It is my pleasure and honor here to introduce three articles by prominent scholars and practitioners of Indian dance to celebrate a set of profound, meticulous acts of devotion—the writings of Kapila Vatsyayan. These essays, originally presented at an honorary panel for Kapila Vatsyayan at the 1998 CORD Conference, offer diverse perspectives and conceptual frames that significantly enrich our appreciation of Vatsyayan's outstanding contribution to dance scholarship. The first frame, that of Janet O'shea, focuses on the interactions between body, subjectivity, a system of dancing, and their combined implications for dance studies. Joan Erdman's frame draws attention to the ways in which Vatsyayan's vision of dance interacts with Indian culture and becomes expressed as thought, art, architecture, and poetry. Mohd Anis Nor considers the impact of Vatsyayan's scholarship on the works of East Asian scholars. Finally, Vatsyayan herself speaks in an informal interview about formative influences on her writings. Her spontaneous responses reflect and confirm issues that the set of papers have raised concerning her postcolonial experience of scholarly research.

Janet O'shea, a performer of Bharatanatyam, explores how Vatsyayan's understanding of the bodily experience of dancing informs her organization of the components of dance structures. She observes that Vatsyayan's concept of dance demonstrates how the various Indian dance forms groom the body to reflect the concepts of body-shape, posture, and of articulation of movement that are listed in the theoretical texts. O'shea notes that “this methodological framework situates dance as an active cultural participant in relation to other systems of thought” and offers a model for exploring dance as a system.