This study interrogates Purulia Chhau as a cultural/performance text through the frameworks of cultural labor and theater semiotics. Drawing on Bramha Prakash’s sanskrutik sram, it argues that the laboring body generates value, forging ties to place, memory, and identity. Mythic portrayals of Chhau’s semiotic network—masks, costumes, body language, music, and audience reception—construct authority and meaning while negotiating authenticity, commodification, and representation in global circuits. Arguing for a nuanced, embedded approach to folk performance, this study honors Chhau’s epistemological depth and the cultural labor through which it endures—ritualized, affective, and continually reinvented in dialogue with contemporary pressures.

In defining global and glocal dance forms and their relation to canonized narratives, Dance in World Cultures courses have the capacity to foster empathy through written and embodied research. This article shares how the authors craft assignments to emphasize facets of identity and prompt students to unearth their personal histories in order to reconstruct larger narratives surrounding dance studies. These autoethnographic and ethnographic research assignments encourage students to reflect on their own ancestry and utilize brain-compatible methods that align with feminist and liberatory pedagogical frameworks. The authors also draw on Howard Gardner’s “theory of multiple intelligences,” utilizing linguistic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal intelligences as a mode for understanding and embodying the historical, social, and political developments of these forms to widen the perception of the global dance canon and encourage culturally-sensitive, reflexive teaching practices.