i PAPER CHOREOGRAPHY: My ancestors dance through me Experimenting with the Unarchival of a South African South Asian Dancer’s Family Archive while Exploring 'Indian-ness’ and Interwoven Dance Cultures and its pedagogical contribution to or implications for the reconfiguring of the Archive. Anusia Govender-Elshove Student No: 1917955 ii Thesis as a fulfillment of the Degree Doctor of Philosophy (Theatre and Performance) by Creative Thesis at the University of the Witwatersrand Supervisor: Dr. Myer Taub iii University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg School of the Arts SENATE PLAGIARISM POLICY Declaration by Students I Anusia Govender-Elshove (Student number: 1917955; ethics clearance no.: H22/01/26 ) am a student registered for Doctor of Philosophy (Theatre and Performance) by Creative Thesis in the year 2023. I hereby declare the following:  I am aware that plagiarism (the use of someone else’s work without their permission and/or without acknowledging the original source) is wrong.  I confirm that ALL the work submitted for assessment for the above course is my own unaided work except where I have explicitly indicated otherwise.  I have followed the required conventions in referencing the thoughts and ideas of others.  I understand that the University of the Witwatersrand may take disciplinary action against me if there is a belief that this is not my own unaided work or that I have failed to acknowledge the source of the ideas or words in my writing. Signature: Date: 23 June 2023 iv DEDICATION Namaste, I dedicate this thesis to my parents… My wonderful father, Mr. Dhanabalan Govender, My rock, pillar of strength and my most ardent supporter. - I love, respect and appreciate you; In loving memory of my Mother, Guru, and best friend, Mrs Luxmidhevi (Rani Nydoo) Govender. You are with me, always! My amazing husband, Mr. Bobby Elshove, my truest partner in every possible way. We finally found each other! And especially, To my favourite niece/daughter Savera Moir, Remember, you are so special, a new breed of South African artist and teacher. Never fear to dance in the footsteps of the great women and men before you. I love you to the moon and back! v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1. This dissertation would not be possible without the “pioneering” work and legacy of the Nydoo Sisters: my mother Rani, my aunts Suryakantha (Radha) and Padmavati (Prema), Mrs Sulochana Naidoo, my ancestors and Gurus -You dance in, and live through me. 2. To the Universe, my divine partner that held me up. 3. To my sister Veena and brother-in-law Keith. Your support, love and understanding mean the world to me. 4. My supervisor, Dr. Myer Taub, thank you for your steadfast support, encouragement, motivation, passion, and trust. You have my unending gratitude and friendship. 5. Prof. Sharlene Khan of the Fine Arts department, my first PhD supervisor, whose expertise and knowledge helped with the initial creative moulding and shaping of this study. 6. To the National Arts Council for a 3-year bursary to enable me to successfully complete my PhD Study, and The University of the Witwatersrand Postgraduate Merit Award for supporting my academic endeavours – this study would not be possible without it. 7. The proposal readers: Prof. Hazel Barnes and Prof. David Andrew for their generosity and guidance in materialising this study. 8. Lori-Jo Bateman at Wits Writing Centre, your enthusiasm and passion for creativity helped buoy my spirits and drive with this study. You are the cherry on the top. 9. Senior librarian, Cynthia Smith as well as Suzette Jansen Van Rensburg, and the staff at the Inter Library Loans department at Wits Main Library, you are so appreciated. Your kindness, support, friendship and patience will never be forgotten. 10. Reshma Chhiba, my sister in dance, for your support, encouragement and unwavering dedication to dance both within and outside of the local academy. 11. My academic “soul sisters” Mrs. Alane Naidoo and Prof. Shenuka Singh, both brilliant minds and souls. Thank you for walking this path with me. You are both such sources of inspiration to me. 12. Ms. Youlendree Appasamy, Zine-master extraordinaire, for her feedback on my very first zine that is part of this study. 13. My dearest friend, Shivani Naidoo, and my family/soul tribe for being my cheerleading squad through this empowering period in my life. 14. To all the students of the Nydoo Sisters School of Dance/Anavarata Dance Institute – my superstar children - you are the true inspiration behind every step I take. It is so heartening to see you grow and blossom into artists, teachers and parents to guide forthcoming generations. vi ABSTRACT The aim of this study was to challenge the understanding of the concept of an archive of the indigenous/marginalised in territory that was previously dominated by a western/colonial presence, in places and spaces that are considered non-traditional. To explore the archive as a performative process and expansive practice by answering the question: How can the ‘unarchival’ process be a functional framework with which to make meaning in transmuting or liberating the artefacts of my family archive, my embodied self, and the ‘Indian-ness’ of South Asian dance, through reconfiguration of experimental iterations that reflect the current reality of this dance form as it unfolds and develops in the South African dance industry and academy? The idea was to utilise the artefacts of my family dance archive, in creative ways, to highlight the interweaving of cultures, while also disrupting the notion of purity and authenticity around South Asian dance with a melange interweaving of the archive of dance styles present in my body of work. The research methodology utilised was autoethnography/biography, with yarning/storytelling to acknowledge the geneaology/genesis of the perceived Indian monolithic culture in both India and South Africa. This study focused on the process of the ‘unarchival’ of my physical family dance archive and, my South Asian dancing body which is a palimpsestic, embodied, living archive. This involved curating an online exhibition of groupings of artefacts, of re-presenting and re-storying, deconstructing and reconstructing my family archive, thereby making them both emancipated and accessible. I argued that the archive is not limited to ‘Indian-ness’, but consists of an early interweaving and intermingling of cultures. The physical artefacts were used to create various iterations of “paper choreography” as my creative work activates the family archive, using paper to enable movement/dance. There was experimentation with age-old modes and my curatorial role in preserving and perpetuating my family’s dance origins which intersects with South Asian dance history in South Africa more broadly, and particularly its pedagogy. By researching unarchival as a curatorial process, I have attempted to recreate history and socio-political narratives: on a macro-level (the histories of both the Indian subcontinent - its influences and changes over centuries – as well as African history) and a micro-level (my own history) with a primordial conceptualisation. Three chapters focus firstly on the Unarchival process and its formulation. Next, the exploration of the concept of ‘Indian-ness’ in terms of dance, identity and archival implications for this study. The final chapter explores the interwoven nature of the dance direction my family and I chose to take by incorporating many cultures into our Indian dance core curriculum over 61 years. This creative study addressed the dearth in the field in the South African academy. The relevance/importance of the study to the field is that the unarchival process/act is seen as a relatively unexplored area, not just in reconfiguring an archive, but also the embodiment of the culture and identity of South Asian dance and dancers that are often mis/under-represented and misunderstood. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS: THE PERFORMANCE PROGRAMME Title Page................................................................................................................................................. i Thesis details .......................................................................................................................................... ii Dedication .............................................................................................................................................. iv Acknowledgement .................................................................................................................................. v Abstract .................................................................................................................................................. vi Contents Page ....................................................................................................................................... vii Glossary of Creative Work - Online Exhibition ............................................................................. viii Appendix List ........................................................................................................................................ ix List of Illustrations with References ....................................................................................................... x INTRODUCTION: THE CURTAIN RISES ......................................................................... 1 Introduction: ............................................................................................................................................ 1 Aims…………………………………………………………………………………………………….9 Rationale, Methodology, Conceptual Framework……………………………………………………..11  Methodology…………………………………………………………………………………..11  Significant Original Contribution to Knowledge ..................................................................... 17 CHAPTER 1 Overture: Unarchival - A Performative Act of Seeking, Holding and Freeing .............................. 21 CHAPTER 2 Finding My Seat in the Theatre: The Unarchival Dance of ‘Indian-Ness’ .................................... 51 CHAPTER 3 The Final Act - Interwoven: The Dance of Many Cultures, its Learnings and Teachings ............................................................................................................................................ 97 CONCLUSION: CURTAIN CALL .................................................................................... 139 BIBLIOGRAPHY: ............................................................................................................... 168 APPENDICES………………………………………………………………………………201 viii GLOSSARY OF CREATIVE WORK - ONLINE EXHIBITION: “LETTING THE FAMILY ARCHIVE OUT OF THE BOX…” Accessible at: https://anusiagovenderelsh.wixsite.com/mysite ............. 9 The site contains the following: Chapter 1: When we dance …: https://youtu.be/029aRawjFHw .................................. 44 Hands of time: https://youtu.be/xRpY9gjMXrg ........................................... 44 Chapter 2: Alive: https://youtu.be/1bv7bVPNqYI ......................................................... 63 Zine : https://issuu.com/anusiagp/docs/e-zine-_anusia_pillay_-_1917955-_phd_-_ch2 ………………………………………………………………………………..78 Chapter 3: Metamorphosis (puppet theatre): https://youtu.be/tUEOBmklSDw…124 Showreel of 3 events – interweaving dance cultures: https://youtu.be/w0V0BexBBxk.................................................................... 134 https://anusiagovenderelsh.wixsite.com/mysite https://youtu.be/029aRawjFHw https://youtu.be/xRpY9gjMXrg https://youtu.be/1bv7bVPNqYI https://issuu.com/anusiagp/docs/e-zine-_anusia_pillay_-_1917955-_phd_-_ch2 https://youtu.be/tUEOBmklSDw ix APPENDIX LIST APPENDIX A: ABSTRACT, MA THESIS (Pillay, 2019: vi) .................................... 201 APPENDIX B: Thandiwe Princess Mzobe (Post, 3-6 May 1995) ............................. 