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Migratory Rituals or Classical Dance Forms?: “Trance” Dance and Bharatanatyam as Signifiers of Tamil Identity in Diasporic Hindu Communities in Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2013

Ann R. David
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Abstract

This paper examines the performance of religion in British Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu communities using ethnographic research to investigate the use of classical dance and trance, or embodied dance, as performative practice. Contemporary U.K. evidence of Tamil Saivite worship shows an affiliation of dance and ritual being articulated and reinvented through the classical dance form of Bharatanatyam and through its transmission in the temple environment in an increasing display of embodied diasporic Hinduism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Congress on Research in Dance Conference Proceedings , Volume 39 , supplement S1: Choreographies Of Migration: Patterns Of Global Mobility , 2007 , pp. 29 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2007

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