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Performance at the Urban Periphery
Insights from South India
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Book Description
This edited volume considers performance in its engagement with expanding Indian cities, with a particular focus on festivals and performances in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
The editors ask how performance practices are affected by urbanisation, the effects of such changes on their cultural economy, and the environmental impacts of performance itself. This project also considers how performance responds to its context, and the potential for performance to be critical of the city’s development, and of its own compromises. Bringing together perspectives from the humanities, natural and social sciences, the book takes a multi-faceted analytical view of live performance, connecting contemporary with heritage forms, and human with more-than-human actors.
The three sections, themed around heritage, everyday life, and future ecologies, will be of great interest to students and scholars in performance, heritage studies, ecology and art history.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of contributors
List of images
Introduction
Cathy Turner, Jerri Daboo, Sharada Srinivasan, and Anindya Sinha
1 The spaces of everyday performance
Narendar Pani
Photo essay 1: Maha Shivaratri, 2018: a journey through Bengaluru
Cathy Turner and Anne Fenk with photography by Siddarth Sumitran
Part one: heritage
Introduction: heritage
Cathy Turner, Jerri Daboo, Sharada Srinivasan, and Anindya Sinha
2 Crossing thresholds: transgressing space, identity and performance in the Urur-Olcott Kuppam Vizha in Chennai
Jerri Daboo
3 Performing craft, crafting performance: from the tangible to intangible in craft and performance heritage
Sharada Srinivasan
4 Staging the temple as a living experience of a distant past
Smriti Haricharan
Photo essay 2: Heritage performances at Tripunithura
Cathy Turner
Part two: everyday life
Introduction: everyday life
Cathy Turner, Jerri Daboo, Sharada Srinivasan, and Anindya Sinha
5 The production of locality at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016)
Cathy Turner
6 Spectacle and subversion at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018)
Cathy Turner
7 Performing the digital city: flash mob performance and social exclusion in Bengaluru’s ‘new’ India
Rebecca Savory Fuller
Photo essay 3: fermented frontier: between north and south
Lawai BemBem
Part three: environment
Introduction: environment
Cathy Turner, Jerri Daboo, Sharada Srinivasan, and Anindya Sinha
8 Musings from the Vrishchikotsavam of Tripunithura: the uncertain future of the performing temple elephants of Kerala
Sreedhar Vijayakrishnan and Anindya Sinha
9 Primate performances in a contact zone: interspecies communication and benefaction in a synurbising forest of Southern India
Sarada Natarajan and Anindya Sinha
10 Performing the Poromboke at the Urur-Olcott Kuppam Vizha, Chennai
Sharada Srinivasan and Cathy Turner
Photo essay 4: on the threshold of Urur Kuppam
Cathy Turner
Index
Editor(s)
Biography
Cathy Turner is Professor of Drama at the University of Exeter.
Sharada Srinivasan is Professor of Archaeology in the School of Humanities at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru.
Jerri Daboo is Professor of Performance at the University of Exeter.
Anindya Sinha is Professor of Animal Behaviour and Cognition at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore, India, and Honorary Research Fellow at the College of Humanities in Exeter University, UK.