The article is an introduction to an interview with Indian film director Ashish Avikunthak, who divides his time between India and the United States. It focuses on Avikunthak's short film Dancing Othello (2002) which is itself based upon a play by Arjun Raina, The Magic Hour. It underlines the uncanny rapprochement of “Shakespeare” and “Kathakali” within the film, a rapprochement which draws each artistic form into the orbit of the other and thus undermines the canonical status of both. It also shows how this process of aesthetic and politically-motivated hybridisation goes one step further, as both "Shakespeare" and "Kathakali" are subsequently brought into contact with a form of street theatre which is alien to them (or at least alien to the dominant construction of them as embodiment of, respectively, Western and Eastern values). The article ends by addressing what the film director calls "disjunctural imagery", his experiment with haptic visuality which arguably registers in the realm of affect the cultural / aesthetic / political / work the film performs at the level of meaning.
Postcolonial Entanglements: Performing Shakespeare and Kathakali in Ashish Avikunthak’s Dancing Othello
CALBI, Maurizio
2011-01-01
Abstract
The article is an introduction to an interview with Indian film director Ashish Avikunthak, who divides his time between India and the United States. It focuses on Avikunthak's short film Dancing Othello (2002) which is itself based upon a play by Arjun Raina, The Magic Hour. It underlines the uncanny rapprochement of “Shakespeare” and “Kathakali” within the film, a rapprochement which draws each artistic form into the orbit of the other and thus undermines the canonical status of both. It also shows how this process of aesthetic and politically-motivated hybridisation goes one step further, as both "Shakespeare" and "Kathakali" are subsequently brought into contact with a form of street theatre which is alien to them (or at least alien to the dominant construction of them as embodiment of, respectively, Western and Eastern values). The article ends by addressing what the film director calls "disjunctural imagery", his experiment with haptic visuality which arguably registers in the realm of affect the cultural / aesthetic / political / work the film performs at the level of meaning.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
