The Body as Method: Dance Research and Writing in India
Speaker: Dr Sreenath Nair, University of Lincoln, U.K.
Chair: Dr Sudha Gopalakrishnan, Executive Director, IIC-International Research Division

Dr Sreenath Nair is a leading UK academic who earned his PhD from the University of Wales in 2006. His research explores embodied methodologies in Kerala performance, examining corporeal links between medical, martial, spiritual, and performance traditions. He has lectured widely across the USA, UK, Russia, Germany, Prague, Finland, and Sweden, and has held international academic posts and collaborations. He received the Leverhulme Trust International Fellowship and served as Scholar-in-Residence at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

Dance research and writing in India have largely relied on Cultural Studies and postcolonial theories to examine questions of identity, representation, and power. While these frameworks offer valuable critical tools, they remain limited in their ability to address embodied and kinaesthetic practices. Grounded in textual and discursive methods, such approaches struggle to engage with tactile experience, rhythm, breath, muscle memory, and the physical intelligence through which the dancing body itself becomes both method and site of knowledge.