Mind The Gap When Taking A Step

When taking a step to your next conclusion, there’s always an Interval that you’re overgoing. A gap small enough to be noticed by some, big enough not to be ignored. By bridging the gap between theory and practice, this is a platform to initiate dialogues and reveal reflections to the topics discussed in our In Focus articles. 

Mind the Gap with Amna mawaz Khan

Edited by Leonie

Amna Mawaz Khan: researcher, activist, and dance performer. From navigating the politicization of dance in her home country Pakistan to advocating for social change, Amna uses dance as a powerful tool for political expression. With her unwavering dedication to the art form, she explores the transformative potential of dance in addressing gender issues and shaping vital societal conversations.

Get ready to be inspired by Amna’s story and her profound insights into the dynamic gap between dance performance, activism, and transcultural scholarship. 

Interval: Hello Amna – can you tell us a bit about how your journey with dance began?

Amna: When I was around 11 years old or so I began taking classes just casually due to a lot of pressure from my mother to become girlish – which I wasn’t as a child. In Pakistan, due to a lot of state imposed cultural eradication, the state has given only some form of classical dances a little bit of backing. One dance is called Kathak and when I saw it performed, I became mesmerised by it. Not only by the form but also by how a story could be conveyed in a non-verbal way. And when my mother finally said to me: You need to start acting gracefully. I started taking those dancing classes.

There was a lot of this patriarchal push on the girls in my class. There were like 20 of us, who had been forced by their parents or mothers to take these dancing lessons. Not to become professional dancers, but strictly to become more graceful. It was something totally unheard of to take this up professionally. So, it was both – my initial interest and my mother’s views – that influenced me into learning Kathak.

This was 20 years ago. My teacher back then was already in her 70s and had taught this dance for five decades. She was an interesting person, but also very pessimistic. She often said “You know – I have been teaching for so long, and I don’t have one single student who’s taking this professionally forward.” And listening to this over the years, being inspired by her, letting her condition my body and teaching me the dance Bharatanatyam, which ultimately became my dancing style, made me consider dance as a profession.

Interval: Can you tell me more about Bharatanatyam?

Amna: This dance is from the state of Tamil Nadu, so it’s originally very foreign, both geographically and culturally. Pakistan lies to the north of the Indian subcontinent, while Tamil Nadu is to the South of it. When the dance style travelled from South to North it underwent a lot of changes. So it’s a very unique form of dance. It was subject to change in terms of the music, in terms of the content, and also in terms of its dancers’ identities.

Over the hundreds of years, it became incorporated in the Brahmanical narrative of Hinduism, so a lot of the songs were devoted to the gods and deities. In Pakistan, dance is often seen as a bad thing that goes against Islam. So my teacher had to secularise the form in order to make it more palatable for the Pakistani audience. Instead of using devotional songs, my teacher decided to tell stories about everyday life, like common love stories. So the content of this dance has been altered multiple times, when I got into it.

Interval: How did you feel knowing that dance was not seen as a good thing in Pakistan?

Amna: In the period of my early teens, there was a dictatorship in Pakistan. Under an imposed emergency state, the dictator imposed a lot of new and restrictive laws. I come from a privileged background. And usually, the people from my “class” were depoliticized due to the strong military indoctrination and the narrative that politics are not for us. I came from a military family, but in those years a lot of us young urban middle or elite class kids became agitated and wanted to change something. So me having joined this politicised group was a big problem, that just built on top of me already being a rebel for wanting to dance professionally.

But even though it was hard, the amazing people I found who were part of this collective, made me stick to it. I also became more interested in research about politics and culture at that time. I tried to understand why culture is the way it is, why certain systems like patriarchy or religion come together in a mutated form. I became active in writing focusing on  newspapers or feminist journals. The academic research started when I came to Heidelberg during the Covid-pandemic. I taught a course on aesthetics and power, which was well attended, but due to the German University regulations, I had to enrol also in a master studies before being able to teach again. So I decided to study Transcultural Studies, that allowed me to not only think about my region and what I knew and experienced myself, but to use the transcultural concept to see how my interests also apply in other regions and states.

Interval: Were you aware of the transcultural background of your dancing? Did you perform it, thinking about how your teacher had to change it due to the geopolitical conditions?

Amna: In the first 11 years, I believe I just learned how to totally embody this style and see it in a “classical” way. But when I entered my twenties and, I met this amazing dancer and scholar, Subashini Ganesan. Through her I discovered all these strange developments that took place in this dance form. It made me question a lot. The fact that it was performed by a group of women who were not high caste and systematically outlawed from practising the dance, because the colonial government saw it as sexually enticing for British soldiers. They had a lot of sexual freedom and also property rights, and there was this movement going on and basically still stigmatised the dancers with this narrative. Who corrupted the dance form were high class Brahmin women, who came from so-called good families, who changed the whole form of the dance and added this sentiment of high culture onto something that was actually very local and associated with specific rituals.

