School of Culture and Creative Arts - Glasgow Theatre Seminar
Date: Wednesday 14 May 2025
Time: 15:30 - 17:00
Venue: James Arnott Theatre, Gilmorehill Centre
Category: Public lectures, Academic events
Speaker: Professor Royona Mitra

 Unmaking Contact: Choreographing South Asian Touch interrogates “contact”, understood in Global North dance discourse as a shorthand for the movement discipline of contact improvisation (CI) and its characteristic shifting points of weight-sharing between two or more bodies through physical touch, by attending to power asymmetries that are foundational to this practice. By placing South Asian aesthetics, bodies, discourses, and philosophies on touch at the heart of its interrogation through the lenses of caste, ecology, faith, gender, and sexuality, I argue for an intersectional, intercultural, and inter-epistemic understanding of contact, that may or may not involve touch. In doing so, I shift and expand understandings of “contact” in dance-making through intercultural epistemologies that examine notions of touch and contact.

Through foregrounding South Asian transnational dance artists - India based contemporary choreographers Akila and Diya Naidu, UK-Pakistan based kathak exponent Nahid Siddiqui, and US-based drag queen LaWhore Vagistan - in this book, the term contact becomes an apparatus for dismantling power regimes; it is conjured as a catalyst to examine power in social relations; it appears as a fulcrum of ecological relationality; it arises as critical encounters full of generative and transformative potential; and finally, it manifests as community.

Royona Mitra is Professor of Dance and Performance Cultures and Associate Pro Vice Chancellor of Equity and Inclusion at Brunel University of London, UK. She is the author of Unmaking Contact: Choreographing South Asian Touch (2025, OUP) and Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism (2015, Palgrave). Her first monograph was awarded the 2017 de la Torre Bueno First Book Award by the Dance Studies Association (DSA); her article "Unmaking Contact: Choreographic Touch at the Intersections of Race, Caste and Gender", was awarded DSA’s Gertrude Lippincott Award in 2022 for the Best English Language Journal Article; and her co-edited journal special issue titled "Outing Archives/Archives Outing" for Contemporary Theatre Review journal, alongside Profs Bryce Lease and Melissa Blanco Borelli, was awarded the Theatre and Performance Research Association's Edited Collection Prize in 2022. Her research examines systems of oppression in dance and performance cultures at the intersections of bodies, social power regimes, and choreography as resistance. She contributes to the fields of diaspora and performance, South Asian dance and performance cultures, critical dance studies and performance studies. Royona was Co-Investigator on the AHRC funded #DanceResearchMatters “South Asian Dance Equity” project (2023-2025) alongside Drs Prarthana Purkayastha (PI, RHUL) and Anusha Kedhar (Co-I, UC Riverside) and is the current co-Chair of TaPRA alongside Dr Broderick Chow (RCSSD) (2022-).

For access information and directions, visit: https://www.accessable.co.uk/university-of-glasgow/access-guides/gilmorehill-halls

This hybrid event will be simultaneously livestreamed – to join us online, visit: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/81652115303?pwd=EeWpDePtHLaN7t4Chxa9kzEZXzDGrL.1