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Anusia
Govender-Elshove
Biography
Anusia Govender-Elshove is the daughter of pioneering Indian classical dancers who
established pedagogical roots in South Africa in 1961. Her interests span Indian,
African Dance, and World dance, interwoven dance cultures, dance theatre, paper
engineering, and digital arts. She earned her MA degree and PhD in Theatre and
Performance at Wits University. Her research focused on curating her family’s 65-
year-old dance archive and developing innovative methodologies.
These methodologies include ‘Paper Choreography’—a unique method that blends
dance with paper art to explore new forms of movement, remembrance and
storytelling. She also developed ‘Unarchival’, a decolonial approach to reinterpreting
historical archives in the field of Dance. This method pays special attention to liminal
spaces—those transitional or overlooked areas in archives—bringing to light stories
and experiences that traditional history often overlooked.
Anusia has redefined how dance archives are curated and interpreted as a
physically disabled dancer, inspiring new approaches to documenting and
celebrating marginalised histories within performance art. Her areas of interest
include Dance/ Paper Choreography, Archives/ Unarchival, Interwoven Cultures,
Yarning/Storytelling, Decolonial Methodology.
Anusia was a Centennial Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand
in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is currently a Lecturer at Wit’s Digital Arts Dept.
PAPER DANCES FOR ME: Re-storying Identity through Trauma, Archive, and
Interweaving Dance Cultures via ASMR and Pop-Up performance.
Could I continue to dance after an accident in 2020 left me permanently disabled? In
that vein, how might I imagine decolonial futures around “Indian-ness” without reducing culture, heritage, and othered identities to a single story? And how could I tell my own origin story in a way that felt both intimate and underexplored? These questions shaped a transdisciplinary practice drawing on urban design, visual arts, Yarning as methodology, and Gabriele Brandstetter’s concept of “interweaving dance cultures” (2011). Together, these frameworks allowed me to reflect on the socially
cohesive choreography that my mother and I have contributed to the South African dance landscape through Anavarata Dance Institute (formerly The Nydoo Sisters School of Dance, founded in 1961), the oldest Indian dance organisation on the African continent.
It is positioned as an act of cultural reconquest or re-storying in South Africa. Informed by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talks, “The Danger of a Single Story” (2009), this practice-as-research project takes the form of a pop-up book as dance theatre performance or page-based dramaturgy as an alternative site of movement- making. Structured through my self-coined methodology, “Paper Choreography,” it asks how paper might dance in my stead when my body cannot. Drawing on my family dance archive, colonial and temporal histories, and erased or untold stories from the Indian subcontinent, the work traces my journey as a disabled dancer healing migratory, inherited, and physical trauma through re-storying identity. By digitising my family archive through ASMR and pop-up forms, I also explore radical pedagogical approaches to artivism in higher education. The proposed paper retains a performative quality while offering an original South African contribution to conversations on disability, archives, decoloniality, and palimpsestic cultural interactions across Africa and the Indian subcontinent.