202 APPENDIX C: A description of Indian Classical Dance pedagogy in four Indian Diasporas, of my own creation (Pillay, 2019: 69) .............................. 203 APPENDIX D: Indian Folk Dance Curriculum (N2) ................................................. 204 APPENDIX E: Indian Folk Dance Curriculum (N3) ............................................... 212 APPENDIX F: Letter of Syllabi Request from Eastside College .............................. 220 APPENDIX G: World Dance Syllabus (Hands Up) ....................................................226 APPENDIX H: A Selection of My Online Footage and Articles ............................... 234 x LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS WITH REFERENCES Fig.1: A few pictures from my family archive and a ‘selfie’, taken in a 2020 postgraduate workshop, that reflects on the passage of sixty years of existence to the archive of creative practice (collage from my family archive).................................................................................1 Fig.2: Ken Gampu, Nydoo Sister’s guest of honour Anonymous. 1965. Indian culture: “Dancing Bells” was fitting farewell (The Indian Trend, no date: npn) .............................................................................................................................. 6 Fig. 3: The Nydoo Sisters’ Arrangetram programme, picture with their Guru and my mother’s certificate with her dance title, India, 1961 .............................................................. 21 Fig. 4: ‘ReAssembling the Archive’ exhibition at the 2019 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (Bhatia, 2020) .................................................................................................. 33 Fig.5: Screenshots of my conversation with Hanna Miller on my LinkedIn profile (2021) Pillay, A. 2021. LinkedIn. Hanna Miller message (2021, October 13). Available at: ........................................................ 36 Fig.6: Rupi Kaur Kaur, R. no date. Pintrest . Ode to Matisse’s Dance. Available at: . Accessed 23 June 2019… ... 42 Fig. 7: Three generations of dancing feet and bells: (from left to Right) my mother’s, mine, and our late student Renusha Manilall’s, from the family dance archive (collage from my family archive) ........................................................................................................................ 51 Fig.8: The site of the 6000 year-old Shiva Lingam at the Sudwala caves in Nelspruit, South Africa Reddy, A. 2021. ‘6000-year-old Shiva Linga was not discovered by archaeologists in the Sudwala Caves (South Africa)’, FACTLY. Available at: . Accessed: 31 July 2022. ......................................................................................................... 60 Fig.9: Comic strip circulated on the 160 th anniversary of the indenture Mangena, African News Agency (2020, November 17) 160 YEARS SINCE INDENTURED INDIANS ARRIVED IN SA. Facebook. Available at: ............................................................................................................................... 61 Fig.10: Collage of pop up book –‘India: A World of dance’ by me ........................................ 65 Fig.11: Screenshot of sculpture indicating a local Indian (Mohan in Youtube, 2014) ............ 70 Fig. 12: Sculpture indicating European presence and a coin as comparison (Mohan in Youtube, 2014) (screenshots have been reconfigured by me) ................................................ 71 Fig. 13: Sculpture indicating Indo-African interaction (Mohan in Youtube, 2014) ............... 73 http://www.linkedin.com/in/anusia-pillay-60054721/ http://www.linkedin.com/in/anusia-pillay-60054721/ https://za.pinterest.com/pin/707839266411819136/?lp=true https://factly.in/6000-year-old-shiva-linga-was-not-discovered-by-archaeologists-in-the-sudwala-caves-south-africa/ https://factly.in/6000-year-old-shiva-linga-was-not-discovered-by-archaeologists-in-the-sudwala-caves-south-africa/ https://www.facebook.com/shika xi Fig.14: Cover of zine Pillay , A. 2022. The Unarchival Dance of ‘Indian-ness’. Isuu. Available at: ............. 79 Fig.15: Page two of zine Pillay , A. 2022. The Unarchival Dance of ‘Indian-ness’. Isuu. Available at: ............. 80 Fig.16: Page three of zine Pillay , A. 2022. The Unarchival Dance of ‘Indian-ness’. Isuu. Available at: ............. 82 Fig.17: Page four of zine Pillay, A. 2022. The Unarchival Dance of ‘Indian-ness’. Isuu. Available at: ............. 84 Fig.18: Page five of zine Pillay, A. 2022. The Unarchival Dance of ‘Indian-ness’. Isuu. Available at: ............. 86 Fig.19: Page six of zine Pillay , A. 2022. The Unarchival Dance of ‘Indian-ness’. Isuu. Available at: ............. 88 Fig.20: Walker’s mural Walker, K. 1994. Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart. New York , wall installation. Available at: ....................... 89 Fig.21: Page seven of zine Pillay , A. 2022. The Unarchival Dance of ‘Indian-ness’. Isuu. Available at: ............. 92 Fig.22: Page eight of zine Pillay , A. 2022. The Unarchival Dance of ‘Indian-ness’. Isuu. Available at: ............. 93 Fig. 23: Screen shot of my DNA test results (www.myheritage.com) ....................................... 95 Fig.24. A tribute to the Indian Indentured in a scene from ‘Evolution of the Rainbow’, Roodepoort Theatre, 17 July 2019. Directed by Anusia Govender-Pillay .............................. 97 Fig.25: Interwoven artefacts from the archive by Anusia Govender-Pillay (2020) ............... 97 Fig. 26: ‘Illumination’ from NNTV programme called “Blase”( 1996) ............................... 102 Fig. 27: Renusha Manilall (Pillay, 2019: 137) ...................................................................... 114 https://www.moma.org/artists/7679 http://www.moma.org/collection/works/110565 http://www.myheritage.com/ xii Fig.28: Timeline of the various syllabi/curricula formulated to formalise Indian dance in the South African education system that were never actioned, created by Anusia Govender-Pillay in 2022. ................................................................................................................................... 118 Fig.29: My ancestor’s record on a ships list (Dept. of Home Affairs,1988)........................ 123 Fig.30: My story box and shadow puppet theatre ..................................................................124 Fig.31: ‘Shiva- Parvati’, Nydoo Sisters, 1960s (from the family archive) ............................124 Fig.32: First Indo- Zulu concert in Chatsworth, Neighbour News, 1995 ............................. 128 Fig.33: Anavarata Dance institute, Mauritius, 1995. ............................................................ 129 Fig.34: Anavarata Dance institute’s logo created in 2011 by Prenuka, Rajarathnam, Naufal Khan and Anusia Govender-Pillay ........................................................................................ 137 Fig.35 : Curtain calls over 60 years: from The Nydoo Sisters in 1962 to present day, Anavarata’s most recent performance at ‘India Day’, 13 August 2022 (collage from the family archive) ...................................................................................................................... 139 Fig.36: The cover of Tony Joseph’s (2018) book depicting the ‘dancing girl’ statue ........... 158 1 INTRODUCTION: THE CURTAIN RISES Fig.1: A few pictures from my family archive and a ‘selfie’, taken in a 2020 postgraduate workshop, that reflects on the passage of sixty years of its existence to the archive of creative practice. BACKGROUND When we dance… we communicate, we exchange, we hurt, we bleed, we heal, we grow, we share, we conflate, we are broken open, we are family, we are visible, we resist, we persist, we are continuum, we are powerful, we are free, we are one! - Anusia Govender-Pillay (2020) To me dance is life. I am the progeny of Luxmidhevi (Rani Nydoo) Govender (1944-2005) who, as a 13-year-old, made her first sojourn to India in 1959/1960. She was among the first 2 0F 1F 4F 2F 3F three South Africa Indians to study a full repertoire of Bharata Natyam 1 . Rani became the first documented South African pedagogue, aged fifteen, of the dance form, amongst others to formally teach Indian dance at the Nydoo Sisters School of Dance in Durban (1961) 2 . This does not negate contributions of Indian nationals and other South Africans, nor does it rule out the possibility that there were others amongst the indentured that may have had some training in the classical dance form. My mother kept a well-documented record of their experiences and career in what began as scrapbooks and evolved into a family archive that spans 61 years. Consisting of pictures, posters, programmes, articles from newspapers and other publications, books, choreographic notes, sketch books, video footage, costumes, tin trunks, props and jewellery, it documents a generational history. It is situated in various locations in my home, in portions at the 1860 Documentation Centre in Durban and the Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre of the University of KwaZulu-Natal 3 in Durban 4 . I returned to the academy in 2018, after 25 years, to attain my MA degree in Theatre and Performance 5 , this became my initial design to my local academic performance, focussing on the ellipses in South Asian Dance history and pedagogy through my mother’s posthumous voice in the archive. It traced my family’s dance evolution and questioned the future pedagogical value and implications for decolonising Indian dance (and those of other marginalised communities) in postcolonial/indenture, and post-apartheid South Africa. I curated the physical artefacts to document a neglected South Asian portion of South African dance history. As a cathartic process, it freed me up to delve into the lingering feeling that 1 The other two young girls were Sulochana Naidoo (16) and my aunt Prema Nydoo (9), who all studied at Sarawathy Gana Nilayam in Triplicane, Chennai together. My mother and two of her sisters were accompanied by their mother. Sulochana returned to South Africa in July 1961, while my family returned in October 1961, after my mother received advanced training with Dr. Padma Subrahmanyam after completing her initial training. My mother studied drama, music, drawing and painting alongside her dance training as well. 2 “They opened a dance School in the early 1960s. Their first student was Vasugi Singh (nee Devar), author of this book” (Vasugi Devar Singh, 2019: 60). 3 This was the former University of Durban-Westville. It became amalgamated with the University of Natal to form the University of KwaZulu-Natal. 