shambik Ghose

It proposed a somatic, hybrid, dance, pedagogic method (SHDPM) for traditional, classical and contemporary dancers assisting them in exploring their embodied knowledge with autonomy and democracy through the multi-modal inquiry of Practice as Research (PaR) model (Nelson, R. 2013). However, it went further in excavating insights that impacted wider and expanded areas of culturally informed diverse training systems in performing arts practice, pedagogy and performance leading me to receive creative proposals from recognized organizations I have stated at the end.  

 The insights I developed through the 5 long years of journey in LBU leading to my doctorate have impacted my current thinking around dance research and opened doors for me with prospects to share my knowledge around the world. 

My PhD research was not contained within developing a SHDPM. It educated me about multicultural and intercultural identities recognising their capacities to live on the boundary-fluid and mobile, acknowledging the similarities and differences between people. The insights that emerged identified possibilities for moving in between cultures. My culturally informed hybrid pedagogic exploration was not limited to providing training strategies for culturally distinctive dancing bodies. It also generated insights about how to support the needs of such dancing identities who locate themselves in a consciousness of ‘double-belonging’, and to empower them with methods to perceive the world and practice through multiple perspectives.

My PaR PhD apart from developing a culturally, hybrid, training method further furnished the existing body of knowledge in the performing arts (dance) about practices that will be critically accommodative of culture and capable of proposing an alternative social epistemology that transcends and criticises dualism and essentialism. The impact my PaR PhD generated is the need for the current dance sector to understand and explore transculturalism that both reflects and is the product of the inner differentiation and complexities of modern culture (artistic). The transcultural subject is a cultural hybrid. It can interconnect and integrate intersections and various cultural forms in an attempt to transcend our monocultural standpoints about cultures and cultural identities. 

While pursuing my PhD my contribution to the existing body of culturally informed performing arts pedagogy, performance and practice would be my expanded learning, understanding and perception of art and its cultures working in international divides. As I developed SHDPM I also developed methods for mapping and exploring cultural histories of performing bodies (dance) who locate themselves in cultural hybridity that propound aligning with disparate cultural and historical identities through interactions foregrounding the notion that cultural borrowing can enrich dance research and practice.

My new approach and understanding of mapping and deducing ways that how culture could stimulate artistic and creative imaginations elicited new, hybrid methods of cultural dialoguing. It offers new possibilities for multi, inter and transcultural collaborations through cross-pollination of ideas, thinking and imagination. This new awareness of dance research and training led me and my wife Dr. Mitul Sengupta along with my dance company Rhythmosaic to receive a choreographic commission from Y Dance Scotland for their project Y Evolution. Our choreography will be performed at the prestigious Fringe Festival 2025.