Kathak: Indian Classical Dance

            Sacred Monsters performed by Akram Khan, an Anglo-Indian Kathak dancer, and Sylvie Guillem, a French ballet dancer, illustrates the use of “physical and cultural dimensions” where the dance is beyond just a story, but rather “[understand] ‘mereotopology’, a topology of ‘regions’…to bypass the infamous dualism of body and mind” (Space and Culture 16.2). The connection between topology, a science, and philosophy brings forth the idea that body “is not detached from the ‘mental’ dimension of abstract ideas” (Space and Culture 16.2). In other words, the dance, Sacred Monsters, choreographed and danced by Khan and Guillem, incorporates the idea that two classical dances of different cultures can surpass the cultural barriers to and a “new topological map emerges…between London and New Delhi, between classical and contemporary: between multiple spaces and times”. The topological nature of the dance focuses on how the two distinct dances illustrate the “abstract nature of the choreography” that shows points, lines, fluidity, and “oneness” instead of the “multiple corporeal and cultural actualizations…in which they fall into actual definitions of classical and contemporary, traditional or postcolonial, pure or hybrid” (Space and Culture 16.2). In short, modern day Kathak can be mixed with other forms of dance from other cultures to form a hybrid dance that portrays abstract movement, like a hybrid Nritta style, rather than the Nritya style. ANALYZE!!