Author's Note: This essay was written in December 2019 for TDHT 21 with Professor Power-Sotomayor at UC San Diego — one of my first forays into writing critically about performance. I came to the Natyashastra not as an abstraction but as a practitioner: I had trained in Bharatanatyam for years before I ever encountered it as an academic text, which gave this particular assignment a strange doubling — the sensation of reading formal notation for something your body already kno
