Thursday, July 14 and Monday, July 18 – “Divine Dancer” by Suzanne Shelton and “Sweating Saris” by Priya Srinivasan
ALRIGHT. I’ve been slacking, so I’m gonna combine some books to make these posts more writable/readable/all-around palatable.
So on Thursday 7/14, I camped out at Unicorn Cafe truly all day to make it through this monster of a book. I was at Pitchfork over the weekend, and then on Monday 7/18 I spent the morning in Kafein and the afternoon at Patisserie Coralie. (Sorry, no fun Chicago coffee shop reviews for these two books).
“Divine Dancer” didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know from Ruth’s own writing. It laid out the dichotomies in St. Denis’s life–aestheticism vs. moralism, and the artistic vs. the spiritual–a bit more clearly than her own writing, but that’s about it. Another important/notable thing that I had sort of glossed over before was the emergence and importance of dance criticism; St. Denis and Shawn were big proponents of dance criticism and helped get the first dance critics going. Which is p cool, if you ask me.
“Sweating Saris” was a very different, very cool read. Priya Srinivasan (who went to Northwestern for grad school, woo!) talks about how Indian dance can be perceived as a form of labor, and the ways in which that labor is reflected in the body. She investigates the intersection of race, gender, and labor, and talks about how dance as labor works in the economy, and how gender roles work within Indian dance (especially when it’s taught in western countries). Srinivasan grew up doing Bharata Natyam, which I also took growing up, so it was very cool to have that shared experience and to be able to read this book with a bit more of a personal lens on it. One of my favorite things about this book is that Srinivasan calls herself an “unruly spectator”; she will not be complacent in observing the way an audience member is intended to observe but rather challenges everything she sees and is very active in her spectatorship.
Srinivasan also addresses St. Denis. Before St. Denis created her own imagined versions of Indian dances, actual Indian dancers came to New York City from India and were received very poorly. The audience wanted them to be more exotic, more sexy than they were. Down the road, St. Denis puts herself in brown face and allows more skin to be shown and does dances that are more provocative than those done by the Indian dancers. So, of course, audiences loved her.
Srinivasan also talks about the power play and gender politics involved in teaching and learning Bharata Natyam in modern-day America, which was super interesting but not specifically relevant to St. Denis or the work for this URG. So I’ll leave that for another day; if you’re interested in talking to me about it let me know because I have a lot to say about it 😉