UCLA

This dissertation demonstrates how diasporic practice experiments with cultural forms of communities of African and Asian descent for decolonizing purposes, or radically transforms systemically oppressive politics on nation, race, gender, and sexuality. Through case studies of two transnational dance companies known as the Los Angeles-based REALITY and Minneapolis-based Ananya Dance Theatre and their respective choreographers David Roussève and Ananya Chatterjea, I discuss how choreographies are grounded in exploration of communities living outside boundaries of racial, ethnic, and national origin and an enduring engagement in dance forms and traditions for the purposes of crafting stories about challenges faced by communities of African and Asian descent. Since the late 1980s, Roussève/REALITY has experimented with identities of the African diaspora through utilizing contact improvisation, jazz, Euro-American modern dance, West African-based movement, and Hip-Hop to emphasize experience in terms of gay black men's losses to AIDS and black women's stories of sexual violence. Representing these black cultural forms and histories alongside the Asian diaspora, Roussève and REALITY connect experimentations in black cultural forms with Asian performance practices in contemporary Indian and Indonesian dance. Since the mid-1990s, Chatterjea has experimented with South Asian identity by engaging with the Indian dance forms of Odissi dance, Chhau martial arts, and yoga to connect the environmental, gender-based violence experienced by South Asian women to persons of Asian and African descent. Also representing stories in cross-cultural formation, Chatterjea and Ananya Dance Theatre align experimentations with Indian dance forms with an African American theatrical jazz aesthetic. To examine racial formations across African and Asian cultures, I utilize a methodology of: dance and film analysis; life history interviews; observations of dance rehearsals, live performances, and films; dance critiques; and autoethnography of my connections as a researcher with the artistic works under scrutiny. This research contributes to gender and sexuality, diaspora, dance, and performance studies.