Performance Studies Working Group Presents Remapping Dance

Yale Performance Studies Working Group 

presents Ayesha Ramachandran Lyric & Dance: Exploring Transmedial Interpretations 

Tuesday, September 23 at 4:30pm

 Broadway Rehearsal Lofts, Room 303 

Focusing on the Akram Khan dance troupe’s interpretation and performance of a set of lyric poems by Karthika Naïr, themselves interpretations of a tale in the Mahābhārata, Ayesha Ramachandran asks: In what sense does dance mediate between lyric and narrative, perspectival experience and the unfolding of a story? Does dance veer towards lyric or epic in this instance? And how can we even begin to explore such generic conversations across forms and media? Ramachandran proposes a definition of lyric that foregrounds the ontological stance of the firstperson and thus enables a movement across time, space, and medium. 

Ayesha Ramachandran is Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University, where she holds affiliate appointments in the Programs in Early Modern Studies, in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, in the History of Science and Medicine, and in the Department of Italian Studies. A scholar of the literatures and cultures of early modern Europe, her research explores the disciplinary, theoretical, and material challenges posed by globalization from the late fifteenth century to the present. Her writing focuses on the making of worlds through interdisciplinary relations between art and science, particularly, poetry, philosophy (natural and political), cartography, visual and print culture. She is the author of The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2015; pbk 2018) which was awarded the MLA’s Scaglione prize in Comparative Literary Studies, the Milton Society of America’s Shawcross Prize, and the Sixteenth Century Studies Association’s Founder’s Prize. Her forthcoming book, Lyric Thinking: Towards a Global Poetics crafts a transhistorical and comparative account of lyric poetry radiating from the early modern period to classical antiquity and to our contemporary moment, taking its cue from poets reading other poets across language, time, and space. A third collaboratively written book project, Styles of Being: Early Modern Ontologies Now (in progress), brings these preoccupations together in an investigation of the links between anthropology and cross-cultural encounters in the early modern period.