Prarthana Purkayastha (Plymouth University)  -

"The Skin of Performance"

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Drawing on postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakraborty's assertion that if modernity ‘is to be a definable, delimited concept, then we must identify some people and practices as non-modern’ (2002: xix), this paper examines how some contemporary South Asian performance practitioners have used their skin in performance to interrogate epistemic ruptures that accompany modernity. Taking Hetain Patel's TEN (2010) – a physical theatre piece that uses strategies such as blockage and mimicry – as case study, this paper notices the ways in which the skin can become a useful conceptual metaphor for stratified meaning-making in performance.

Dr Prarthana Purkayastha is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Plymouth University. She is the author of Indian Modern Dance, Feminism and Transnationalism (2014, Palgrave Macmillan), and scholarly essays in Dance Research Journal, South Asia Research and the forthcoming Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. Prarthana is also a practitioner whose recent works such as 'Devi the Divine Dancer' uses a feminist framework to examine her long-standing interest in gaze, spectacle and embodied agency within performance.

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