4 These institutions have copied portions of the archive, both physical and digital, since the 1990s. This is found on the Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre website: http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/gandhi-luthuli-documentation-centre/rani-naidoo- dancer 5 My Master’s thesis is entitled My Mother Dances in Me: A history of South Asian Dance by South African Indian Women Through the Lens of a Family Archive as a Lived Experience (2019), accredited to Wits School of the Arts. http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/gandhi-luthuli-documentation-centre/rani-naidoo- 3 the archival exploration was still unfinished. Interestingly, the name Nydoo (meaning ‘justice’ in Telegu) was originally Naidoo, and was changed by my late maternal grandfather to indicate the trajectory of our family’s drive. It was also to create our own marker of identity – we would be able to know our kin anywhere in the world. With this study, though still based on my family archive, I, like my late grandfather, am creating a new entity or performance based on the re-configuration of the old and expected. I created a new identity marker or story for myself, the field of dance and the academy. This is where the curtain rises on this study, on a new theatre performance or as in the old days, a cinema screening – setting the stage for the process of realising the potential of, and seeking something more substantial in, my story and my family archive. This study covers a few key concepts from my life, work and family archive that incorporate aspects of South Asian/Indian dance (used interchangeably in this study) and its deep-rooted storytelling component. Firstly, my pursuit of this type of research would not have been possible even a few years ago as ‘unarchival’ is a relatively new and untapped area of study. With ‘unarchival’, the experimentation with the spatial orientation and placements of artefacts within the archive could expose the materiality to the inner workings of an individual, just as movement gives expression through the dancing body. The website UNARCHIVAL.com is a visual research project by RDYSTDY video artists Hanna Miller and Jacob Perkins who state their purpose as being, “To change our course for the future - and our reflexes in a present moment - by reclassifying the past. Placing old objects in new contexts” (unarchival.com, 2020). My intimate knowledge of both the physical and embodied archives aided in animating the artefacts of my family archive to unite both iterations into a third. What may appear a simple feat of re-assemblage on the surface is far more complicated in 4 5F 6F 7F 8F reality. How do I take apart complex bodies of knowledge? My creative approach is similar to the concept of creating the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle. In the act of extraction and reconfiguration of various artefacts, to provoke innate possibility, would these pieces eventually fit together to reveal a new story or picture? This approach considered the cultural seepage in India from multiple migrations and invasions in a similar way that has happened in the South African context. By researching unarchival as a curatorial process, I have attempted to recreate history and socio-political narratives: on a macro-level (the histories of both the Indian subcontinent - its influences and changes over centuries – as well as African history) and a micro-level (my own history) with a primordial conceptualisation. Secondly, the influence of various cultures makes up a strong DNA 6 thread over time. DNA is not just taken in the clinical sense in this study but rather as a basic denominator or composition of culture/art that is described as Indian (it is believed that DNA itself dances 7 ). Video dance art scholar Jeannette Ginslov (2016) believes that, “Through our bodies, we make contact, contain, remember and remake living stories, create memories, narratives and meaning for ourselves and others” 8 . It could also refer to cell memory transmission that is programmed into our DNA. Anthropologist/dancer Claire Vionnet (2018) refers to the dancing body as a “living archive”, saying that, “my body carries the souvenir of dancing and ethnographic experiences. My body is shaped by past performances, dancing skills and encounters with dance pedagogues who taught me” 9 . Temporality, its traversability and connotations are vital to this study and its creative processes. Inma Álvarez (2009: 1), a dance 6 According to geneticist Adam Rutherford (2018), “DNA is the code in your cells. It is the richest but also most complex treasure trove of information that we’ve ever attempted to understand.” 7 “DNA flows inside a cell's nucleus in a choreographed line dance, new simulations reveal. The finding is the first large- scale explanation of genetic material moving within a working cell. …The dancing DNA may play a role in gene expression, replication and remodeling, though the exact effects remain unclear, the researchers reported online October 22 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” (Simons Institute, 2018). 8https://medium.com/the-politics-practices-and-poetics-of-openness/p-ar-ticipate-body-of-experience-body-of-work-body- as-archive-b19446c9ce5d 9 https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/rai2018/paper/40741 https://medium.com/the-politics-practices-and-poetics-of-openness/p-ar-ticipate-body-of-experience-body-of-work-body-as-archive-b19446c9ce5d https://medium.com/the-politics-practices-and-poetics-of-openness/p-ar-ticipate-body-of-experience-body-of-work-body-as-archive-b19446c9ce5d 5 9F and culture pedagogue, referred to the “aesthetics of time” as she conceptualised the meaning of the time strand, exposing how various sub-strands connect together. In a similar manner, the artefacts of the family archive, memory, lived experience and learnings form temporal strands that, when linked through the curatorial/choreographic act, create new avenues to the unarchival process. This study also draws inspiration from the questions raised by author of Les Danses du Temps (2004), Geisha Fontaine, “does time shape dance or does dance shape its time? Is time in dance comparable to time in the other arts or does it display unique characteristics? What variations of time are introduced by each choreographer? What are the temporal openings specific to choreographed movement?” (Fontaine in Ivarez, 2009: 2). The composition of current Indian dance as the product of the intermingling of cultures over time, established a genealogy that is refuted or erased as taboo by the local Indian dance community on the basis that traditional is equated with the ‘pure’ and even sacred. Finally, this study explores the interweaving of other cultures into our dance performances. Would this be viewed as globalisation 10 ? What was the motivation for the deviation from ‘Indian- ness’? What compelled us to defy the norms of socio-political expectations? There were hints of this deviation very early on in my mother’s career. I found an image of South African actor Ken Gampu on the same stage as my mother and aunts at a time of racial segregation. How was this possible? Gampu (1929-2003) was a teacher who became an actor, “one of the first black South Africans to work alongside stars such as Edward Robinson and Burt Lancaster” 1 0 F 11. My grandfather’s links to the film industry 12 made this a 10 “Globalization is defined by dictionary.com as “the act of extending to other or all parts of the world”. In the case of dance, globalization takes place when dance companies go on tour, students go abroad or travel, and particularly since the dawn of the internet. Dancers may adopt movements from foreign genres, may train completely in various styles, and some will even work to adopt the cultural behaviors associated with a dance style” (Marcoux in https://sophia.smith.edu/blog/danceglobalization/2012/04/29/the-globalization-of-bollywood-dance-2/). 11 https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0304027/bio 12 Director of the Rani (Clairwood) and Vijay Cinemas (Asherville) in Durban. 11F https://sophia.smith.edu/blog/danceglobalization/2012/04/29/the-globalization-of-bollywood-dance-2/ http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0304027/bio 6 natural and conscious move to support black artists in their promotion and success, as ‘celebrity-dom’ facilitated a different process to everyday life. I often wonder what the trajectory of Indian dance in this country would have been if it were not for my grandfather’s sudden passing in 1966 and his efforts in retarding the effectiveness of the Group Areas Act of 1950, which effectively limited such interaction and resulted in artists making work for, and within, their own cultural communities. Fig.2: Ken Gampu, Nydoo Sister’s guest of honour (The India Trend, 1965). Having grown up with this archive, with stories like Ken Gampu’s and the pride taken in this act, revealed that my family was not ashamed of the relation or of them performing for any audience, which facilitated my own inter-racial views and teaching in the townships around 7 12F Gauteng. This makes it possible to use my intimacy with this family archive to read through it in different ways - to re-create and re-imagine a meaningful way of situating Indian Dance in the current South African cultural/arts landscape. The archive evidences a steady increase in delving beyond what we were told we should/should not be. Increasingly, the pedagogy and scholarly investigation of the arts is viewed as an arena of reclamation, self-actualisation and decolonising of the previously disenfranchised, subjugated and marginalised. “The challenge for arts educators… is that such an approach might require relinquishing what we seem to hold most dear - the very discourses of the arts through which we construct self-identification as artists and arts educators” (Gaztambide- Fernández, 2013: 227). Radical pedagogy scholar, Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández (2013: 211) asserts that, Rather than seeing culture as asset of values, norms, and customs that define the essence of a given group of people or as a collection of artifacts that represent their shared characteristics, such an approach seeks to account for the patterns of interaction that evolve in different contexts and under particular material and symbolic conditions (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013: 226). Gaztambide-Fernández can see a shape to collection, but does not offer a method. My critique of Gaztambide-Fernández is not just about the description of method, but rather how the decolonial method is made.The search is for an alternative instrument, as I have explored decolonial/radical pedagogical 13 practices in this study in a way that allows it to, “devise its own institutional framework, mission and modus operandi at the crossroad of knowledge 13 “On the basis of theoretical and historical analysis it is shown that the ideas of the radical reconstruction of the education system and teaching practices have deep historical roots. In modern pedagogy the concept of "radical pedagogy" is understood in two ways. It is defined by some theorists as the notion that secures the changing views about cognitive capacities, conditions, and factors forming human exposure that indicates the system of pedagogical measures and solutions. The second group of researchers interprets this term as an uncompromising commitment to achieve real transformation in accordance with the views on the development of socio-political, ideological and economic spheres. On the basis of content- analytical study of special publications of the journal "Radical Pedagogy" it is shown that currently, this conceptualization is in the stage of intensive growth” (Fedotova & Nikolaeva, 2015: 785). 8 production, art and activism. …that allows us to decolonise cultural paradigms and forms of teaching, building an autonomous space of mutual teaching and learning between students, activists and scholars” (Micciarelli, Prodromidis & Mollona, 2021: npn). To address the erasures and ellipses that our past and current education systems have reduced the contributions of the marginalised, and the South African Indian contribution to this country in particular, to ‘non-events’. The goal was not to regurgitate the details and techniques of Indian dance or the chronological recounting of my family history, which has already been achieved. Rather, the focus was and possibly still is on the archive which is usually locked away in rooms and basements or behind glass for their protection. That inaccessible archive is in keeping with philosopher Jacques Derrida’s notion of the archive as “domiciliation” or under “house arrest” (Derrida & Prenowitz, 1995: 10). Here, I am focusing on the liberation of the artefacts - adaptation, transmutation and re-animation as a curatorial act - the unprecedented experimentation and exploration of ‘if’ and ‘how’ the ‘unarchival’ process can be applied to my family archive. The application of the unravelling of a systematic ordering does something to the family archive, as a different re-ordering. Translation itself is a form of making; reading of experience; as well as notions around original work. Although one can argue that there is violence in the interpretation of a state of being in terms of the status quo and patterns in a dredging/digging or archaeological framework, in this study, it is a redemptive violence. Meaning that the violence that is imposed on the archive through its translation becomes redemptive. This process asked questions around translation of the archive, and that became important to this enquiry. 