About the Actant
© Sharan Devkar Shankar
Ranjana Dave is a dancer and writer based in New Delhi. She is Programmes Director at the Gati Dance Forum, working on curation, pedagogy and research across Gati’s projects. She teaches on the MA Performance Practice (Dance) programme at Ambedkar University Delhi. Her interests lie at the intersection of the body, performance, and text. She loves socks; the more toes the better. Someday, she’d like to cartwheel.
© Ranjana Dave
Age Sex Location (ASL) considers what it means to perform desire in text, through the practice of ‘sexting’. Twelve people sit around a long table. For an hour, they sext with someone else at the table, but they have no way of knowing whom they’re in conversation with. What happens when one begins to think of uncertainty in the performing body as a space of transgressive possibilities? The text may seem to triangulate the relationship, in adding a device to the connections between two bodies. But it also allows for radical imaginations of the body in ways that are disconnected from, and hence free of, the sequential constraints of the real world. It is excruciating, the time it takes to unhook a bra...but in text, it can become the score for a series of other actions. You are not muttering impatiently because that third hook is always the nastiest one, while you sext.