This course guides the student through multiple performance practices, focussing in particular on the Indian subcontinent. These practices include the locally specific, the socially specific, the traditional, the hereditary, the rural, the nomadic, the urban, the pan-Indian, as well as those practices with discernable connections with performance conventions beyond the specifically Indian context. An important premise of this course is that music, dance and theatre are three strands of an intertwined whole. Their closely related cultural, social and aesthetic histories will constitute the core material to be studied. While being in one sense an overview of a sub-continent whose cultural corpus can at times possess obvious mutual affinities, this course will instead give pride of place to the wide varieties of performance practices found in India and the divergent histories accompanying them. Though mainly academic, the course will also contain some performance exercises closely related to the material being studied.
