Must Indian dance be categorised simply as ethnic art?
by Shobana Jeyasingh
(Artistic Director of the Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company, London)
Below are excerpts of an article that first appeared in Connections, Summer 2002, London

In the 1980s, I approached the Arts Council of Great Britain (as it was then known) for funding a tour of a series of Indian dance. They agreed to support me as an 'ethnic dancer' - that irked me, it was like being put in a cage. I could not see the logic of how I merited a distinct category to do only with my racial origins. The institutional attitude to the art form that I practised seemed to shape my relationship with the funding body and not the nature of the art form itself. My youthful naivety argued for putting me in the well funded category that housed ballet, another classical dance. It seemed an intellectually ludicrous position to be an ethnic dancer in precisely the country that I wasn't ethnic to!

An elderly and well-meaning lady on the dance panel could not comprehend my feelings of artistic disenfranchisement. The august portals of the Arts Council had opened to me - wasn't that a sign of acceptance? She thought that 'ethnic' suggested something pure and authentic and perfectly captured my position as a classical Indian dancer in Britain. The message was clear: I could belong to the arts community but in certain prescribed ways.

It took me some time to unravel the fact that the term 'the arts of the ethnic minorities' had in the popular consciousness found a happy home in the long held colonial notions of ethnicity. The shortened term 'ethnic arts' had become with the Orientalist 'native arts' with all its historically conditioned prejudices. Native art was viewed as rural, non-dynamic, ahistoric - part & parcel of the way Europe had traditionally engaged with the East, creating it in the image of its own desires. It was a sort of arts that only existed in the act of being looked at. There was no room in this worldview for any other classical dance other than ballet.

The unchallenged belief was that non-European cultures were somehow alien - to be benignly tolerated rather than bridged through the active sharing of a common slice of history. The term 'ethnic arts' is no longer used by the Arts Council. Now more sophisticated labels and mechanisms apply which perhaps better reflect the way non-white people like to see their participation in British life.

However, the attitudes behind the labels are harder to change. Even though I am not a dancer anymore but a choreographer whose work is far outside the narrowly classical, the simplistic and prescribed link between racial origins and artistic culture is still something that I have to contend with. There are still venue managers who believe that the most appropriate audience for a British artist of Asian origin is the 'Asian community', as if that were a homogeneous entity.

The fixed triad of race, culture and art still generates the inevitable starting point of much critical comment on the work of such artists - comment that is at times closer to anthropology than artistic evaluation. While race is a biologically fixed entity, culture is dynamic and socially contingent. For second generation Asians and younger whites in Britain, cultural diversity is in the process of being internalised, an attitude that is second nature rather than a policy laid down self-consciously. In addition, technology is encouraging crossing of cultural boundaries and will immensely influence that nature of British art and how artists choose to work.

The present race-led policies mean that while a white choreographer influenced by Indian dance may not press the cultural diversity button for funding, a black dancer trained in western contemporary dance will. Some dance companies have become organically multiracial without necessarily becoming multicultural in their output. These occasional grey areas of the present may well be the norm of the future. Creating an equitable space for the expression of artistic cultures will require going beyond issues of race and into the complex areas of 21st century identity. Policies should become agents of liberation rather than of containment.

(END)