Аннотация:Transgressing Norms of Gender and Sexuality in Urban and Transnational Kuchipudi DanceToday, Kuchipudi is an Indian dance form practiced across transnational contexts, spanning from Australia to Paris to the United States.Kuchipudi's transnational reach is attributed to a single figure from the mid-twentieth century: Vempati Chinna Satyam .A brahmin from the Kuchipudi village, Chinna Satyam left his hometown in the late 1940s to move to the Tamil-speaking urban center of Madras (present-day Chennai), where he would soon establish the Kuchipudi Art Academy (hereafter KAA), an institution referred to as the "Mecca for all aspirants who wanted to learn Kuchipudi" (Nagabhushana Sarma 2004, 7). 1 Paralleling the ostensible "revival" of Bharatanatyam a few decades beforehand (Allen 1997), Chinna Satyam began to experiment, innovate, and reimagine Kuchipudi from an insulated dance style solely performed by village brahmin men to a transnationally recognized "classical" Indian dance form.Chinna Satyam's experiments with Kuchipudi abandoned many key elements of the dance form as it was practiced in his natal village: he began to teach both women and men from a variety of caste backgrounds; he choreographed elaborate dance dramas featuring both mythological and social themes; and, most significant for this study, he eliminated the practice of male dancers donning the strī-vēṣam.There is an extensive body of literature about Chinna Satyam's various innovations with performance and pedagogy by practitioners and scholars of Kuchipudi (Pattabhi Raman 1988/89; Andavalli and Pemmaraju 1994; Jonnalagadda 1996b; Nagabhushana Sarma 2004; Bhikshu 2006; Chinna Satyam 2012).However, these discussions are, for the most part, silent on Chinna Satyam's experiments with impersonation, particularly as it pertains to Siddhendra's Bhāmākalāpam and the character of Madhavi. 2 In his rechoreographed version of Bhāmākalāpam
