The concluding chapter offers three short ethnographic accounts of dance events in twenty-first-century Kolkata to argue how nautch has an afterlife. It persists, despite sustained bureaucratic attempts to legally annihilate it. It continues to be carried by bodies under compulsion and bodies with volition. Nautch has morphed into modern-day baiji dances in private rooms and into choreographed spectacles on public stages. A dance and performance studies lens shows how nautch has endured as a profession, a form of waged labour at times shrouded in secrecy, and in other moments displayed proudly in civic spaces. Its legacy of stigma hangs like a curse on multiple professional dance communities across India, who continue to grapple with the shame that accompanies a life of dancing, as other scholars have found. But the afterlife of nautch also features insistent and localised revolutionary movements, such as those led by sex workers’ collective Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) and its cultural wing Komal Gandhar in Kolkata. The chapter ends with a discussion of how Komal Gandhar’s dancing collectively activates spaces of possibilities, of new forms of decriminalised citizenship and of more equitable futures of social belonging.

This chapter examines the fictions of nautch dancers painted by local artists (patuas) in nineteenth-century Kalighat paintings from Bengal. Part I, ‘Bazaar Art, Bazaari Women’, highlights key features and techniques of Kalighat paintings in representing the female/courtesan figure (or Bibi). Part II, ‘Patuas and Performance’, discusses the intimacy between visual and performance worlds in Kalighat paintings, noticing how patuas borrowed gestures and bodies from Bengal’s performance forms such as jatra and khemta. Through contemporary social satires and reviews produced by caste-privileged, Bengali male authors, the chapter tracks a growing anti-nautch narrative targeting the baiji and khemta dancers of Bengal whilst popular circulation of their imagery through Kalighat paintings flourished. Part III, ‘Murdering Dance’, examines two real murders: the 1873 Tarakeshwar case, a sensational event that rocked Calcutta and was captured in several notable Kalighat paintings, and the 1875 Sonagachi murder case of Golap, a sex worker in Calcutta. Visual traces of these two murders are read as part of an anti-nautch discourse in which colonial law and native patriarchy centred violence against a dancer’s body within debates on female sexual desire and deviance, and against which subaltern women performed their insurgent gestures of refusal.

This chapter maps the prolific appearance of nautch sundaris (beauties) and jans (beloveds) in South Asian popular visual culture in a period of growing anti-colonial nationalism and anti-nautch regulation in India. Visual traces of dancer-actresses are studied alongside established theatre history primary texts to re-presence the overlooked labour of dancing, a fundamental part of innovative and seditious vernacular dramaturgies that inaugurated modern Bengali drama. Part I, ‘The Age of Mechanical Reprodarshan’, narrates the intimacy of the red-light district and the popular printing presses of Kansaripara Art Studio and Chorebagan Art Studio in Calcutta. It argues that actress-dancers proliferated in print in the unique visual participatory space of darshan. Part II, ‘The Sundaris (Beauties)’ traces the many sundaris – real and fictional – appearing in popular visual prints and in Calcutta’s theatres. Part III, ‘The Jans (Beloveds)’ examines nautch on the humble and ubiquitous matchbox label. A reading of the real and fictional beloveds – Khorshed Jan, Pokhraj Jan, Sanichar Jan, Bani Jan and the celebrated Gauhar Jan (1873 –1930) – explores how the circulation of the Jan series on matchboxes brought about a change in modes of patronage and spectatorship for nautch in the subcontinent in the early twentieth century.

The Epilogue speculates on what Haydn might think about a study of his minuets and considers further applications of the research to other repertoires and fields.

