Growing up, my sister and I listened to the soundtrack of the musical Pip-pin (1972) so frequently, with such verve, that a permanent skip formed in the middle of “War Is a Science.” (We eventually bought a replacement record.) I don’t recall her ever expressing interest in any other musical, but she LOVEDPippin. She was a particular fan of Ben Vereen, who received a Tony Award for Best A…
While a larger history of medieval Indian theatre, comprehensively accounting for its different literary, theoretical, and performative strands, still needs to be written, the ambition of the present study is to explore the emergence of an original debate on the nature of dance and dramatic acting in the Abhinavabh?rat?, Abhinavagupta’s eleventh-century commentary on Bharata’s N??ya??stra. …
It was the last day of October 2015 when I attended Rootlessroot’s (2015) performance Europium [The end of the world will be better this year]1 at the Onassis Stegi in Athens, Greece. Europium, the chemical element, is known for its volatile and unpredictable nature, much like the narratives circulating internationally about Greeks during the Greek financial crisis. …
Within Western institutional thinking, the human is constituted through an abil-ity to speak, defined as the sole creature who holds language and consequently is capable of articulating, representing, and reflecting upon the world. Along with language comes the power of naming, of choreographing the semantic categories put in place, continually reproduced and negotiated to make sense…
Over the next two centuries, the Company grew rapidly, often exploiting tensions between competing powers—the Mughals, the Marathas, the naw-abs of Awadh and Bengal, and the French in India. The year 1764 was espe-cially pivotal. In the battle of Buxar, Company officer Robert Clive defeated the combined forces of the weakened Mughals, and the Mughal emperor was forced to gran…