9 I am a dancer. I had received no formal training in visual arts prior to joining the PhD programme at the Wits Fine Arts department in 2020. This was done with the view that the innovative techniques and flexibility with the abstract would enhance my exploration and experimentation in interdisciplinarity, which it did. However, a deficit in formal training; the fact that I would disadvantage myself by being examined as an expert in that field; led me to the realisation that this study and I are better suited to the Theatre and Performance discipline. In order to realise the creative vision I had with paper and deriving the maximum benefit from its ability to move, as well as to give my basic artistic knowledge a more polished feel, I completed two courses online via international experts, Karishma Chugani and Silvia Hijano Coullaut at Domestika, i.e. Paper Cutting Techniques for Storytelling (22 April 2021) and Pop-Up Book Creation (30 July 2021), respectively. I learnt useful techniques in paper engineering and layered storytelling in order to realise the creative pieces that evolved out of this study. An online exhibition of all my creative pieces in this study, titled LETTING THE FAMILY ARCHIVE OUT OF THE BOX…, have been housed together in a website (https://anusiagovenderelsh.wixsite.com/mysite) as well as embedded in the relevant chapters that they bear kinship to. The performances, stories and motivation were designed to be relevant to all age groups, especially young school-going children to support their early exposure to dance and culture. A vast amount of my body of work was established and cultivated outside the academy until mid-2018 to these types for family-oriented audiences. AIMS The objective of this study is in keeping with the many changes in social and political status, geography, and circumstances that my ancestors and their dances had to adapt to. This resonates with the way dance scholar Jay Pather described his creations as being “prepared to 10 deconstruct and reconstruct” (in Devar Singh, 2019: 125), similar to the manner that I consider mine. The focus is “less about fusion than about juxtaposed forms - telling a story” (Pather in Devar Singh, 2019: 124). As curator, I wanted to experiment with the artefacts in an unusual and creative manner as I do with my dance practice - breaking it down to basic pieces to reconfigure/re-create or choreograph the artefacts in an abstract manner. To get paper to dance. To achieve a metamorphosis/transformation of the archive. This study, therefore, aimed to “challenge the perception of “archive” as something closed, orientated for exclusive usage by experts or locked containers of “historical truth”, and see archives as reflective process and communicative practice” (Center for Urban History of East Central Europe website, 2004-2021) in relation to my family archive, in order to trouble the notion of the purity and authenticity of a perceived monoculture, such as that of India and “Indian-ness” in terms of dance, by harnessing the unarchival of artefacts of the archive as a ‘DNA test’/stage production. It also aimed to explore unarchival in relation to artefacts, stories, traditions and dance performances of interwoven dance cultures to reconcile/reclaim the identity that my body of work is synonymous with. Notably, the creative praxis centred around the connection or the threads/yarns of each creative piece, to find how the links between storytelling, ‘yarning’ and choreography are interwoven to support the choice of ‘paper choreography’ in various iterations of the ‘unarchival’ process within the South African arts and culture tapestry. 11 RATIONALE, METHODOLOGY, CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK This study allowed the past to speak to the present, while exploring the deconstruction and re- configuration of my family dance archive by asking: How can I transmute and transform the archive, the dancing body and the cultural ancestry and influences to create other iterations through an ‘unarchival’ process, in the South African context? This is how I navigated it:  Methodology The underpinning to the enquiry was qualitative research. The choice of this method was because of its “rich tradition in the study of human social behaviour and cultures. Its general aim is to develop concepts which help us to understand social phenomena … to gain an understanding of the experiences, perceptions and/or behaviours of individuals, and the meanings attached to them” (Agius, 2013: 204). The overarching method of choice was auto- ethnography, as it contains a strong hint of the biographical, “an umbrella term for an assembly of loosely related, variously titled activities: narrative, life history, oral history, autobiography, biographical interpretive methods, storytelling, auto/biography, ethnography, reminiscence” (Bornat, 2008: 344), and interdisciplinarity. Retired dance ethnographer, Deidre Sklar (1991: 6) describes the meaning of ethnography as “‘portrait of a people’ … for an ethnographer seeks not only to describe but to understand what constitutes a people's cultural knowledge. …. The ethnographer wants to know… how a given group of people find or, more accurately, make meaning” (italics in original). Here auto-ethnography is based on my lived experience as both dancer and curator, as well as, in terms of my interest in the pre- colonial ‘DNA’ of Indians and the resultant dance forms that emanate from the Indian sub- continent. My reason for this choice is shared by ethnographer Carolyn Ellis, “it combined my interests in ethnography, social psychology of the self and role-taking, subjectivity and emotionality, face to face communication and interaction, writing as inquiry 12 and for evocation, storytelling and my social work orientation toward social justice and giving back to the community” (Jones, Adams & Ellis, 2016: 17). The relevance of this description is that I come from a social work background which greatly influenced the direction and choices in my dance pedagogy. It is my goal to delve into the artefacts in the archive to find their value in my own story in the manner that subjectivity in the arts stresses “that values are dependent on the relative modes of human experience and are … the reflections of the feeling, attitudes and responses to the individual” (Arnold, 1995: 61). I wished to explore if, where and how these values appear in my own story in a meaningful way. In order to do that there was an extraction for modification, for practice-led research (PLR)/ performance as research. PLR is ‘the desire to create artefacts and present them as part of the “answer” to research questions posed at the outset of the creative endeavor. In this sense, the practice-led enterprise is different from many other approaches since it does not simply use objects as evidence, but attempts to present the objects created during the process as arguments’ (Biggs in Rutten, 2016: 301) (italics in original). In this study, PLR provides an answer to the construction of a creative jigsaw puzzle. According to Research for the Creative Industries scholar Brad Haseman (2006: 3), “Practice-led research is intrinsically experiential and comes to the fore when the researcher creates new artistic forms for performance”. His view aligns with that of the creators of UNARCHIVAL.com, from the stance that the researcher “may be led by what is best described as ‘an enthusiasm of practice’: something which is exciting, something which may be unruly, or indeed something which may be just becoming possible as new technology or networks allow (but of which they cannot be certain)” (Haseman, 2006: 3), in order to translate and mediate between research and practice. The ethnographic narrative speaks to activation of deconstruction and the personal sharing of creative practice around this study. It is it’s translation that helps make meaning from gaps in the archive. 13 13F According to art scholar Nalini Moodley-Diar (2021: 30), “Omissions, apparent marginalization, and invisibility of the visual culture of Indian South Africans needs exploration particularly as their contribution to the South African art history is somewhat silent”. This is the gap that the unarchival process can stop when applied to archives, especially those of the marginalised. The combination of history and art has the potential to catalyse the archive. Tarquam McKenna and Davina B. Woods (2012: npn), authors on ‘Artful ethnography’, describe the process in the following way, “art brings with it an invitation to witness what is often in the unconscious realm of the researcher and researched alike; art accelerates management of the physical, mental, social, and emotional well-being as it brings into consciousness that which is not ‘known’”. This could be that answer to breaking the silence that Moodley-Diar refers to. As a dancer there are constant stories being told in the form of ‘conversations’ with fellow performers, music, the audience, and the current and historical forms of Indian dance. The archive is no different, as each artefact narrates its own story. “Narrative methodologies emphasise the temporal quality of both lived lives and told stories, and the meaning making processes” (Bradbury, 2017: 14). Here, I discussed a variety of positions on narrative methogologies and considered the possibilities that unarchival offers for intertwining narratives and further object/subject relation into movement. In using the term Indigenous 14 in this study I acknowledge that, The common currency of all of these terms—Aborigine, Indian, Indigenous, or First Nations— their uses and valency in government, legal and scholarly contexts, are often offensive to tribal groups especially when used in an international, totalizing and universal way to define radically different groups because they have the effect of homogenizing peoples in ways that early imperial anthropology created ‘others’ as ‘indigenous’ in differentiation and opposition to colonial settlers, often using these labels for legal, educational, adminstrative and policing purposes (Peters & Mika, 2017: 1). 14 For the purposes of this study, “As commonly used, ‘indigenous’ means something similar to the older word ‘native’; nowadays not considered ‘polite’ given its overtones of meaning of ‘primitive’ and all the associated negative implications. But this likeness to older words such as ‘native’ does not capture the full meaning described by ‘indigenous’. Indigenous is a primary adjective that does not stem from a noun: Despite the emergence of ‘indigene’ for an indigenous person/people and ‘indigeneity’ for the quality of being indigenous, it is the adjective ‘indigenous’ that remains the dominant usage” (Stewart, 2018: 470). 