Communication
Antara Collective organized a colloquium in the context of the December 2015 issue of Seminar (676), featuring essays focused on the problem stated by Gitanjali Kolanad as simply ‘Why Dance?’ The issue engaged with the Indian dance scene from the sociological, neuroscience, historical, political and embodied perspectives. We selected four pieces from the journal for discussion among diverse participants, including both practitioners and theoreticians from across generations, disciplines and fields of arts: (i) ‘Young girls were harmed in the making of this dance’ by Gitanjali Kolanad; (ii) ‘Why Sadir?’ by Amrit Srinivasan; (iii) Interviews with Swapna Sundari, Padmini Chettur and Kapila Venu ; and (iv) ‘Dance without Moving’ by Aparna U. Banerjee.
The colloquium, an effort towards breaking the isolation that exists between theory and practice, old and young, one form of art practice and another, acknowledged our shared concerns: How can we make theory and practice access and find application in each other? How do we build a critical culture?
De-fragmentation is the only way to build a critical body of discourse in the field of performing arts. In order to sustain this work beyond the issue of Seminar, and the colloquium, this essay documents the crucial questions raised in this context, thereby adding another voice to the ongoing discourse.
The colloquium addressed the paucity of discussion, debate and dialogue outside of institutional spaces with redundant vocabularies mouthed by the same voices of authority, by finding fresh ways of engaging with dance. Every participant came with a different interest. To give concrete examples from those who attended, Sunitha, a theatre actor who had practiced Bharatanatyam as a child was now looking for ways to re-engage with the form. Dipanjali’s moment of questioning came when she had to write four lines about Kathak on the brochure for her dance student’s annual day that would not just be a rehash of the popular narrative we hear about Kathak that she knew to be false? Aparna’s concern for making traditional dance relevant came from teaching children in a ‘peri-urban’ locality. Both Lata Mani and Bishnu, from their scholarly perspectives, challenged the assumptions inherent in words like ‘tradition’, ‘contemporary’ or ‘history’. Gitanjali Kolanad and Aparna Banerjee were on hand to discuss their own essays in depth and address the issues their papers raised. The gathering of participants included dancers, dance scholar, poet, philosophy student, political philosopher, historian and some who assumed multiple roles.
Three strands of interconnected enquiry emerged during the course of the day-long event: the importance of context, especially in pedagogy; the problematic of dance history which must be confronted in order to provide that context; the constrained (mis)understanding ‘tradition’ and ‘time’.
Context in pedagogy: In urbanized spaces dance teachers find themselves face-to-face with children whose lifestyle and language bypass traditional, especially embodied forms of wisdom and practices. For example, the movements and postures of Odissi which derive from the action of drawing water from the well, can’t automatically find relevance within these children’s bodily experience. Their everyday lives make familiar the postures of sitting on a chair, typing and texting with fingers, and craning their necks to focus on the electronic screen. Hence, the emotions and aesthetics associated with Odissi movements constitute an incomprehensible physical vocabulary.
The need for context arises most often in pedagogical spaces. Teachers of dance who remain unaware of context consciously or unconsciously inflict violence on the child’s body by forcing it into an aesthetic with which they have no connection.
However, to talk about the context as something fixed in which one is merely embedded is not an appropriate understanding. The relationship between the practices and the context is far more fluid, in that each one influences the other. By teaching Odissi, one has influenced the child’s environment, allowing the form, aesthetics and poetics of Odissi to affect the lifestyle. One could think of creating a relevant manual of dance, where the first sutra could be ‘sit on the floor’. Thus one could build a way of living that makes the Odissi chowka relevant. Perhaps in the same way, it is also possible for the significance of the movements and postures to acquire references drawing from the world the student inhabits. Thus, though the chowka position is inspired by the posture of the idol of Lord Jagannath of Puri temple, it could accurately mean a table, bringing it within the child’s comprehension.
Teaching dance history as a way of teaching context and its problems: It is not to say that the world and the lifestyle from which these traditional forms evolved and emerged can be dismissed or disguised; rather, one must equip the student with the tools to comprehend these practices in a holistic sense. Thus, one has to engage with dance history without forgetting that it is not over; we are in the process of making it. This emphasis on bringing reflexivity to one’s own practice is essential, because dance lives into the future in the student’s body. The body becomes the only true living document of the dance.
Observing dance in the Indian context gives us a ringside view of gender and body politics. The popular dance history narrative passed on to students in ‘classical’ dance classes is stuck in the rut of the rhetoric of rescue, reform and revival. These are the versions of history that Gitanjali summarizes and critiques in her essay. While one story has it that Bharatanatyam was rescued from the devadasis and reformed by removing all the ‘vulgar’ elements from it, leading to a revival of the ‘authentic’ art following the tenets of the Natyashastra, the alternate narrative also searches for an imagined authenticity, this time situated within the valorized devadasi.
