Two years ago, I attended a lecture on the conservation of dance and performance art. Delivered by Louise Lawson, Head Conservator at the Tate, the lecture stressed the importance of documenting a performance’s intersubjective aspects, when caring for such works in a museum’s collecting context. These aspects include “professional networks” and the “shared values, meaning, language, relationships, social and cultural backgrounds of those involved with the production, performance and preservation of the work: dance culture and artistic influence.”¹ (Of course, the desire of the institution to document might also rightfully be impeded by an artist’s or community’s right to opacity).

This call to record intersubjectivities resonates with many themes explored in Copy of the Copy. Created by Dr Priya Srinivasan in collaboration with Danielle Micich, this dance-theatre piece maps the interconnected histories and pedagogical lineages of Indian classical dance and Western contemporary dance. It reveals artistic connections erased from canonical narratives of dance – “kinaesthetic legacies” rendered invisible by colonialism, casteism and anti-immigration policy.² Via Srinivasan's narration, we hear that mother of American modern dance Ruth St Denis studied the movements of Indian dancers on Coney Island and in New York (some of whom also taught her to make chappati). St Denis passed ‘Oriental dance’ on to her students (among them, Martha Graham) and its specific origins were gradually obscured, absorbed into North American modern dance. Srinivasan’s PhD research, published in her book Sweating Saris, explains another factor in this historical erasure: the United States enforced anti-Asian immigration laws in the early twentieth century, thus dwindling the number of Indian performers able to carry these bodily histories.³

Throughout Copy of the Copy, I record around 17 narrative sequences and sub-sequences. All reveal criss-crossing constellations of artistic influence and appropriation. In a particularly enchanting moment, Srinivasan moves in dialogue with St Denis whose ghostly projection twirls in a nautch dance across the stage curtain. Beyond the veil, Srinivasan’s silhouette spins to music adapted from Marius Petipa’s La Bayadère.

In another sequence, Srinivasan describes renowned Bharatanatyam dancer Rukmini Devi Arundale’s encounters with Louise Lightfoot, an Australian dancer who helped Indian dancers tour the continent during the White Australia Policy. On stage, Srinivasan’s dancing body mediates this exchange. She is centred between two gauzy projections – a pair of feet in ballet shoes and another in ankle bells.

Srinivasan tells the story of a student repudiated for wanting to learn a dance she is told does not befit the Brahmin class. Here, we are led to imagine that casteism might explain lost records of encounter. Reprised repeatedly throughout Copy of the Copy are also dance sequences set against watery projections, suggesting transgeographical networks and the migration of the dancing body.

Just as water represents transmission and migratory exchange, so too do recipes appear as pedagogical metaphor. In the first instance, a volunteer is invited behind the stage curtain to knead chappati. Over the thuds of dough on wood, the audience chants, on beat, a chappati recipe projected onto the curtain. Later, we recite the recipes for Indian dance and modern dance. The latter recipe reminds us to integrate Martha-like contractions and withhold from smiling. Yet later, the volunteer is called back and asked if they’ve altered the recipe – to which they respond in the affirmative. Thus, the destabilised process of bodily knowledge transmission is iterated through the metaphor of a recipe.