14 This study further acknowledges that the concept of indigeneity holds differing definitions in divergent countries, incorporating language and bloodlines. The distribution of indigenous peoples in 2012 was as follows: 70% in Asia; 11% in Latin America; and 1.5 million in North America (Joona in Sarivaara, Maatta & Uusiautti, 2013). There has been little if any change in the status or conditions of the indigenous in the past decade as the most current statistics indicate, There are 476 million Indigenous people around the world and spread across more than 90 countries. They belong to more than 5,000 different Indigenous peoples and speak more than 4,000 languages. Indigenous people represent about 5% of the world’s population. The vast majority of them – 70% – live in Asia (Amnesty International website, 2022). United Nations special reporter, José Martinez Cobo’s (1986) group-level definition is, Those communities and peoples, who still have continuous historical connection to the societies preceding colonization, who developed on areas populated by these peoples and who consider themselves as clearly separate from other societal structures currently prevailing in the area, are indigenous. In addition, indigenous peoples are not in a ruling position in the modern society and they want to maintain, develop and transmit the inherited lands and ethnical identity to the future generations. Their ethnic identity forms the existence of the people as one, unitary population in harmony with their own cultural practices, social institutions and legal systems (in Sarivaara, Maatta & Uusiautti, 2013: 370). On an individual level, a more subjective definition is offered by way of the person identifying him/herself as a member of the indigenous group. According to the UN Declaration’s (2007) Article 9, “Indigenous peoples and individuals have the right to belong to an indigenous community or nation, in accordance with the traditions and customs of the community or nation concerned, no discrimination of any kind may arise of such right” (in Sarivaara, Maatta & Uusiautti, 2013: 370). My question is: What of the Indian Diaspora that was forcibly removed to other parts of the globe, including South Africa? Are we relegated to the status of perpetual ethnic minority? Even though I am a naturalised citizen of South Africa, after four generations of the indentured Indians official arrival here, I and several generations hence are still unable to access the rights enshrined in the country’s constitution 15 14F 15F in terms of the right to have access to and practice our individual culture and heritage within formal structures. An example that will be unpacked further in chapter three of this thesis, is the absence of Indian dance as a subject in schools/basic education despite the existence of syllabi/curricula that my mother and I created in 1996. The snowball effect is that I and many of my dance peers were unable to obtain degrees in dance locally as it would consequently not be offered as a course at tertiary level. We have been forced to pursue any further training outside this country at great expense. Such policies only serve to keep the artists of the other on the periphery of the relevant industries and ultimately of social and economic activities - an act of disenfranchisement. What is interesting to the ethos of this study is the method of Yarning. Yarning is a theorisation of Australian Aboriginal origin, a “synonym for ‘talking’ and/or ‘storytelling’ … capturing not only the sense in which the ‘threads’ of a story may be ‘woven’ together to create a ‘fabric’ of narrative, but also drawing forth associations with storytelling techniques stretching back to and beyond narrative artefacts” (McKenna & Woods, 2012: npn). Of further interest to the ethos of this study, is the way various appropriate processes are taken into account when conversing: When an Aboriginal person says “let’s have a yarn” 15 , what they are saying is, let’s have a talk or conversation. … Similarly, in Botswana the language that is spoken is Setswana; a Setswana phrase “A re bue” means “to talk”; when a Motswana says, “tla re bue sanye” they mean “come and let’s talk” (Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010: 38). The ‘conversations’ I envisaged were not the standard interview, but rather a “jugalbandi” 16 15 As a point of interest, in parts of northern England people talk about ‘spinning a yarn’ which means to tell a good story, one that may not be altogether true. 16 The rhythmic cycles go back and forth, culminating in joint expression. “The self-esteem of a musician is inevitably reflected in his creations, but in case of jugalbandi the mental and emotional issues of the musicians need to maintain a close harmony between the self-esteem and respect for the co-musician. Such duets become a magnificent musical experience for the ardent connoisseurs, as they get the opportunity to observe and listen to the musical dialogue that envisages the exquisite 16 16F (where artists execute a non-verbal conversation between two or more instruments, dancers or a combination of the two) between the physical artefacts, temporality, cultures and the various iterations of the archive in a textual and visual format. This is also implied in the interweaving of cultural dance styles and the conversation that they allow within societies that are melting pots of culture. Is this a unique modern phenomenon, or a deep response to dance of DNA that has been globalised throughout the passage of time? “The creative process is life-enhancing and ultimately awakening for the researcher into alternative ways of knowing” (McKenna & Woods, 2012: npn) 17 . Art in various forms is viewed as literacy for the individual and societal in a way that is rooted in the traditions of the indigenous so that “over thousands of generations Indigenous cosmologies and belief systems were respectfully illustrated in paintings, carvings, and especially in dance” (McKenna & Woods, 2012: npn). Thus, the dancing body offers a multitude of interpretations as an archive in the current time and setting. The dancing body enacts a process of explanation and evokes storytelling. “The word ‘Kathak’ literally means “storyteller” referring to the ancient narrators of the Vedic scriptures, legends, folklore and mythology” (Govender & Govender, 1991: 10) 18 . Every author on the Kathak style, which is over 2000 years old, writes that storytelling is a vital part of this dance tradition. It is part of a living archive, an oral embodied repository - “of the social reparation of injustice, and knowing of ‘otherness’ that the artful practice we are espousing sees as its goal” (McKenna & Woods, 2012: npn). As performance studies scholar manifestation of the musical art emanated through their body, mind and spirit – integrated and strongly focused on experiencing the beauty of their creation” (Banerjee, The Hindu website, 2017). 17https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251878997_An_Indigenous_Conversation_Artful_Autoethnography_A_Pre- colonised_Collaborative_Research_Method 18 Information on Kathak and its storytelling quality is also found in books in the archive by Singha and Massey (1967); Projesh Bannerji (1982); Sunil Kothari (1989); Shovana Narayan (1998); Massey (1999); Samson (1987); and Devar Singh (2000). 17F https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251878997_An_Indigenous_Conversation_Artful_Autoethnography_A_Pre-colonised_Collaborative_Research_Method https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251878997_An_Indigenous_Conversation_Artful_Autoethnography_A_Pre-colonised_Collaborative_Research_Method 17 Rebecca Schneider (2014: 106-107) describes, I will use the “remains differently or in difference, the past performed and made explicit as performance can function as the kind of bodily transmission conventional archivists dread, a counter-memory, almost in the sense of an echo” in my creative work. It will be a retracing of the echo through experimentation with dance, memory fragments, and cultural traditions, while making curatorial choices around digitisation and groupings of artefacts. I, as the subject/beneficiary/curator, am re-telling my own story, acting as the translator of the archive. Translation studies scholar, Lawrence Venuti (2000: 11-14) states, “Translation is a focus of theoretical speculation and formal innovation … translating is useful in challenging the complacencies of contemporary culture because it fosters a “historical consciousness” that is lacking… translating can introduce a critical difference into the present”. This study is the translation of choreography/genealogy from embodied presentation to the ‘dancing’ in paper choreography resulting in an innovative creative form. The proposed play with, and unfurling of, the family archive allowed the envisaged focus to be on the dichotomy of agency and tradition, as well as the complexities/violence related to identity that I and my ancestors have experienced.  Significant Original Contribution to Knowledge My original contribution to the field is partly genealogical as a descendant of the first recorded South African Indian Classical dance teacher and being a local originator in Odissi (1986); even though Merle O’Brien (a PhD candidate at UCT at the time) laid claim to that title in an interview with Santham Pillay of the Sunday Times of 26 June 2011. I also became 18 18F the first exponent of Sufi Kathak (1990s). These salient aspects of my career were documented in an article titled ‘Best foot forward’ in The Independent on Saturday of 16 January 1999. My mother and I compiled Indian dance syllabi for the National Education Department (1996) at technical college level, and Gauteng Department of Education (2001) for secondary schools. These pilot projects, which had not been done before, were unfortunately, never actioned by the relevant bodies. Further, my MA thesis was one of the earliest ‘more formal’ recordings of an entire family archive based on South Asian dance in the local academy, spanning the entire life/career of an originating member of the South African Indian Diaspora. This allows me to position myself “as a container and transmitter of memories and histories” (Hellier-Tinoco, 2019: 12), to provide a fresh and rare perspective that possibly few South Asian dance scholars in this country can, as there is no undergraduate South Asian dance syllabus implemented at tertiary education to date. In addressing the gap in scholarship, firstly, there is a well-known dearth of scholarly work in this field in South Africa. “Indian dance i.e., dance emanating from the South Asian continent, also thrives in South Africa particularly in Durban and Johannesburg … However, very few scholarly accounts of Southern African Dance exist within a rich, complex, diverse and highly contested terrain” (Samuel 2016: 3). Over the years, the study of complete Indian classical dance repertoires were relegated to outside of South Africa, while being limited to informal pedagogy within the country. It is only recently being studied at the local academy at postgraduate level 19 . Building a local knowledge base around the subject allows further 19 Vasugi Devar Singh completed an MA in Education at University of Durban-Westville, with a focus on Bharata Natyam in 2000. This was converted to a book in 2019. Currently, postgraduates in the field of South Asian Dance at Wits University are Reshma Chhiba (MA attained in 2013), with Reshma Maharaj, and myself currently in the PhD programme. In addition, I was recently contacted by Saranya Devan, who was a Masters student at UCT in 2021, researching around the changes in the pedagogy of Bharata Natayam over the period of time that it has been present in South Africa. Further, I also had a conversation recently with a South Asian Classical dancer, who attained an MA degree in India and is hoping to pursue a PhD degree at the local academy, yet is finding it almost impossible to find a suitable supervisor in the field. There 19 study in the field. Secondly, unarchival is a relatively new and unexplored territory in general, outside of the computing field. This is particularly true in terms of South Asian dance. Finally, Indian dance has been viewed stereotypically as sacred, and South African artists who delve into the unrecorded origins or trouble the secular are seen as ‘blasphemous’. Undertaking this study is to aid in transforming this field into a less contested area of scholarship and create room for future scholarship of marginalised dance forms in this country. The design of this study is as interwoven as the dance making that my family and I practiced, with regard to the theoretical and creative components. Creative Industries scholar, Haseman, “found that current curators and learning designers had some way to go in making the transition from their existing modern archive to a re-imagine network archive” (Cameron, Anderson & Wotzko, 2017: 167). With this in mind, the creative portion of this study, utilises the concept of “Network archives: online archives like YouTube or more broadly the internet as a platform, organized around the uncertain probability of finding material, with users co- creating widely accessible and potentially reusable content” (Cameron, Anderson & Wotzko, 2017: 162) (italics in original). Parts of the interweaving are composed of the fragments of my re-memorising of the family archive, myself and the dance element that are housed on Youtube and curated on a single website as an online exhibition of these works. This thesis unpacks the various issues of this study in three chapters focussing firstly on the Unarchival process and its formulation. Next, the exploration of the concept of is also a dearth of suitable supervisors and examiners in the field in the local academy, which results in this specialised field being treated generically. 