There was a lot of societal disputes over this. And my dance teacher belonged to the first generation that learned from this new school. And once I became more aware of it, I started to use what I knew as a way to political resist. It changed the way I interacted with the dance form: I dropped parts of it, I incorporated more physical theatre into it, I experimented a lot. And this made me aware that this dance form had come from a very entangled history, and still to this day was effected and affected the hierarchy in society. 

Interval: Were you aware of the transcultural background of your dancing? Did you perform it, thinking about how your teacher had to change it due to the geopolitical conditions? (Continued)

Amna: If I’m performing in a village with a group of women who have never even encountered live dance before, where dance is mostly seen as a communal thing and not as an individual expression or a political statement, then I have to be hyper aware of my position in showing them that dance can be more than just coming together during a wedding or harvest time. And this has garnered a lot of criticism. There are people who only want me to dance the style in its pure form, and who deem it problematic that someone from the new generation is deconstructing the dance form. But actually there is no pure way of dancing.

Interval: So you would say that dance is a tool of communication that can be used in different settings and different purposes?

Amna: Yes. Dance can be taken in so many different ways, sometimes ending in unintended messages. And for me, I have used it the last few years often for political expression. And that’s what people don’t like. They want to keep it apolitical. But I think dancing in a place like Pakistan automatically is political. A lot of the regional folk dances, that are part of the regional rituals for women and men, have been object to this nation-wide erasure, built on the narrative of the nation-state that we are all Pakistani and we are all Muslim. So even folk dances that have existed for centuries have now become tools of political will and resistance.

It is fascinating to see how traditions, for example the male dance Atan in the northwestern region, becomes relevant in modern times and within politics. If we were to talk in terms of the transcultural framework, we would say that dance is a tool to show your agency. While the state-imposed nationalism is a tool to prohibit it, the resistance and continuing of dance is also part of the nation to proclaim the discontentment about the government’s rule. Dance becomes the contact zone for people with different perspectives and cultures. And not only in Pakistan. Across the globe you can see that certain propaganda and certain identity is shaped by using dance. 

Interval: So you would say that dance is a tool of communication that can be used in different settings and different purposes? (Continued)

Amna: Even though it was hard, the amazing people I found who were part of this collective, made me stick to it. I also became more interested in research about politics and culture at that time. I tried to understand why culture is the way it is, why certain systems like patriarchy or religion come together in a mutated form. I became active in writing focusing on  newspapers or feminist journals. The academic research started when I came to Heidelberg during the Covid-pandemic. I taught a course on aesthetics and power, which was well attended, but due to the German University regulations, I had to enrol also in a master studies before being able to teach again. So I decided to study Transcultural Studies, that allowed me to not only think about my region and what I knew and experienced myself, but to use the transcultural concept to see how my interests also apply in other regions and states.

Interval: So research on dance within the transcultural studies could reveal quite a lot of issues in regards to nationalism, gender issues and agency?

Amna: Yes. Especially political agency could be revealed. And while the global north and global south do differ to some extent, you can never escape the political side of dance. If you want to be a prominent dancer, you need funding from so many agencies that all have different political standpoints. And everyone of us is taking their political world views with them. If we talk about nationalism, then these narratives of freedom of expression and democratic values show themselves in how things are run. You can see capitalism in the way dance-theatres do their ticket sales, in what they’re producing and how they engage dance directors and choreographers. 

Interval: Have you ever experienced a performance where you were confronted with different political or cultural views, that made you rethink your own biases and ways of thinking?

Amna: As a dancer here in Heidelberg, where I mostly work within a studio run by an alliance of free artists, it happened a few times that I’ve tried to be part of a production but wasn’t quite heard. And not only because there’s this difference in language. If we think of dance as a language as well then mine is just so foreign that it is seen as incompatible, and the people don’t even answer to my requests. It’s easier in spaces and places that are more multicultural. The most work I’ve got has been in Berlin, Zurich, or Frankfurt. 

And as a choreographer, I had this experience last year, when I put up a show that was called No Man’s Land. And for this I tried to retain the content, while still translating it somehow for the European audience. There was a Pashtun guitarist, two Tamil musicians and a Pakistani dancer and we came together to perform this evening of dance, with a lot of the pieces being in English. We told the story of Krishna, who in the original kills a serpent who has poisoned this river, but in our show we made them friends that had a happy end together. So we used traditional tropes, but experimented with them. And I guess, some conservatives would see this as offensive.

Interval: Have you ever experienced a performance where you were confronted with different political or cultural views, that made you rethink your own biases and ways of thinking? (Continued)

Amna: We did not only modernise the performances but also problematized these traditional narratives that have been passed down again and again for generations. I think this is the work that I do nowadays. I am also trying to create a piece for a feminist theatre festival that I have applied for. It would be about different women, of various sexualities and from different regions of the subcontinent. This piece is about myth and healing and intergenerational trauma, but also how people can subvert and use traditional systems to resist and survive, to create connections and build solidarity. With dance you can interact with the viewer in a really magical way, that one can really experience what the dance tries to convey with one’s whole body. 

