ABSTRACT

How can I as a Swedish dancer devoted to the Indian classical dance form, kathak, re root it into my own cultural sphere? And express topics beyond the Sub Indian continent without diluting the essence of the art form?

I don’t want to create a new dance style.I don’t want to add anything. I want to explore and investigate how I within the tradition of kathak dance and Hindustani music can shuffle the classical format in order to create a longer narrative. 

To create a dramaturgical nerve in the performance and take it further than the traditional short dances and compositions connected by being strung together on a basic rhythm. During this work I have followed different strands of evolution within me as a kathak dancers as well as personal experiences that has led up to this need of making it my kathak dance, rather than my Indian kathak dance. It’s also a close study of the relationship between a student and her master and how the master forces his student to mature to become her own master. 

I want to use the kathak dance as an artistic expression to create performances based on topics interesting to me. I want to use the rhythmical patterns to enhance, elaborate and ornament the story told. How can I use the bols and sound from the kathak dance and Hindustani music? What happens if I instead of using bols create similar material but based on the Swedish language? The unexpected result of my research, the unexpected finding of what happened with me after I decided to drop India, and to focus my gaze to my own cultural space by being a native Swedish person living in Stockholm was that I lost my dance. I lost my geography.