20 ‘Indian-ness’ in terms of dance, identity and archival implications for this study. The final chapter explores the interwoven nature of the dance direction my family and I chose to take by incorporating many cultures into our Indian dance core curriculum over 60 years. This includes the learnings and teachings derived from the attempts to incorporate the Indian dance syllabi (artefacts from the archive) at basic education level in South Africa. This thesis is given the format of a programme to a dance recital, as each chapter felt like a different stage or act of a dance theatre production. Each has its own area of focus, yet it comes together to tell a new and completely unique story with all the passion, flair and twists that we infused our productions with. 21 CHAPTER 1 OVERTURE: UNARCHIVAL - A PERFORMATIVE ACT OF SEEKING, HOLDING AND FREEING Fig. 3: The Nydoo Sisters’ Arrangetram programme, picture with their Guru and my mother’s certificate with her dance title, India, 1961 above all now I know how often beyond the shores of a word lies a sea I do not understand - Shabbir Banoobhai (in Naicker, 2011:6) Like my indentured ancestors who embarked on a sea voyage to parts unknown, I was aware that a journey awaited me the details, however, remained a mystery. This chapter is based on mapping out or building the architecture of ideas in the evolution of the unarchival process. This is the overture of this study - the opening piece to this performance, preparing the audience for an uncharted quest of my family archive. In choosing to create a new path in my field of expertise, I had also chosen to step into the unknown and be submerged in its currents 22 19F and depths. In many ways I was assailed with the same feelings as I experience for about five seconds before I step on stage – anticipation, excitement and a few butterflies of trepidation. This unease of entering into a contested space includes coming up against concepts like John Donne’s work titled Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions and severall steps in my Sickness 20 (1624). Part of the unease is the constant presence of whiteness and masculinity in the archive that have contributed to the erasures of the recordings of indigenous history. Human history is about the future. Whiteness is about entrapment...... It is the most corrosive and the most lethal when it makes us believe that it is everywhere; that everything originates from it and it has no outside. … because democracy in South Africa will … be built on the ruins of those versions of whiteness (Mbembe, 2015: npn). Mark Payne (2017) has suggested in the paradigm of depressive anthropology that the engagement produced by the researcher can induce a sense of shame as a haunting, “as a haunting not only haunted by the past as affect but what has also been erased” (Taub, 2023, unpublished). Is it survivor’s guilty, a sense of helplessness and impotence rising from the traps of tradition and social expectation, the inability to realise one’s potential due to political manoeuvring or purpose as a result of death? Payne also suggested that “the idea that shame is the route by which we access the capabilities of living that are abrogated in modernity” (Payne 2017:1). The ironic tensions of using the words of the white male frame or templates to contextualise my study is not lost on me. I rather chose to use the words of this chapter’s opening lines as, “for us, the marginalization of our lives and contributions speaks to a different reality. Namely that, despite the long history of black scholarly contribution, and despite the trending importance of diversity, the academic space is still the stronghold of capitalist white supremacy that it always has been” (Biswas, 2020: npn). It is 20 No man is an iland, intire of it selfe; everyman Is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee (Donne in Young, 2018: 303) (italics in original). 23 the irony of its connection to my study that first beckoned me to utilise it in a subversive manner “to calibrate and neutralize the purpose of diversity and difference… The subversive intellectual seizes her place in the university, but refuses to be defined by it.” (Biswas, 2020: npn). The pictures in fig. 3 are obviously of women of Indian origin - my mother and aunt were fifteen and eleven years old respectively at the time it was taken, making them children. The fact that these girls took on the arduous task of journeying across the very waters that separated them from their identity and cultural moorings and assigned them the task of spreading their acquired knowledge in an environment of hostility and discrimination (the apartheid era) is testimony to their strength and tenacity, traits attributed to and reserved for the white male enclave. In this study, and Indian dance in particular, bells are symbolic of life and rhythm given to a dancer’s feet and body - an act that conjures up primordial sounds, shapes and movement. A revolutionary act for people of colour as will be observed in the creative performance related to the next chapter. My time spent on two seemingly contrasting continents and traditions, since 1978 until 2014, to study the dance forms of my heritage, may appear juxtaposed to each other. However, it is that very experience of shared histories and cultures that have shaped not only the family archive, but also my personal and artistic development as a South African dancer, as well as this study. This chapter will therefore focus on the scholarly and creative choices made to find and conceptualise a study that is as embryonic as the unarchival process itself. Excavating the unknown and still to be created in terms of my role in this story. PRIOR TO COLONIALISM… Colonialism acted in the way that most diseases do, as in the case of my paternal ancestor who told of famine and disease eroding his entire family - leaving him as the sole survivor. “And I anchored in Durban… in the dust of waves. To be scattered in the gales of continents. In the currents of colonies” (Torabully in Naicker, 2011:30). The system attempted to erase 24 indigenous identity by the colonisers, white males, keeping their own records of the colonised. One example of this is the fact that my family surname ‘Govender’ does not exist in India. The closest we could ascertain is that it was an anglicised version of ‘Govinda’. There is evidence that in the many invasions of India, the structures that generally recorded such history or cultural evidence were mutilated, whether for perceived wealth or malice may never be fully understood. By extension, the malady lies in the manner in which indigenous/first people or peoples of colour, and by extension their art forms, have been historicised, labelled and categorised as people without a valid heritage. This was done through a colonial lens, despite a litany of evidence to the contrary, which is highlighted in this study. Just as disease has the power to obliterate scores of lives, so too did colonialism, yet there have been survivors who live to tell the tale. They left traces, like hauntings, their stories, in prehistoric stone paintings of lifestyle and even dance on the cave walls at Bhimbetka (Madhya Pradesh, India) and the South African Drakensberg Mountains, “Rock art created by First Nation peoples over the millennia are more than decorative. Sites of heritage such as temples and caves … act as encyclopedias or archives of world occurrences, as well as being repositories of dance knowledge. In ancient times, artists were afforded elevated status in this society, however, like all things they experienced an ebb and flow of fortunes for various reasons and purposes (Joseph, 2018: npn [in entire book]). These clues in stone form part of a puzzle that archaeologists, historians and scientists have been piecing together over centuries. “Non-Indigenous archaeologists are beginning to appreciate how they constitute an Indigenous archive of memories, histories, and relationships to the land and Ancestors” (Rademaker, Maralngurra, Goldhahn, Mangiru, Taçon, & May, 2022: npn); to ancient carvings on Indian temples such as Chidambaram (9 th century), “What makes these Chidambaram karana reliefs so particular is that they are accompanied by inscriptions of Sanskrit verses from the Natyashastra. Thus they form a kind of an illustrated dance manual carved in stone” (Miettinen, 2018: npn). This https://www.sapiens.org/authors/laura-rademaker/ https://www.sapiens.org/authors/gabriel-maralngurra/ https://www.sapiens.org/authors/joakim-goldhahn/ https://www.sapiens.org/authors/kenneth-mangiru/ https://www.sapiens.org/authors/paul-s-c-tacon/ 25 results in a complex, complicated and palimpsestic, inscription on and in me, instigating an investigation into the connectivity of all aspects of my heritage and lived experience through the interplay between archive and dance. THE ARCHIVE The construct of the archive is central to this study. “Our primary access to the past of dance is always through sources, whether written, pictorial or embodied” (Morris & Nicholas, 2018: 3). Dance researcher, Bertha Bermúdez Pascual (2016: 1331), defines archive as “the collection of official documents, where descriptions of legal, social, commercial and administrative events are collected”. Archival scholar, Achille Mbembe posits, Our capacity to make systematic forays beyond our current knowledge horizons will be severely hampered if we rely exclusively on those aspects of the Western archive that disregard other epistemic traditions. Yet the Western archive is singularly complex. It contains within itself the resources of its own refutation. It is neither monolithic, nor the exclusive property of the West. Africa and its diaspora decisively contributed to its making and should legitimately make foundational claims on it. Decolonizing knowledge is therefore not simply about deWesternization (Mbembe, 2002: npn). We have a multiplicity of origins, as humans, yet are relegated to a single entity when identity and history are considered. Archivists, Michael Moss and David Thomas’ book Archival Silences: Missing, Lost and, Uncreated Archives (2021) clearly highlights the global silences or absences that exist in the archival act. This serves to legitimise the non-recording of human atrocities creating crevices that perpetuate an exclusion of the other. They recommend the development of alternate methods of engaging with archives broadly in order to requite the silences, gaps or