This article interrogates “contact,” understood by Global North contemporary dance discourse as choreography that is mobilized by shifting points of physical touch between two or more bodies, by attending to inherent, and often ignored, power asymmetries that are foundational to such choreographic practices. This “unmaking of contact” is undertaken by deploying the lenses of race, caste, and gender in order to argue for an intersectional, intercultural and inter-epistemic understanding of “choreographic touch” that may or may not involve tactility. It starts by examining contact improvisation (CI), and its now ubiquitous choreographic manifestation of partnering, as an aesthetic that can work in colonizing ways on South Asian dancers who train in primarily solo classical dance forms. The article then moves on to place South Asian bodies, philosophies, and discourses at the heart of its interrogation of choreographic touch, and foregrounds the culturally specific politics and powers that govern them.

本文质疑“接触”，全球北方当代舞蹈话语将其理解为通过在两个或多个身体之间转移身体接触点来动员的舞蹈，通过关注作为这种舞蹈实践基础的固有但经常被忽视的权力不对称。这种“取消接触”是通过使用种族、种姓和性别的视角来进行的，以争取对可能涉及或不涉及触觉的“舞蹈触觉”的交叉、跨文化和跨认识论的理解。它首先检查接触即兴表演 (CI)，以及它现在无处不在的合作舞蹈表现形式，作为一种美学，可以在主要以独奏古典舞蹈形式训练的南亚舞者身上以殖民方式发挥作用。然后文章继续放置南亚尸体，