Performativity and Nomadic Subjectivity in Shobana Jeyasingh's TooMortal

Extract

In Shobana Jeyasingh's TooMortal, a contemporary dance piece made for historic churches in Britain and Europe, six dancers enact rituals of life's journey. They use the pews as coffins and cradles and in doing so they interact with the architecture and rituals of the church space in new and disruptive ways. In this article Amita Nijhawan utilizes Judith Butler's notion of performativity and Rosi Braidotti's concept of nomadic subjectivity to suggest that through these encounters the dancers construct the church as a space where women can find power, refuge, agency, and perhaps sensuality. The dancers start by engaging with church rituals and imperfectly reiterating them in such a way that the performance takes on a performative function. The dancers’ bodies show the potential for dancing female bodies to disrupt patriarchal spaces and, therefore, the normative social order. Amita Nijhawan is a Teaching Fellow in Dance at the University of Surrey. Among others she has published in Media/Culture Journal, South Asian Popular Culture, and PAJ. She is a kathak and yoga practitioner, and a creative writer.