A ‘Material’-ist Reading of the Bharata Natyam Dancing Body: The Possibility of the ‘Unruly Spectator’

Abstract

This chapter weaves back and forth between reading a stage performance of the Bharata Natyam body, its labor on and off stage, and examining the material accoutrements that invest the body with its symbolic, ritual, cultural, and physical power.¹ A localized materialist reading of the Bharata Natyam body in performance reveals its labor within specific historical, ethnographic, and critical global discourses. As assistant to this analysis, I offer the notion of the ‘unruly spectator,’ a corporeal being who critically engages with the female dancing body and is able to view its multiple and material performances even while accounting for the seduction of its aesthetics. I turn to feminist ethnography, and particularly to the concerns of third world feminists, in order to envision the unruly spectator as one who works through the seduction of nationalist, Orientalist, and patriarchal discourses that saturate the Bharata Natyam female dancer on stage and is then able to see beyond them to account for multiple histories of capital flow and domination.²