In this chapter a method of ‘somatic enquiry’ is put forward, which demonstrates ways in which the bodily knowledge of the minuet might inform analytical approaches to this repertoire. Drawing on other contributions to the field of somatic studies by scholars such as Suzanne Ravn and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, it demonstrates ways in which the sensation of dancing informs my perception of the musical sounds, and conversely how the sounds affect my body’s kinaesthetic sensations. Taking Elisabeth Le Guin’s similar exploration of Boccherini’s body as a model, it considers challenges faced by any attempts to grapple with bodily knowledge. It builds on Christopher Hasty’s notion of projection, or ‘throwing forth’, in his theory of metre, arguing that to dance is a physical throwing forth of one’s body. The method of somatic enquiry is illustrated through detailed accounts of dancing to movements from Haydn’s Minuets Hoboken IX:11, composed in 1792 for the first annual ball of the Gesellschaft bildender Künstler at the Hofburg Redoutensaal. Ultimately, it argues that musical listening (even when seated) is a more active bodily experience than is typically recognised, even when one’s awareness of this activity is limited.

This chapter turns to the concert minuet, asking how somatic knowledge of the minuet dance informs engagement with and understanding of this genre. The chapter begins with writings that show eighteenth-century listeners discussing concert minuets in relation to the minuet dance step, as well as eighteenth-century music-theoretical discussions of minuet composition that put forward a view of the concert minuet as the nonconformist version of the dance minuet. Two case studies discuss minuets from Haydn’s ‘London’ Symphonies – Nos. 97 and 102 – which were written around the same period as the dance minuets discussed in the previous chapter, and were also performed in Vienna in the 1790s. These case studies show ways in which Haydn plays with expectations formed by the dance minuet: he subverts the structural norms of minuet composition, as well as manipulating one’s feeling of the dance step. The argument is made that, while traditional forms of analysis tend to seek subversion of expectations as a feature for explication, minuets and somatic enquiry invite us to see artfulness through a different lens.

In this chapter the choreography of the minuet as it was performed in late eighteenth-century Vienna is reconstructed. Unlike previous iterations of the dance, the minuet in this context was performed as a group dance, undertaken by many couples dancing simultaneously, and the minuet’s development as a group dance is considered in relation to its previous history. The choreography is reconstructed from German-language dance treatises written around the end of the eighteenth century. The minuet step is explained, and readers are taught how to perform it. The main figures of the minuet are given – the Z-figure, the révérences, the giving of hands – and comparative schemes for these figures from the different treatises are set alongside each other. The overall structure of the dance is established, and practical logistics of performing the dance alongside other dancers in a crowded space are considered. The minuet’s association with the enactment of ‘nobility’ is interrogated.

This chapter explores the dance culture of Vienna in the latter half of the eighteenth century. It describes the changing legislation that opened up the city’s dance halls to a paying public, and the subsequent establishment of new dance venues across the city and its suburbs. It considers the social make-up of attendees at these venues, and ways in which social class was both entrenched and destabilised in this setting, particularly through practices such as masking. Descriptions of the minuet, the German dance and the contredanse – the three main dances performed at the public balls during this period – are given. The chapter ends with a detailed account of a public ball hosted by the Gesellschaft bildender Künstler at the Hofburg Redoutensaal on 25 November 1792, for which Haydn composed the music. The aim of focusing on this one event is to paint as vivid as possible a picture of the scene, such that readers can readily put themselves ‘in the shoes’ of minuet dancers in Vienna at the end of the century.

In November 1792, Beethoven arrived in Vienna to study with Haydn and ultimately to make his career. Such was the importance of dancing as a social skill that Beethoven included finding a dancing teacher on his ‘to-do’ list and upon arrival in Vienna copied out the details of a dancing teacher from the Wiener Zeitung. In the same month, Haydn returned to Vienna from his first trip to England, and his first task was to compose minuets and German dances for a ball in the city’s Redoutensaal at the end of the month. November 1792 thus sets the scene for an investigation into the dance culture of Vienna at the end of the eighteenth century, and its implications for minuet composition, with a focus on minuets by Haydn. Following a description of Beethoven’s arrival and Haydn’s return, the Introduction considers existing musicological attempts to consider the minuet, and provides a summary outline of the book that follows.