The choreographies of supermodern time: Mapping non-place in Nina Rajarani’s Quick! and Divya Kasturi’s NowHere

We live in a world that features unprecedented acceleration, spatial surplus and an egocentric sense of self, a phenomenon that ethnologist Marc Augé terms as supermodernity. With the rapid proliferation of travel in the globalized age, an increasing proportion of our time is thus spent in airports, supermarkets, highways and railway stations, which Augé refers to as non-places. For the first time, in this article, I investigate these transit spaces through the theoretical assertion of non-place and explore what supermodern choreographies might be by critically analysing two contemporary Bharatanatyam choreographies, Quick! by Nina Rajarani (2006) and NowHere by Divya Kasturi (2011). Drawing on a multidisciplinary understanding of non-place and applying a mixed-method approach, including dance observation, dance reading and narrative analysis of interviews, I depict the spatial politics of supermodern time in these dances which is dominated by abundant travels, shifting homes, identity crisis and solitude. By adopting the Augéan ‘palimpsestic model’, I also reveal how it acts as a prism to view (non)places, practices and identity not as permanent but evolving over time. Furthermore, I argue that non-place can be purely ‘psycho-geographic’, expanding the boundary of the Augéan assertions. Drawing on ethnographic interviews, I demonstrate that these two dance works have created semblance by connecting the lives of the characters with audiences, disrupting the line between them. In light of these, my contention is that theory informs practice as much as life and dance practices inform the Augéan assertions.