What does it mean to love a dance form you are also in tension with? This essay lingers in that uneasy intimacy. Writing from within that friction, I reflect on what it means to stay in relation to a ‘classical’ form without surrendering complexity, and to let contradiction become a way of listening more truthfully to what the body resists and cannot easily let go.

Alongside my research project, Disobedient Bodies, my work has become increasingly concerned with how “the contemporary” operates not simply as a marker of time, but as a set of attitudes and permissions within Indian ‘classical’ dance. This essay explores who defines what counts as contemporary, how such definitions are upheld or contested, and how they are positioned in relation to the ‘classical’ across Western and Indian dance lineages.