Hybridity and Nomadic Subjectivity in Shobana Jeyasingh’s Duets with Automobiles

Abstract

In Duets with Automobiles (1993) three female dancers (Jeyaverni Jeganathan, Savitha Shekhar and Vidya Thirunarayan), filmed inside and outside three London office buildings (The Ark, Hammersmith, anary Wharf and Alban Gate, London Wall), perform a mixture of vocabulary from contemporary dance and the traditional, Indian classical dance form of Bharata Natyam. I argue that the choreography and filming of the juxtaposition and interaction of the three female dancers with the geographically situated architecture construct these spaces as ‘in-between’. In the process West/East and male/female binaries are blurred suggesting the possibility of a rethought, contemporary, urban, female subjectivity.