Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Unmaking Contact: Choreographing South Asian Touch

Unmaking Contact: Choreographing South Asian Touch

Mitra, Royona

Paperback

Dance

ISBN10: 0197627773
ISBN13: 9780197627778
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Apr 4 2025
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.90
Height: 0.68 Width: 6.19 Depth: 9.23
Language: English
Unmaking Contact interrogates contact, understood in Global North dance discourse as a shorthand for the movement discipline of contact improvisation (CI) and its characteristic shifting points of weight-sharing between two or more bodies through physical touch, by attending to power asymmetries that are foundational to this practice.

By placing South Asian aesthetics, bodies, discourses, and philosophies on touch at the heart of its interrogation through the lenses of caste, ecology, faith, gender, and sexuality, author Royona Mitra argues for an intersectional, intercultural, and inter-epistemic understanding of contact, that may or may not involve touch. The book shifts and expands understandings of contact in dance-making through intercultural epistemologies that examine notions of touch and contact.

In this book the term contact signals both a shorthand for CI and a shift away from it to more expansive choreographic considerations. It becomes an apparatus for dismantling power regimes; it is conjured as a catalyst to examine power in social relations; it appears as a fulcrum of ecological relationality; it arises as critical encounters full of generative and transformative potential; and finally, it manifests as community.

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