Priya Srinivasan

Priya Srinivasan has a dual career as an artist and scholar committed to questions of migration, female labour, and art. After obtaining a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, she became the first Indian Professor of Dance at the University of California, Riverside where she presented her hybrid talking dance lecture/performance based on her award winning book, Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labor, across the US in leading universities such as Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, Chicago, Northwestern, and in the UK at Oxford and Royal Holloway. She has a long career as a performer of post modern Indian artistic practices in Australia, USA, India, China, and Europe. She worked as an Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside and at the International Institute of Asian Studies at Leiden University, and is currently an independent artist and Honorary Fellow at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne.

On Centers and Peripheries

I want to begin this short contribution to the Dancehouse Diary by discussing centers and peripheries in the unceded land we call Naarm whose custodians are the Bunnwurung and Wurundjeri people. As a migrant child, the turn to South Asian arts in a white Australia was my haven from racism in everyday spaces where I was often told, as an Asian, to go back to where I came from. I began practicing dance, already politicised from a very young age, questioning who or what belonged at the center and who was in the periphery here in Naarm. As I grew older, I began understanding that Asians were not recent entrants to Australia. As my friend and collaborator First Nations Yolgnu artist Sylvia Nulpintidj recently reminded me, her people and my people have been in conversation for over 4000 years but I do not forget that we, along with everyone else, are guests on this land and therefore peripheral to the centers that First Nations people have imagined for this space for over 80,000 years. Read more...

The Labour of the Many – Staging the Few

Whose bodies are we seeing today in mainstream spaces? Whose aesthetics are dominant? Whose history occludes and makes invisible the labour of immigration and the absence of certain racialised borders that helped consolidate modern and contemporary dance practices today? How can those in power share the spaces and resources with the many in the margins? What can an attention to the historical assembly of all these flows, stoppages, and movement invite us to consider as we move forward? Read more...