion.

In order to move beyond this static, self-perpetuating position it is necessary to attend to the internal workings of the dance itself; for dance is not simply a reflection of its context, but also the source of its own emergent meanings. The aesthetic structures of Jeyasingh’s choreography suggest that it cannot be simply described as a cultural compound. To date, Jeyasingh’s aesthetic interests have formed a relatively consistent framework – a regard for the form and texture of movement, an attention to structural rigour, more abstract than representational: modernist. (Even Correspondences, with its narrative of exile and return, is interpreted in a sequence of abstract episodes, and in the final section – thrillingly titled ‘The Mock Theta Functions’ – dissolves into a spectacle of pure mathematics.) It is through formal experimentation that old maps can be overwritten and restructured into new configurations. Instead of referring to prior knowledge, this exploration activates the potential for connoting new meanings; it presents more than it represents. So, as described above, the separation of Configurations into two distinct cultural modes ignores the internal coherence of music and movement. From within its own terms, Configurations is not a cultural hybrid, but a hybrid of two media: music and dance. And in Making of Maps, by placing herself at the centre (‘an Indian dancer in Britain’) rather than between the poles of India and Britain, Jeyasingh reorders that polarity into a more open, complex configuration. Through her abstract, modernist procedures, she navigates a pathway along the precarious edge between the known and the unknown, dancing on the very cusp of possibility.

Here be dragons

A number of writers have proposed that new formations in art (or, more generally, in cultural representations) can prefigure social identities. Raymond Williams, for example, in his concept of ‘structures of feeling’, argues that emergent social groups that have yet to be positioned within the dominant regime of representation (the hegemonic map) may find points of identification in the emergent meanings articulated in art. Art, by creating new configurations, pushes at the ‘edge of semantic availability’ (Williams, 1977, p.134), enabling new meanings to be imagined, and hence new possibilities for identification.

The dominant regime described at the beginning of this chapter relies upon a particular formation of race, nation and culture. As I suggested, this leaves British Asians in a contradictory position. They are given a choice of either assimilating into a culture which defines them as out of place, leading to the experience of ‘inexclusion’, or attempting to identify with a country of origin to which they can no longer belong. In his witty and poignant story ‘The Courter’, Salman Rushdie expresses this dilemma:

But I too, have ropes around my neck, I have them to this day, pulling me this way and that, East and West, the nooses tightening, commanding choose, choose. I buck, I snort, I whinny, I rear, I kick. Ropes, I do not choose between you. Lassoes, lariats, I choose neither of you and both. Do you hear? I refuse to choose. (Rushdie, 1994, p.211)

The choice between a motherland of origin and a fatherland of adoption is frankly Oedipal: either identify with the mother (from whom you are irrevocably separated) or with the father (which necessarily involves an act of repression). The traumas of these impossible demands are expressed by Roger Sinha, first in Burning Skin (choose the West), and then in Pehla Safar (choose the East). Neither are satisfactory.

Jeyasingh (like Rushdie, in fact) does more than refuse to choose: she refuses the validity of the choice. Instead of struggling within these Oedipal terms (like Sinha), she opts for a less nuclear, more extended family. Making of Maps stands at a critical distance from Sinha’s dilemma, invoking his predicament without itself being an example of it. In the process of redefining herself on the map, Jeyasingh reconfigures it. In doing so, she charts a new terrain in which those anomalous creatures, the British Asians, may find a point of identification that is not impossibly self-contradictory or confined to an imaginary ghetto. By getting ‘under the skin’ of cultural boundaries, by loosening the links between race, place and culture, her work can speak to the experience of diaspora. As she said in a television interview ‘I am inventing my own ethnicity’ (The Colour of Britain, BBC, 1994).

Is this ethnicity a hybrid? It depends on the viewpoint: a hybrid is not so much a thing as a way of understanding. We all, in fact, have plural identities that shift with context, place and time, often in contradictory ways; in short, we are all hybrids. But this ordinary, everyday hybridity is not generally conceived as such: hybridity seems to be recognised only when its elements are seen as somehow essentially incompatible; that is when a cultural border has been crossed, such as the imaginary one between East and West. So it is the existence of the border which defines the elements, not the other way round:

A boundary is not that at which something stops, but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing. (Martin Heidegger, quoted in Bhabha 1994, p. 1).