Interval: One of the dancers spoke about how dance is not about understanding things in a rational way. Instead it’s a primitive way of experiencing something on an emotional level. Would you agree that dance connects people on a level that is transcending a lot of our imaginative borders that we acquired through our lives?

Amna: I remember my teacher saying that dance is the only style of performance that bridges time and space. I find that it opens the mind up in a way that’s beyond our understanding. Dance breaks all of these isolating boundaries that we gain through those narratives and discourses. It’s a knowledge production that can change mindsets. It doesn’t rely on language that is often weighed down by so many stigmas and meanings.

The context is often very limited with language, whereas dance can mean a lot of things. And it’s not just a painting that one looks at. The dancer can shift the narrative of the piece within a performance. If the dancer or choreographer wants, they can tell a story that doesn’t have to be vague and abstract. They have the agency to guide the audience directly.

Interval: Would you say that doing research on dance in the context of revealing problems within the industry would help the choreographers or dancers in their practical work?

Amna: Yes, definitely. Dance is such a big topic. When something is produced academically, it can create a dialogue and then movements of change. The me-too movement for example also went on in multiple parts of the world regarding big personalities in dance industries. Of course, the effect is not always directly visible. But I do think there’s a bit more of a threat of accountability if we talk about dance and related issues in academia. And there are so many different angles on which we can research dance. There’s a lot of research happening about dance therapy for example.

Seeing how our bodies react quite physically to certain triggers or because of different cultural settings. Let’s say there is a lot of conservatism in the house or society – how this restricts the way we see our body and feel our movements, how violence affects the way we move – research on these aspects can be very valuable. Also if we are talking about masculinity for example: Research on how men across cultures move and how they express themselves through their physicality could have an effect on the industry. And of course, academic discourses on gender, class, and ethnicity, can spread a better understanding of culture. I recently met quite a few choreographers who read a lot of academic work. Reflecting on these discussed issues, complicating questions in their minds, leads them to create work from and about it. 

Interval: Is it the research on dance that inspires people or is it research on topics that then leads people to incorporate them into their performances?

Amna: I think it’s both. I also met a scholar in the university, who is writing a book with a Zumba teacher. They’re writing a whole manuscript on Zumba and social relations around the Zumba class in a random town in America. The piece I am working on these days is for example also based on this manuscript called Sita under the present moon. It’s a phenomenal work that has not been researched before.

It’s more journalistic in the sense that the author is following these stories of women who go to different shrines in very poor areas in the South of Pakistan. But she is also tracing Hindu influences from India, and researching on the people from the Arab states who go as migrant labourers and then come back. It’s more about the dynamics of transculturation, but she’s also writing about the role of dance in it. And there is also someone in Heidelberg who created a trilogy of dances based on the research of scientists on healing and trauma. 

Interval: So dance is something that can reveal cultural mindsets, nationalistic tendencies, political opinions, that can deconstruct traditions and change the perspectives of people. And doing research on those topics and on dance in that context can help with the deconstruction and reconstruction of dance pieces. How would you define dance for yourself then?

Amna: I think dance is an intentional movement that often has rhythm to it. This rhythm is not stagnant, it can be dissonant, and it can be totally erratic. Everything is dance or dancing: Babies, Animals, Trees, …. There’s this beautiful idea and belief about the Hindu god Shiva. He’s Nataraja, the Lord of Dance and he’s not just a man, he’s a woman, and he’s genderless. When he is dancing, the whole universe lies on his head. Through his dance the universe orbits. For me this becomes a spiritual understanding that everything is movement. Everything is somehow dance. And ultimately it is expressive. It is less about a cognitive intention and more about an embodied interaction. It is just beautiful.

Photos courtesy of Amna Mawaz Khan

ABOUT AMNA

Amna Mawaz Khan, born on July 22, 1989, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, presents an exceptional perspective on the universality of dance and its cultural significance. Her extensive training in Bharatanatyam, a classical Indian dance form, has provided her with profound insights into the interplay between dance and culture.
Through her international performances in countries like the United States, China, India, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, Amna has had the opportunity to connect with diverse audiences and transcend cultural boundaries, showcasing the art’s innate ability to resonate across different societies.
Moreover, Amna’s personal commitment to preserving and promoting Bharatanatyam in Pakistan, a context distinct from its cultural origins, highlights the adaptability of this classical art form.
In addition to her artistic pursuits, Amna is a fervent activist and feminist who utilizes dance as a potent means of advocating for vital social and political causes. Her unique combination of artistic expression and advocacy underscores the broader implications of the intersection of dance and culture.
Amna’s life journey, from her dance training to international performances and her role as an activist, positions her as an ideal interviewee for exploring how dance transcends cultural boundaries and shapes our understanding of global artistic expression.

Learn More about Amna
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