absences in the archive. This study ascribes to the notion of writer, James Ngugi wa Thiong’o who asserts that “it mostly means developing a perspective which can allow us to see ourselves clearly, but always in relationship to ourselves and to https://www.routledge.com/search?author=Michael%20Moss https://www.routledge.com/search?author=David%20Thomas 26 other selves in the universe” (in Mbembe, 2002 : npn). Archives and history are read and viewed in their complexity over time, thereby translating and re-translating their meaning. It is this notion that is further explored in this study. Pascual (2016) posits that archival practices date back to 3000 BC, adding that, “Revisiting such documents, cultural characteristics arise since one cannot detach culture from human life. Dance is a cultural event and its first records within an archive date back as the origin of the archive itself” (Pascual, 2016: 1331). Dance scholar, Prarthana Purkayastha (2018: 4) highlights how the documentation of dance of the Indian subcontinent has been constructed as part of a binary notion of East and West, invented by western scholars, and therefore not integrated into the historical narrative. According to authors on reconfiguring the archive, Michael Moss, David Thomas, and Tim Gollins (2018: 4) “Histories ignored or suppressed are the results of specific ideologies that conceive of dance history from a Euro- American viewpoint”. They acknowledge the expansion of the archive as having “moved from being a collection of largely administrative records to become a collection of data to be made sense” (Moss, Thomas, & Gollins, 2018:131). The unarchival process, thus, calls for an approach that “will require a shift in approach from archivists, who will need to view archives as collections of data to be mined and not as texts to be read” (Moss, Thomas, & Gollins, 2018: 118). Having lived in Johannesburg, the city renowned for its gold mining industry, for twenty three years, I drew inspiration from the treatment of gold ore or diamonds as raw materials. By cutting, honing and polishing, their worth expands with each step in the refining process, so too are the artefacts of the family archive given different value and meaning in its new iterations. While both are acts of extraction, I wanted to format something active/performative, rather than passive from the numerous artefacts available to 27 20F me. The unarchival process allowed me the opportunity to extend the lifespan of the archive while making it more accessible to current and future generations. THE FAMILY ARCHIVE On an existential level, life, death and dance are constituents of aspects of my identity, culture and artistic choices, not just in material/physical terms, but also as a living, embodied 21 archive. My family archive is symbolic of a series of rites of passage. Life, as this study was birthed more than sixty years ago when my mother first conceptualised the archive as proof/record that we were here and made a significant contribution to this country. Death, as I contemplated the notion of a formal recording since my mother’s passing in 2005, as well as the realisation of my own mortality (and the archive’s) without ratifying the knowledge passed down to me - that would be an act of selfishness. “Living in the ‘Anthropocene’ the need for a whole new perspective on humanity and its relation to the non- human world becomes pressing when we want to prevent our own extinction” (Mbembe, 2015: npn). As an act of rebirth, the archive was nurtured and given documented shape in my MA thesis (APPENDIX A). In seeking to go beyond a chronological documentation of the archive, I had to first ascertain a non-identical approach (from the MA thesis) to dealing with the artefacts. “To reassemble the archive today asks how the selection and ordering of information can be situated as a discourse that is inclusive to a range of voices and their corresponding forms of information” (Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, 2019: npn). How could I include the stories of ancestry, legacy and heredity, without drowning out my own voice? 21 There is a recognition of the boundaries of embodiment, accompanied by the experience of the body as unsatisfactory and in need of modification, which is rendered as normal, thus operating as a strategy of resisting and evading those very forces which seek to normalize and discipline”(Budgeon, 2001: 35). This has bearing particularly on the colonial and apartheid restrictions on my lived experience. 28 [W]e must become aware of how many voices from the past have been historically inhibited by social and political power. Oral history projects documenting the participation of the many whose names are not ‘writ large’ by conventional histories are important, both to provide sources for future histories and to affirm the worth of individual lives in dance…. Other voices are commonly obscured by racist and colonial ideologies’ (Morris & Nicholas, 2018: 4). Having grown up with the artefacts of my family’s archive, curating it, I feel as if I have become it. “[O]ral histories, rituals, and gestures are all strategic for the transmission of knowledge among communities that do not traditionally have archives or those privileging physical forms of transmission” (Giannachi, 2016:154). The archive provides evidence of the rich and robust pedagogical contribution that not just my family, but the Indian Diaspora made to the cultural landscape of this country that goes largely unacknowledged until the annual 24 September commemoration of Heritage Day in South Africa. The curatorial choices made first by my mother, then me, challenge the idea of invisibility, tokenism and citizenry. Visual artist and fellow South Asian classical dancer, Reshma Chhiba (2019: 35- 36) describes curatorship as confronting “tensions between tradition and contemporary, mythology and reality, feminine and masculine, Black and Indian and artist and curator, by centering questions of gender, ethnicity and race. In turn, our roles as curator and artist are also in question and under scrutiny”. These tensions are evident when pondering the longevity and relevance of the archive through my dancing body. In the South African Indian dance world itself, I am viewed as treading a fine line between traditionalist and popularist or non-traditional approaches, utilising a vast vocabulary of World Dance styles. I found in this study, as in my choreography, that I am constantly looking at reconciliations, of bringing things that appear to be estranged, incompatible and opposites of one another together in dance and choreography. An example would be merging Indian classical dance with African and western contemporary dance, and in the same dance piece combining Indian Folk dance 29 21F with Korean, Chinese and Taiwanese styles to a melange of music that I remix - going against the grain as it were. ARRIVING AT THE UNARCHIVAL PROCESS The act of exploration of the deconstruction or difference in the curation of the archive becomes a characteristic of the unarchival process. That process became a very sensory experience - in the sitting, touching, looking, smelling and the linking together of it all. The realisation that I was experiencing a transfiguration throughout my career, while completing the recording of the archive, was accompanied by the churning up of mixed emotions. This was underlined by awareness that there were missing pieces to the puzzle that I was composing - a liminal space. A persistent sense of ellipses in my work with the archive was present, implying a pause or omission, even while my thesis was in examination, even after I graduated. A transformation and metamorphosis of questioning began. For example, I became aware, during the completion of my MA degree, of erasures and omissions, especially around the pedagogical focus of Indian dance both within the local academy as well as the South African Indian Dance community itself, and began to be more vocal in questioning it in educational, policy and industry forums – an archive of absence. I became what anthropologist Victor Turner referred to as ‘liminal personae’ 22 (in Davis & O’Mara, 2021: 1). Turner’s comment, “during the intervening liminal period, the state of the ritual subject . . . is ambiguous; he [sic] passes through a realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state” (in Davis & O’Mara, 2021: 1) comes closest to explaining the state that I found myself in. I knew that there was much more to be done as I found ellipses for making meaning of my own journey beyond my mother and the documented archive. In arranging and telling my family’s story, I discovered that it was only 22 “The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (‘threshold people’) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these personals elude or slipe through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed” (Davis & O’Mara, 2021: 1). 30 partially my own. What remained of me and the concept of an archive was, like tendrils of smoke, visible yet illusory, just out of reach. A concept I could not encapsulate, hence my choice of a creative study. Another phrase that could apply to the sense of the unfinished, holding resonance with me in the course of this study is “a fetishising of the unknowable past” (South African Art Historians (SAVAH), 2022: npn). “The stories of heritage affect the senses and emotions as much as the intellect. They combine to make up a shared memory that gives meaning to identity in the present” (Chetty in Vahed, Desai & Waetjen, 2010: v). In its reassemblage the archive presented me with an opportunity to deconstruct and reconfigure/refigure not just the archive, but myself and the remnants of a colourful ancestry that is artistically, geographically, historically and politically classified as ‘Indian’. Consider that for the first century of Indian experience in South Africa, only a limited number of individuals received a secular education. Though materials were archived by officials trying to manage ‘groups’ of peoples, including Indians, there were no libraries or museums, and very few trained historians, interested in presenting critical or celebratory ‘Indian’ histories. …fortunately … there have been, and continue to be, individuals with a passion for preserving family history and the ephemera of their own life and times, which have greatly helped to reconstruct a more nuanced and comprehensive past (Chetty in Vahed et al, 2010: vi). Amidst the uncertainty of citizenry and the violence of the colonial and subsequent apartheid system (where during police raids, the seizure and destruction of records were common place), it took a century before Indians in South Africa could look beyond survival to self- actualisation (Desai, 2018; Pillay, 2019). This is exactly the time that my family decided to study dance in India and return to propagate it within the South African Indian Diaspora. It is also the time that my mother, an educated Indian woman, had the foresight to begin recording what evolved into an archive worthy of study. 