About

The Menaka Archive is a network of different research projects in the context of the tour of the “Indian Ballet Menaka” in Germany and Europe 1936-38. The archive collects materials, reflects its collection process and contextualises it with artistic elaborations and scientific research.

So far, neither a Menaka archive nor a private estate existed. Leila Roy died childless in 1947 – the year of independence and division of India. Menaka’s contribution to a dance-like modernity that was interwoven between Asia and Europe was therefore largely forgotten and is only recently being rediscovered in Indian dance research. From today’s perspective, Menaka’s tour in Europe therefore represents an archive in which structures have been documented that complete the image of an internationally interwoven dance modernity.

Nevertheless, the traces of Menaka’s tour in Europe are fragmented. The fragmentation and incompleteness of the material situation makes the historiographic reconstruction of Menaka’s project the subject of critical archive work. Against this background, the Menaka Archive is collaborative platform for researching and reconstructing a specific history of artistic modernity, written jointly by dancers and musicians in India as well as in Germany. The aim of the archive is to find and secure previously unknown original sources, as well as to register and arrange the already archived tracks and documents of performances. Based on a linked database, the performances of the Indian artists are being contoured as a subject of research. The Digital Archive with its manifold features serves an ideal presentation platform for heterogeneous material such as newspaper articles, music and film recordings, concert recordings and interviews. In addition, the Menaka Archive also reveals its production logic and the special archival aesthetics, which, in addition to spatially and temporally scattered materials with their interconnectedness, also make the vacancies of the archive visible. Thus, the archives are not only presents its holdings, but implements different approaches of storytelling.
In this way, the Menaka Archive seeks to fill gaps in an intertwined research field between Asia and Europe and to reconstruct the structures of productive artistic exchange between different cultures in the period between the two world wars.

Authors

Markus Schlaffke
Markus Schlaffke studied visual communication and fine arts at the Bauhaus University Weimar and works as a documentary filmmaker and cultural historian. (recent documentary films: Songs without a Place – Music from Afghanistan; Documentary, Afghanistan/Germany 2015; The Albatross around my Neck, Documentary, India/Germany 2019). Since 2016 PHD-at the Bauhaus University Weimar. Markus Schlaffke examines the traces of Menakas Indian Ballet in Europe from a perspective of archival-aesthetics.

Dr. Isabella Schwaderer
Dr. Isabella Schwaderer is a research associate at the Chair of Comparative Religion at Erfurt University. She studied classical philology and philosophy in Würzburg, Thessaloniki and Padua and received her doctorate 2014 in Erfurt in Religious Studies for Orthodox Christianity.
She studies the Menaka Indian Ballet as a part of her habilitation project: Dance and Religion in the Nazi-Era: Press Reviews on the Tour of the Menaka Indian Ballet 1936-1938.

ISSN: 2701-4681