Recent CMCI Research Seminar 'Ram Gopal. Histories of Interweaving Indian Dance' by Professor Ann R. David took place on Wednesday 8 May.
About the speaker:
Ann R. David, PhD, Professor of Dance and Cultural Engagement, is a Visiting Professor at King's College, London in the CMCI department. She holds an Emerita professorial position at the University of Roehampton, where she worked for 17 years, including as Head of the Dance Department for 6 years.
Her research and teaching specialisms are in dance anthropology (ritual, migration, diaspora, embodiment) and South Asian classical & popular dance; her dance training includes ballet, contemporary, folk, and the Indian classical styles of Bharatanatyam and Kathak. She has published widely on this work, as well as on dance in Bollywood and on the ritual dances of Tibetan Buddhism and has just completed a monograph of Indian dancer Ram Gopal, published by Bloomsbury. Ann has given public talks at the V&A, the British Library, the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery and been involved in post-show discussions at Asia House, Nehru Centre, Sadler's Wells, Southbank and the Bhavan, and has appeared on BBC radio and TV on several occasions.
She is passionate about the need for the arts in education, working closely with policy makers, and is on the board of several arts organisations. Her current interests are in creating cultures of (mutual) care in the arts that support an ecological dimension. This autumn, she will take up a Distinguished Professor Emeritus position at the University of Bonn, in the Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies.
Ram Gopal. Histories of Interweaving Indian Dance
Professor Ann R David discusses aspects of her new book (Bloomsbury) that focuses on Indian dancer Ram Gopal. The book sets out his especially important role in transforming the Indian dance that westerners witnessed from the late 1930s to the period following World War II, and the subsequent change in perceptions of the classical Indian dancer. It expounds the significant part that Gopal himself played in bringing Indian dance to international audiences from the 1930s to the late 1960s, a process of transnationalisation, and the context in which this took place.
Ann R. David giving the talk. Photo: Gilang Desti Parahita
Part biography, part interweaving histories of Indian dance, the book engages with the use of historical imagination, employing an ethnographic approach through interviews with Gopal's remaining family members, his costume-makers, close friends, dance partners, other dancers, and audience members. In the 1930s, Gopal created a new, modern, international concert dance, based on classical Indian technique, and established an innovative aesthetic through his culturally and historically woven material, disrupting perceived notions of fixed identities, origins, gender, styles and geographies. David argues that Gopal interrupted and challenged European orientalism while simultaneously and consciously utilising tropes of oriental thought in his performances. The analysis reveals how Gopal's dance concerts interwove a myriad of cultures and histories without erasing difference.
During the Research Seminar Event. Photo: Gilang Desti Parahita
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