Ketu H. Katrak, Astad Deboo: An Icon of Contemporary Indian Dance. New York: Seagull Books, 2024. Paperback, $30.00; cloth, $115.00. ISBN 9781803094304 (paperback), 9781803094298 (cloth).

Ketu H. Katrak
Astad Deboo: An Icon of Contemporary Indian Dance
New York: Seagull Books, 2024. 320 pages. Paperback, $30.00; cloth, $115.00. ISBN 9781803094304 (paperback), 9781803094298 (cloth).

How does a critical dance studies scholar deal with an emotional biography? Astad Deboo: An Icon of Contemporary Indian Dance by professor emerita of drama Ketu H. Katrak creates such a dilemma due to authorial proclamations of “warm feelings” (x). The simultaneous humanitarian and creative artistic pursuit of Astad Deboo, with a fifty-year career spanning seventy-two nations, is grounded in collaborative inspirations across ableism, transnationalism, and traditionalism. Adorned with national awards (namely, the Sangeet Natak Academy Award and Padma Shri Award), Astad Deboo is a contemporary Indian choreographer and dancer who has collaborated with Pink Floyd, Pina Bausch, and other famous musicians. Informed by numerous interviews and personal reflections over a long-term collaboration with the research subject, Katrak positions Deboo in empathic relationality and keen curiosity with movement, his male kinesthetic physicality, and collaborative perspectives, alongside the world, with its share of food, travel, friends, and family. Crafting a unique vocabulary across eclectic influences, some of them being the José Limón technique of modern dance, Japanese Kabuki and Butoh, classical Indian Kathak and Kathakali, Afro-Jazz, and Brazilian music and dance, his unconventional choreography and performance gained him accolades in the world concert dance circuit prior to visibility in India. If Deboo’s 1970s–1980s phase had eclectic proliferations in spatial, scenic, and visual design, his 1990s–2000s were a deepening of existing musical and material inflections.

Deboo is notorious for his signature spins, where he is tilted at an axis with a deep backbend complementing the spiraling spine as the feet keep up the turning motion, and Katrak notes how this aspect of Deboo’s performance is primarily conceptual in nature, woven in his minimalist, meditative, and temporally slowed choreographic unfolding. While hard pressed to find a thesis, emerging in this biographical hagiography are Astad-isms, blending plural trends, some of which are Gandhism, Zoroastrianism, and Catholicism. However, modernist grand-narrative inspired iconic works, namely Unbroken Unbowed (2019) and Eternal Embrace (2015) with rudraveena and flute, respectively, perhaps elicit such a response even from academia, especially where there is an absolute lack of appreciation and understanding of the South Asian creative ethos. Thus, as a cultural and historical recuperative maneuver, a holistic reflection on the contemporary Indian dance dancer and choreographer, Deboo—across personal, professional, aesthetic, philanthropic, and moral values—provides a thorough biographical panorama to the making of an artist.

Deboo’s work highlights how movement can serve as a foundation for building trust. Painstaking efforts through transnational exchanges along with meaningful engagements led to a body of work with marginalized groups. Part 3 was particularly a difficult read, in which deaf people, street children, and Thang Ta/Poong Cholom dancers from Manipur have been woven together as marginalized communities. Deboo choreographed for the 20th Summer Deaflympics in Melbourne, Australia in January 2005, during which he worked with the Clarke School for the Deaf in Chennai, India. He also supported the non-profit Salaam Baalak Trust for his 2009 premiere of Breaking Boundaries (Kumar 2020). It was hard to not find critical reflection of the contemporary dance savior-model and an exploratory-extractivist impulse, although it is undeniable that Deboo had an unwavering responsibility and commitment to his artists. Katrak’s writing paints a humanitarian side to a contemporary dancer who took care of the arts fraternity with whatever means available to him, especially during the Covid-19 lockdown.

Ultimately, in this work, his dance got lost in the life in his biography. Deboo’s ability to mesmerize and captivate through an encapsulating grip of facial expression and emotion remained footnote to enthralling costumes and musical inspirations. The writing would have benefited from an infusion of the dynamism that Deboo’s spins, bends, pain, sorrow, and performance entailed. Nevertheless, this text is a living testament to the daily lived experience of an immaculate artist. It brings to life every moment, every friendship, every dance, and every performance in an eerie capacity, especially with the live testimonies of numerous friends and well-wishers. In that capacity, it is an act of reverence. Katrak establishes her positionality at the outset as a friend and close collaborator, and as someone close to Deboo, her take is unapologetically reverential. However, her reverence is supported by a degree of purpose that animated Deboo’s art. Dance was a means for finding purpose for Deboo’s meditative conversations of dissolving the form and the content into the formless. Perhaps a touch of dynamism, a deeper analysis of Rasa (aesthetic sentiment akin to traditional Indian dance), and a stronger movement analysis would have strengthened the dance-related perspectives of this text. In his fifty-year celebration, he clearly made a point of channeling his physicality as a potent expressive medium. However, this physicality could perhaps be more deeply engaged with through the concept of Angika Abhinaya (physical expression). This is especially because of Deboo’s self-acknowledgment of his work as communication and his self-proclamation of how his body is perhaps a little more important than his face, although both the body and the face have their respective place in his choreography, especially when it comes to being lit up meaningfully through lighting design. His signature white tunic and his dervish-like twirls continue to etch him in contemporary memory with distinction and creativity. In another iteration of this book, there is perhaps hope of deeper engagement with the movement and the choreography through description, interpretation, and analysis.

This book is a must-read for South Asian dance studies, as well as contemporary dance studies students, educators, and scholars. Its strength lies within the captivating visuals alongside thematic organization. Cycling through the key theme of friendship, this text is an act of offering that is true to the cultural dynamics of the biography. Academic journey occludes personal connections. However, I applaud Katrak for positioning herself hyphenated across scholarship and collaboration, striking a unique balance between familial allegiance and pedagogical offering.

Kaustavi Sarkar
University of North Carolina at Charlotte