Assuming therefore a Constructivist and anti-Essentialist perspective, according to which 'the process of gendering sexed bodies is a constant shifting, reworking and reauthorizing of one's identity undertaken against or with local.The world is in the fighting the COVID-19 pandemic that has brought every country to a standstill. So when people stay in their houses, they need to be motivated, stay entertained and do some productive things staying indoors to kill boredom. In the house of Anthropology and Feminist Studies, gender and sexuality are generally considered not as naturally fixed qualities, but as multiple, changeable, unstable cultural constructs. This essay investigates what this process could mean for those social actors who place themselves out of the mainstream dichotomy male man/female woman, those social actors who constantly cross those cultural borders also in everyday life.
Thus, these acts of impersonation can sometimes become a mean for dancers to explore different bodily attitudes and feelings, to express emotions in different ways from what they are socially expected to do, to dance across culturally fixed boundaries of gender and sexuality. The exploration of gender nuances would therefore need to be real: for transmitting an emotional state in the way a certain character would do, the dancer should deeply experience what that character would feel. (3) As the Natyasastra, popular ancient treatise on Indian dramaturgy specifies, the aim of a Bharatanatyam dancer is to express feeling moods or bhavas, situations and acts in order to evoke in the spectator the appropriate emotive responses, the rasas (4,5). During my four years of training in Bharatanatyam, I experienced how this process of impersonation should go beyond gestures, beyond physical technique: the transformation should be deeper than merely creating a physical image. In the narrative component of this choreutic form, the Abhinaya, (2) they use facial expression and bodily attitudes to tell episodes from the big corpus of Hindu epic and mythology, becoming any character of the story: a king, a god, a princess, a lover, a demon. What I consider to be one of the most interesting elements characterizing the Indian classical dance style Bharatanatyam (1), is the modality in which dancers are demanded and at the same time allowed to move across gender boundaries. Keywords: Bharatanatyam, Abhinaya, gender identity, LGBT, queerness, Tamil Nadu This essay, basing on the ethnographic fieldwork I conducted during summer 2013 in Chennai (Tamil Nadu, India) with a LGBT group of dancers, explores individual modalities of crossing gender boundaries through Bharatanatyam. Assuming the Constructivist and anti-Essentialist perspective, according to which gender and sexuality are not naturally fixed qualities, but changeable and unstable cultural constructs, I attempt to explore the place Abhinaya could have in this process of self-shaping for homosexual, bisexual and transgender dancers. My research investigates what this process could mean for those social actors who place themselves out of the mainstream dichotomy male man/female woman. These acts of impersonation can sometimes become a mean for them to go beyond their "actual" gender and explore different attitudes and feelings.
MAHABHARAT 2013 CAST INTERVIEW SERIES
In the narrative component of this choreutic form, the Abhinaya, dancers are demanded to enact both male and female roles, using codified series of bodily attitudes and gestures. Abstract: Gender dynamics play an essential role within the Indian classic dance Bharatanatyam.
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