My mentor, Ananya Chatterjea recently asked me: what in Odissi do I want to move away from, and what do I want to keep?
My immediate answer arrived as a simple sorting process: keep what feels liberating, discard what feels limiting. But the longer deliberated, I realized my relationship with dance resisted any clean map. What draws me to Odissi and what envelopes me are quite entangled and not separated. In fact, there are some aspects of Odissi which trouble but also challenge me, and even at times, give me great pleasure.
My earlier musings unpacked whether a traditional artform like Odissi can be understood as contemporary. The question still matters because it pushes me to reconsider Indian ‘classical’ dance as relic. As if exempt from the present tense and the politics of now. Here, my reflection starts elsewhere. Here, I ponder not only what Odissi is in relation to the present, but how Odissi behaves inside the body. What kinds of discipline, desire, legitimacy and affect does it activate? What forms of attachment does it cultivate? And what happens when a body does not inhabit those demands seamlessly?
This has been on my mind through the idea of institutional embodiment. By this I do not mean that the body is itself an institution in any straightforward sense. But I am curious about how institutions become durable by cushioning into our bodies.
Odissi, a reconstructed form of the 20th century, has undoubtedly become institutionalized by the bodies that dance it. In this sense, it is not only a dance form but a particular field of ideals about “high art”, respectability, discipline, sacredness and beauty.
Traditional training teaches you not only how to dance, but how to be legible as ‘classical’. And yet, my body never enters the vocabulary of Odissi as an empty receptacle waiting to be filled by the ideals of classicism. It arrives already colored by the memories of my ancestors, Caribbean sensoriums, and embodied knowledges; shaped by the waves of convergences and frictions of diasporic life. My relationship to Odissi was never going to be straightforward. It is (and has always been) a contested site of inheritances, unable to be fully captured by any single history, culture or regime of meaning.
Disobedience is my way of thinking through what happens when my body does not re-enact Odissi in compliance with the aesthetic and disciplinary ideals that have come to regulate the form. However, I am aware that disobedience cannot fully define artistic signature. If I only talk about defiance I risk casting myself as Odissi’s critic which is not entirely true. I am also its student, and in many, many ways its lover.
This is what makes my present question more unnerving and even, more vulnerable. I do not only want to ask what I resist in Odissi. I want to ask what I remain attached to, and why.
Some of my attachments are sensorial. There are aspects of Odissi that feel dynamically alive in my body. Certain rules sharpen my attention and create an experience of clarity and groundedness. Certain phrases create pleasure through intricacy, tension, release. Other attachments are much more difficult to name. I suspect that part of what I enjoy is the satisfaction of mastering something incredibly difficult. There is a deep emotional charge in working towards precision, in attending to the shifting temporalities that emerge through repetition, in becoming capable of what once felt unreachable. Mastering technique for me has its own kinaesthetic and psychic pleasure.
Pleasure here should not be dismissed too quickly. There is value in rigour. There is dignity in craft. There is something exceedingly meaningful about entering a practice that asks for patience, strength, discipline and sustained attention of the body. In an era that often rewards speed, instant legibility and shallow expressivity, difficulty can itself be a counter-practice. Even so, the pleasure of discipline is not politically innocent. So here is where my question becomes sharper.
What exactly am I enjoying when I enjoy the discipline of Odissi? Is it the sensorial intelligence of the practice? The physical challenge? The deepening of capacity in my muscles and bones? Or is it also the promise of legitimacy that comes with mastery? The satisfaction of being able to do something recognized as difficult, refined and valuable within an already sanctioned regime? These are not mutually exclusive possibilities.
The notion of ‘institutional embodiment’ has become a useful frame for me to think through these conundrums. It helps me understand how my body attaches itself to discipline beyond coercion (through accomplishment, pleasure, notions of beauty and recognition). It asks me to consider that power is not only what limits the body from outside, but what the body may come to desire from within. A technique can nourish my body and regulate it at the same time. It can loosen sensitivity while also demanding compliance. It can offer pleasure while reproducing (harmful) norms. These contradictions do not cancel each other out, so how can we hold them together?
I am compelled to admit, I am less interested in a clean narrative of liberation than in a politics of discernment. The question for me is not simply which parts of Odissi are oppressive and which are free. That would be too easy. The question is far more intimate: what in the form enlarges me, what contracts me, what sustains me, what disciplines me, what I love because it feels alive, and what I love because I have been trained to value it.
The uncomfortable truth is that power is not only coercive; it is also seductive, pleasurable, and wildly generative. Inside that sustained tension is where my real inquiry burrows.
There are aspects of Odissi I find myself wanting to move away from. Some feel overdetermined by a logic that doesn’t quite fit my body. Other aspects ask for a kind of confinement that restricts what I can fully sense and feel. Sometimes I can feel arrested to the pressure of legibility too strongly. But there are also things I don’t want to let go of. Not out of an uncritical attachment to the form, but because they genuinely give my mind, spirit and body something valuable.
What I am trying to resist, then, is a false choice between total rejection and romantic fidelity. I do not want to dance the form as though oppression is not part of its history. But neither do I want to abandon a form I have grown to love because it is implicated in power. My task, as I understand it now, is learning how to distinguish between what the Odissi offers my body as a craft and what it asks my body to internalize as obedience.
There are aspects I wish to keep because they expand and deepen me. There are aspects I wish to loosen because they no longer sit truthfully in my body. And there are aspects I still love but do not yet fully understand — attachments I need to interrogate more carefully. All of these have implications for my practice. Every time I dance I am reminded that disobedience is not only dissidence in a spectacular sense. Disobedience is also the more difficult work of discerning my own seductions and attachments.
What hinges me to my practice is what happens when a Caribbean body inhabits a ‘classical’ form with full awareness of what that form carries and what it costs. Dancing inside of this friction is where my practice comes alive.
If the body is one of the places where institutions become intimate, then it is also one of the places where they can begin to unravel. Sometimes they unravel through resistance. Other times, an admission of what we love, and what that love is made of.