Negotiating hybridity: Native women's performance as cultural persistence

New Delhi-based performer, Maya Krishna Rao’s experimental performances incorporate a variety of forms including kathakali, cabaret, comedy, drag, live music, and video, and draw attention to the performative, political, and ethical potential of gesture. This article traces Rao’s practice as a minor inhabitation of kathakali and everyday gesture. Following performance theorist Erin Manning (2016), I understand the “minor” to be a force that scrambles normative hierarchies of value and organization from within the intervals of the “major.” Rao’s minor practice retools the four-hundred-year-old dance-drama form to produce new sensory-kinesthetic knowledge of quotidian regimes. In works such as The Non-Stop Feel-Good Show, Khol Do, and A Deep Fried Jam, Rao straddles kathakali’s mythical economy, conventions, and physicality alongside snippets from contemporary news media, ideologically inflected historical narratives, and socially normative dress and behavior codes, to reveal the extraordinary with/in the everyday, such that we might inhabit the present differently. In distorting, combining, disarticulating, and deterritorializing kathakali’s gestural and expressive vocabulary, Rao invites audiences to partake and follow her into a gestural regime that lies alongside the known. By focusing on the possibilities for affective realignment and queering in a minor register, her experimental and hybrid kathakali-influenced performances impress upon discourses and practices of neoliberal urbanism, national memory, and gender and sexuality in New Delhi today.