31 As the holder of a body of personal, cultural, and historical knowledge, I am creating a transmutation of a physical archive and myself. The archive and the eclectic nature of my dance repertoire took on the guise of clues or a portal to the discovery of my cultural heritage and identity, “at a new level, beyond the limits of borders and nationalities” (Runardotter, Mirijamdotter & Mörtberg, 2007: 47) - “thus the traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel” (Benjamin in Pearson & Shanks, 2001: iix) - as a dancer/choreographer, I perform the emotions, rites of passage and the cyclical nuances of life from birth to death. The physical artefacts are transformed into moving pictures and a story that is mostly wordless, yet the resonance, though ephemeral – an invisible signature, is branded in the psyche of both the audience and the performer. There is transference of the artists’ and audience’s collective life experience and stories - even if these stories have been experienced repeatedly, each experience unfolds a new and different dimension to the experience - an imprint is made. As an extension on Benjamin’s statement, about the potter’s handprint being a part of the pottery created, Hindus believe that life is cyclical, a process of birth, death and re-birth, yet each new life is a pursuit of a freedom from this cycle - Moksha. “The literal meaning of moksha (derived from the root muc) is ‘to let loose’ or ‘to let go’ or ‘to free’. In common parlance, moksha is widely regarded in the sense of liberation” (Mishra, 2013: 23). This study could be based on that philosophy. Each lifetime’s imprint is left on the psyche and whispers to the present incarnation. It leaves a trace, no matter how disjointed, clues to how we become who we are. I wish to ascertain whether the archive can attain Moksha through its own performance in the form of an unarchival process. Alternatively, the determination of one’s genealogy factors into Moksha for one’s own body and career trajectory. 32 22F CURATOR/CHOREOGRAPHER By researching unarchival as a curatorial process, I am attempting to disturb and disrupt the stereotypical, distorted history and socio-political narratives. This is in order to give my family archive a fresh treatment, an incubated idea since I applied to attend an Arts Research Africa (ARA) Winter school workshop in 2019, while I was still in examination for my MA degree. This led to the materialisation of this study. However, once enrolled in the PhD phase of my studies, I found that theorists and literature covered the areas of unarchiving in the computing field. “Unarchive is a term used to describe the process of restoring files from an archive (compressed file) or backup to their original location, usually a hard drive” (Computer Hope website, 2017) (bold and underline in original). While, ‘dearchiving’ which focuses on the “the new aesthetic orders of accumulation” (Moya, 2012: npn) of images and film. “De-archiving is the process of taking old assets out of “cold” storage and putting them in “hot” storage where they can be properly managed and, eventually, monetized” (italics in original). Authors of the book Refiguring the Archive 23 , Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh (2002: npn), wrote the following: “Traditionally archives have been seen as preserving memory and as holding the past. The contributors to this book question this orthodoxy, unfolding the ways in which archives construct, sanctify, and bury pasts”. In an attempt to release the hold of the past on my family archive, I also considered the appropriateness of the term “archiveology”, Archiveology, in its most succinct form, refers to the reuse, recycling, appropriation, and borrowing of archival material that filmmakers have been doing for decades. Archiveology traverses experimental, documentary, and essayistic filmmaking, moving beyond the categories of found footage, compilation and collage (Russell, 2017: npn). 23 Which materialised from a 1998 seminar series held at Wits University https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/h/harddriv.htm https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Cristian-Gomez-Moya-2096409600?_sg%5B0%5D=QXS_04NbTlkvSEBe79XZarI-3WXUQ_GhD-wJoWlK0U-uYMPBcL88yDv3ecf7v3c7JY7uIn0.y76txwUPhNNydo0Ph13LJnZoCcQjaJOQ4f-gQIzL61ZV4sQPl7DA2VuvjrqtapOirK3Ydr7xPOZBLsm-QT9Xjg.bSLKIayy6f7_H0ACnwUKfo6bfQQqs1FWq-pkxYmRbKpzKcaA9Bf7ZhRJP6c7CobvwOuqoJHGSCfZRgfh6MCDJA&_sg%5B1%5D=fsdIdGFdMwdKylhLyIKL7MUfksOoxW0Eu3FbPR7Z5cw9FBZqMOppEJvicZo0ACtjabxdK08.lV2iW2n6GKrug7Lo-5WlN2L21Z7BaXhKnJmwdqBTSJDR1wbBjqlO61Kjyty7hEMF_uTDVf04Iuz8hW8feIXOBw 33 23F 24F which according to the practice of Walter Benjamin 24 and film studies scholar, Catherine Russell is what I planned on doing with artefacts of the family archive. Even though Russell’s medium is film rather than dance, her opinions of the archive resonate with my notions of this study in the following manner, “The concept of the archive continues to be rethought and revised as artists, scholars, and historians gain new access to the documents of the past”, as well as, “The archive as a mode of transmission offers a unique means of displaying and accessing historical memory, with significant implications for the ways that we imagine cultural history” (2017: npn). Neeraj Bhatia (2020: 117), architect and urban designer, who was part of the team 25 of the ReAssembling the Archive exhibition, posits that “There is no political power without control of the archive”. Going beyond the archive as a static container of information and transitioning the building from a site of power to a place of empowerment, ReAssembling the Archive situates the archive as a place of discourse and public assembly. By doing so, it brings this space to the foreground of the public sphere and allows for the reordering of information to construct new histories and knowledge. Inserting the contemporary subject as a participant in assembling the archive, information can now be questioned, critiqued, and reordered as an act of knowledge production. (Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, 2019: npn). Fig. 4: ‘ReAssembling the Archive’ exhibition at the 2019 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 24“Walter Benjamin’s conceptions of memory, document, excavation, and historiography tend to be articulated differently over the course of his career, and there are a host of interpretations and glosses on what he might have actually meant” (Russell, 2017: npn). 25ProjectTeam: Neeraj Bhatia, Cesar Lopez, Bomin Park, Ian Erickson, Douglas Lee, Shuang Yan, Hayfa Al-Gwaiz, Mia Voevodsky, Caleb Bentley. Curators: Beth Hughes and Francisco Sanin. 34 The project team designed what appeared to be a block of stairs on castors. The interesting aspect was that it consisted of four pieces that could be taken apart and re-arranged in various configurations; much like a kaleidoscope would arrange pieces of glass, just without the light and mirror effect. Bhatia goes on to note that, “Every archive is a product of exclusion. Through the selection of information, only particular histories are deemed to be valuable and thereby only certain vantage points are represented and preserved” (Bhatia, 2020: 117).The unarchival process required a re-assemblage of the artefacts and the chronology of the family dance archive, while being cognisant of the terminologies referred to above as well as Bhatia’s concerns. Re-positioning, rearranging and remaking of the archive felt appropriate to the vision that was forming within me, as they had a mutable creative energy that resonated with this study. The archive as a form of performative making remained elusive until in sheer frustration I conducted an online search for various versions of the word ‘unarchival’ and came across the website UNARCHIVAL.com. ‘Te Papa Tonagrewa’ translates to ‘container of treasures’ or archive. It is also the name of the Museum in New Zealand that spawned the UNARCHIVAL.com website that finally provided me with the inspiration and justification around this study. The website was a visual research project by RDYSTDY, based in Wellington, video artists Hana Miller and Jacob Perkins who stated their purpose as, “To change our course for the future - and our reflexes in a present moment - by reclassifying the past. [By] Placing old objects in new contexts” (Miller & Perkins, 2020). They utilised moving image to allow audience interaction with its artefacts in a rather engaging manner, such as re-animation of fossils or preserved artefacts. They posed a question similar to the one that I was attempting to formulate: “How to make our own ecologies visible by making 35 25F visible the ways we make meaning of an object that may or may not be culturally and historically significant to us?” (Miller & Perkins, 2020). In terms of associations with Indian dance and unarchival, the only reference that I encountered in subsequent online searches is Odissi pedagogue, Aadhya Kaktikar’s 26 discussion of the intersection of traditional Indian academy. She never used the term again in the article addressing the tensions that exist in “decolonisation as an epistemological move towards understanding, living and moving beyond the colonial translation” (Kaktikar, 2020:1). This study addresses the tensions in the following manner, “This un-archival unruly lived experience of decolonization proposes a possibility of evoking Indian pasts against the misuses of the present. Arguing for an un- archival response which mediates the insertion of traditional oral mnemocultres into academia, enables knowledge production through heterogeneous modes of practice sustained by an embodied relation with generativity” (Kaktikar, 2020:1), in the South African context. In keeping with her statements, I wanted to craft and experiment with the artefacts myself, as a dancer, using the principles of “error, risk and imagination” that the UNARCHIVAL.com website extolled in order to activate an unraveling of the archive. In preparation for my PhD proposal presentation, I contacted Hanna Miller on LinkedIn, on 13 October 2021, to gauge how long this work had been going on, as no date was listed on their website. This is the conversation that ensued (Fig. 5): 26 From an article in Research in Dance Education titled ‘Choreographing Decolonization: pedagogical confrontations at the intersection of traditional dance and liberal arts in higher education in India’by Kaktikar (2020). 36 Fig. 5: Screenshots of my conversation with Hanna Miller on my LinkedIn profile (2021). If like me, one believes in serendipity or synchronicity - this felt like a neon sign from the universe that this study and all of the many areas it embraces, was meant to materialise. It also meant that the site could be taken down from public access until it is fully developed, now that she was aware of my access to it (as at 2 January 2023, the website is still accessible). Unarchival is being developed as a process of remaking and forming, yet relevant to current times, and future pedagogy, with my family archive. The following terms then become relevant to the process: Deconstruction, emancipation, re-/animation, re- configuration, adaptation, transformation, transmutation, metamorphosis, reconstruction, re- storying, re-imagining, when considering the question: How can I ‘challenge the perception of ‘archive’ as something closed, orientated for exclusive usage by experts or locked 37 containers of “historical truth” and see archives as reflective process and communicative practice in relation to my family archive? “Through collecting, archiving and writing, … through photography and community participation and performance, people contribute to the story of heritage by what they do and what they care for” (Chetty in Vahed, Desai & Waetjen, 2010: vi). As this has not been attempted in this field previously, and for the purposes of this study, the ‘unarchival’ process equates to an unpacking in the following manner: First, traversing unchartered routes into time, history and heritage utilising fact, fantasy or forbiddance to tell my story requires malleability and re-invention. Then, creating an opus or a set of compositions/reflections based on previous documentation, current interaction with the family archive, as well as allowing room for the instinctive and intuitive. Finally, it becomes the opposite of the unarchiving process where rather than deletion or erasure, there is an excavation (Foucault, 1969), and resurfacing of ideas and research-worthy issues prompting further/future pedagogy. Peeling back the layers of erasure to generate new/alternative knowledge in my field, this will be expanded upon in the next chapter of this thesis. T