Ayla Joncheere Email and Phone Number

Bollywood on a missionWith Bollylicious, the team intends to uplift Indian dance to a professional level, standing side-by-side other international dance projects. They focus on large accessibility and want to represent more diversity in the current international dance scene.As European audiences are not very familiar with Indian dance, it's a challenge to present India's rich traditional culture, by remaining accessible for non-experts without being merely exotic, and by being equally interesting for spectators with a high knowledge of Indian dance.They pay much attention to staging of multiple dance styles and their professionally elegant execution. From their experiences in the international dance scene, they observed a lack of versatile and professional dance companies in Europe to present Indian dance. Therefore their first goal was, and still is, to contest the narrow-mindedness and monotonous representation of dance in European professional settings.Bollylicious is a very conscious balancing act whereby they try to be intercultural mediators through dance. In their performances, they fuse and present Indian dance in a contemporary way while respecting its traditions. They aim at being original and simultaneously they reach out by being accessible to audiences. They continue to fight for international respect for Indian dance.

Subtitles for Last Days (Lieve Blancquaert) - Episode India.

Hindi Translator for Axel Opgelicht (Mumbai Episode)

Ayla Joncheere successfully defended her doctoral thesis entitled: 'Kālbeliyās: Dancers, Gypsies or Snake Charmers - Staging of Authenticity and Dynamics of Identity' on 20 July 2016. Abstract PhD:Being enlisted as intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO since 2010, Kalbeliya dance from Rajasthan is nowadays generally conceptualized as an ancient tradition from India. However, this same dance practice, also known as a form of ‘Indian gypsy’ or ‘snake charmers’ folk’ dance, appears to have originated as recently as the 1980s. Joncheere’s research gives an account of the swift development of Kalbeliya dance from its first appearance on stage in 1981 to the present. Ethnographic research with Kalbeliya dancers’ families has elucidated how this inventive dance practice was formed to fit into national and transnational narratives with the aim of commercializing it globally and of generating a new, lucrative livelihood for these Kalbeliya families. As a new cultural product of Rajasthani fusion, the dance finds itself at the crossroads of commercial tourism and political folklorism and is grounded in neo-orientalist discourses (romanticism and exoticism).For a list of publications: http://research.flw.ugent.be/en/ayla.joncheere