Locating Odissi in the United States: Dancing through Curricula, Teaching Methods, and Assessment

ABSTRACT

Teaching Odissi in the university space is not new to me. However, as a dancer-scholar located in India, teaching this dance form in a university in the United States expanded and deepened my understanding of this dance form and the ways it can be taught. This encounter, a collision of cultures, beliefs, and movement practices in the dance studio, engendered a pedagogical process that revealed itself as I taught this class over two semesters. The design of the class discussed in this article emerged from an intersection of my own training in Odissi with my guru and the institutional requirements of the program. This paper unpacks my pedagogical process of creating a syllabus, adopting teaching strategies, and assessing student work for negotiating the cultural chasm between me and my students, hoping to generate a sense of critical questioning, mutual curiosity, and respect.

KEYWORDS:

• Odissi curriculum
• traditional pedagogy
• US university

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. While students were aware of Bharatnatyam and Bollywood, the students that I interacted with had never heard of Odissi. However, given the large Indian diaspora in the United States, this may not be true in every teaching context.

2. Lord Jagannath is a Hindu deity considered an avatar (incarnation) of Lord Vishnu. The Jagannath temple is in Puri, Odisha, where he is worshipped along with his elder brother Balabhadra and sister Subhadra.

3. Drawing on the work of Shapiro (1999), the idea of the perceiving body places the body (of the student and the teacher) as the primary medium of perception and creation of reality. This implies that what gets taught and learned in class is negotiated through the varied realities of the teacher and the students (as constituted by their individual bodies). Pedagogy therefore “cannot be equated narrowly with instructional tools and practices” (Shapiro 1999, 10).

4. Growing up dancing in the incense filled living room of my guru, the formal studio space, with large mirrors and wooden floors, was an uncomfortable and unfamiliar space for me.

5. This is not to say that this somatic experience is not possible within India. The political nationalist esthetics within which the classical is framed in India, however, often clouds this somatic experience especially if, as a scholar, one is critiquing and problematizing these narratives.

6. In Oriya language, “Goti” means “single” and “Pua” means “boy.” Gotipua are troupes of pre-pubescent boys who dress as women to dance on bhakti poetry. The Gotipua’s dance style is a precursor to the classical Odissi dance tradition.

7. The Maharis were women dedicated to the temples in Orissa and were the chief repositories of the Odissi dance tradition.

8. Chauk is a basic Odissi stance where the weight of the body is distributed equally on both the sides. Chauk literally means square.

9. I found myself teaching in a multicultural class, where there were no Indian students in the dance class, even as there were Indian students on campus.

10. The dominant language spoken in Orissa.

11. Recitation of rhythmic patterns of the percussion instrument.