Jeyasingh is, then, not necessarily creating a cultural hybrid; rather, by assuming that hybridity is already there, though it may be unrecognised, she attempts to transform the way that it is understood: ‘I don’t want to divide between East and West, nor do I see myself as bringing them together. History has already done that’ (India Mail, 2 March 1995). We might say that she attempts to change an exceptional hybrid into an ordinary one, to transfigure the simple binary of East and West into a more complex configuration, which, paradoxical though it may seem, makes it more everyday. This is not to dissolve into that commonplace of multiculturalism, the cultural melting-pot, but to complicate the simplistic terms in which ethnicity is thought, the way that knowledge is structured, and the way that borders are mapped.

On medieval maps, the areas of uncharted terrain beyond the edges of the known world were imagined to be populated by strange creatures that could only be conceived as monstrous hybrids composed of elements that were already known – mermaids (half-woman, half-fish), griffons (half-lion, half-eagle), dragons (half-bat, half-lizard). In the modern age, that uncharted terrain is cultural, and those hybrids now appear not at the edges of the map, but at its very centre: the city. Here – in the modern urban metropolis – be dragons. These noisome products of colonial and post-colonial traffic have come home to roost; must they – we, I – too be imagined as monstrous creatures, impossible compounds that can only speak with forked tongues?

Notes

1. For a lucid discussion of the reduction of ‘relative’ to ‘equivalent’, see Wilden, 1980, p.xxxvi-xxxvii.
2. I should add that within Great Britain, England remains precedent: the Irish, Scots and Welsh have a different relation to Britain from the English. These internal differences within British national identity are not, however, the subject for consideration here.
3. For an investigation into the relations between multiculturalism, popular imperialism and the connoisseurship of the urbane white city-dweller – the flâneur – see Shields, 1994.
4. Wherever this mistake came from, it seems very unlikely to have arisen from the dance company.
5. Modernity is not, of course, the only dimension which affects how Jeyasingh’s choreography is seen, though it is the one I consider here. Gender, for example, is another, and one which has its own relations to modernity and ethnicity. Bibliography R. Araeen, ‘The Other Immigrant: The Experiences and Achievements of AfroAsian Artists in the Metropolis’, Third Text, Vol. 15 (Summer 1991) pp. 17-28.
H. Bhabha, ‘The Third Space’ in J. Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990) pp. 207-21.
H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
I. Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London: Routledge. 1994).
M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: an Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966).
F. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986).
P. Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984).
P. Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (London: Routledge, 1987).
P. Gilroy, Small Acts (London: Verso, 1993).
S. Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ in J. Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990) pp. 222-37.
S. Jeyasingh, ‘Getting Off the Orient Express’, Dance Theatre Journal, Vol. 8 No. 2 (1990) pp. 34-7.
S. Jeyasingh, ‘Imaginary Homelands: Creating a New Dance Language’ in Border Tensions: Proceedings of the Fifth Study of Dance Conference (Guildford: University of Surrey, 1995) pp. 191-7.
S. Maharaj, ‘The Congo is Flooding the Acropolis: Art in Britain of the Immigrations’ Third Text No. 15 (Summer 1991) pp. 77-90.
G. Moorhouse, India Britannica (London: Paladin, 1984).
S. Rubidge, Romance*…with footnotes (London: Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company, 1995).
S. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (London: Granta, 1991).
S. Rushdie, East, West (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994).
R. Shields, ‘Fancy Footwork: Walter Benjamin’s Notes on Flâneurie’ in K. Tester (ed.), The Flâneur (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 61-80.
M. Stokes, ‘Place, Exchange and Meaning’ in M. Stokes (ed.), Ethnicity, Identity and Music: the Musical Construction of Place (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1994) pp. 97-115.
R. Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain 1700-1947 (London: Pluto Press, 1986).
A. Wilden, System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange, 2nd edn (London: Tavistock, 1980).
R. Williams, ‘Structures of Feeling’, in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 128-35.
R. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995). Another useful source will be the forthcoming special issue of Choreography and Dance: An International Journal on South Asian dance in Britain, to be published in 1996. Other sources The Colour of Britain BBC, 1994.
Making of Maps education pack (book and video), Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company, 1993.