Unmaking Contact interrogates “contact”, understood in Global North dance discourse as a shorthand for the movement discipline of contact improvisation (CI) and its characteristic shifting points of weight-sharing between two or more bodies through physical touch, by attending to power asymmetries that are foundational to this practice. By placing South Asian aesthetics, bodies, discourses, and philosophies on touch at the heart of its interrogation through the lenses of caste, ecology, faith, gender, and sexuality, author Royona Mitra argues for an intersectional, intercultural, and inter-epistemic understanding of contact, that may or may not involve touch. The book shifts and expands understandings of “contact” in dance-making through intercultural epistemologies that examine notions of touch and contact. In this book the term contact signals both a shorthand for CI and a shift away from it to more expansive choreographic considerations. It becomes an apparatus for dismantling power regimes; it is conjured as a catalyst to examine power in social relations; it appears as a fulcrum of ecological relationality; it arises as critical encounters full of generative and transformative potential; and finally, it manifests as community.

Innovative, provocative, and insightful, Unmaking Contact explores the liberatory and oppressive potentials of physical, intersubjective interaction in contemporary South Asian and diaspora choreography. Fluidly written and skillfully argued, this book considers contact as both literal and metaphorical connection, examining choreographers' use of touch as it navigates concerns of caste, gender, faith, sexuality, and more-than-human relations. As the first study of its kind to address touch and contact in South Asian choreographies, this book mobilizes South Asian epistemologies, aesthetics and critical theory in the interest of unsettling casteism and other oppressive hierarchies. * Janet O'Shea, Author of Risk, Failure, Play: What Dance Reveals about Martial Arts Training *
Unmaking Contact delves into a field that one dares not touch, while touch remains central to dance and caste-based South Asian society and culture. The book's strength lies in the path of uncertainty it takes, making us realise that one cannot talk about South Asian dance without talking about caste. With an in-depth analyses of the works of South Asian dance artists, Mitra opens up for us a contested field of dance and touch that will make and unmake the futures of South Asian dance/studies. * Brahma Prakash, Author of Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India *

Royona Mitra is the author of Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism. Her research examines systems of oppression in dance and performance cultures at the intersections of bodies, social power regimes, and choreography as resistance. She contributes to the fields of diaspora and performance, South Asian dance and performance cultures, critical dance studies and performance studies.