Nicole Haitzinger and Christina Gillinger-Correa Vivar met Malavika Klein, former dancer in Nyota Inyoka’s company for an oral history interview. She was kind to receive us in her Parisian home and gave valuable insights not only to Inyoka’s way of creating and working with her students. She also shed light on the spirit of the time as well as the context of and relationships between dancers in Paris of the 1940s and 1950s whose work related to Indian culture and dance traditions.
Another research meeting had to be transferred to the virtual space. The whole team gathered with Sneharika Roy, Associate Professor for Comparative Literature and English at the American University of Paris, to reflect on Inyoka’s poetic writing. Her point of view and expertise triggered some new and ambivalent directions in thinking on this part of the artistic oeuvre as well as Inyoka’s positionality as an artist of colour living in colonial France.
These activities were part of the research project Contemporary Reflections on Nyota Inyoka co-funded by Centre national de la danse (CND Pantin / France) Aide à la Recherche et au Patrimoine en Danse in cooperation with the Project Border-Dancing Across Time (Austrian Science Fund, University of Salzburg – Department of Music and Dance Studies) and Tanzquartier Wien.
Featured Image at the top of the page: Malavika Klein.
(c) Christina Gillinger-Correa Vivar