Each narrative justifies a notion of purity of the form through a selective manipulation of historical evidence. Each version attempts to pin down the form in time. ‘Classical’ dancers seek their identity in the imagined past while ‘contemporary’ dancers seek their identities in a present formulated in opposition to the past. Time is framed as either historical or contemporary, pitting one against the other, as if one somehow leaves the past behind in being contemporary. The classical is defined as limiting, stilted, anachronistic, while freedom is afforded by contemporary dance, which becomes the only modern way of moving. This ignores the simple fact that both are contemporary expressions, since dance has no choice but to be contemporary.
In search of a new vocabulary: time and tradition: Labelled as practitioners of a form that belongs the past, classical dancers experience a very deep need to make themselves and their identities relevant to the present context. We find the classical dancers of the present generation having to deal with the history of their dance form either by glorifying it or experiencing it as baggage of the past. Releasing the form from the rigid timeframes and allowing it to interact with the life world of dancers, will ease the burden of the past and enable dancers to access, engage and enter dance history from a more honest place. Though dancers are drawn to the form itself, they are often unable to articulate the relevance of the form, why people should learn and practice it. The fixed vocabulary that has persisted around Indian classical dance forms does not allow for this articulation. One needs a vocabulary that breaks out the vicious circle of classical and contemporary and gives space for addressing and articulating the changing needs of the art form and the artist.
Without engaging with the context around dance, one often tends to project a frozen image of the dance form. Reducing dance to mere formations in space and time and the dancer to a material object. In Amrit Srinivasan’s words, ‘freeing the dance from the dancer.’ From ‘Why Dance?’ we are driven to asking ‘What is Dance?’ If dance is only the projection of form imposed on a body in space and time then the dancer in the dance is completely dehumanized, leaving no scope for a personal relationship with the form.
Swapna Sundari, Padmini Chettur and Kapila Venu have expressed this dichotomy in their interviews and as artists at the height of their powers, have provided inspiration as to how the person and the art form intertwine. Belonging to three different traditions of performing arts, they have different points of entry into the discourse of tradition and the contemporary. Both Swapna Sundari and Kapila Venu have articulated the importance of movement within the tradition to keep it alive. They locate themselves in the history of their form and recognize the shifting currents of the tradition. Both Vilasini Natyam and Koodiattam have given them the space to make the tradition their own. Padmini Chettur, starting in Bharatanatyam, in breaking out of the tradition is neither seeking nor asserting any greater creative agency. Each artist, whether labelled ‘traditional’ or ‘contemporary’ finds freedom working within her own set of constraints.
By situating the dancer in the dance, we can see the aesthetic and the emotional flavours that movements assume for the dancer. Their personal journeys suggest that dance itself could become a means to humanize. Dance lives not just in the physical space but in how the dancer wears the dance, how she embodies it. The movement to break away from the classical may be in response to this rigidity, this lack of space to engage with the form in any new way. We need to allow ongoing, innovative interactions with the form to emerge without that becoming a reason to exclude them from the category of the classical. This can happen when we situate the dancer in the dance. The enquiry then becomes ‘How to Dance?’
Aparna articulated her own personal experience with Odissi, demonstrating in her article ‘Dance without Moving’, that while dance needs a body to live, she herself needed Odissi, a form so deeply held within her that she danced it without moving. One cannot extract the dance from the being of the dancer. There is no imagination of dance without the dancing person. The dancer in all her emotional and physical pain is more fundamental to dance than any set of physical movements in space.
Moving past rescue, reform and revival, we could think of renewal – to initiate dialogue, discussion, debate, discourse that comes from dance practitioners as well as scholars. Rather than redundant categories, we need the fresh breeze of reflexivity in the pedagogical spaces.
Awareness of one’s self, body and identity in a context-specific way could be one way to consider renewal. To observe one’s body, recognize the world it embodies and finally articulate this awareness; a reframing within time as both synchronic and diachronic; re-situating the dancer in dance can initiate a discourse that does not lean on the crutches of tradition and its static categories.
This is because the lived experience of past and present exceeds what the logic of words like ‘history’ or ‘contemporary’ can capture. The word ‘temporality’ adds the necessary complexity to time rather than reducing it to linear scale. The past lives in the present in a nuanced and sometimes ineffable way. To say that Bharatanatyam is contemporary is not to say that it does not occupy a place in the past. Bharatanatyam exists in the present and the past simultaneously. Gitanjali’s emphasis on the immediacy and contemporaneity of any dance form and Ajay Cadambi’s quoted lines that ‘Bharatanatyam occupies many centuries’ can be said in the same breath and be true at the same time.
What the dancer needs to articulate is what really draws her to move and dance. Dancers keep dancing, and what keeps them dancing is not that the dance originates in the Natyashastra, or from a devadasi. When the dancer dances the movement cuts across all these categories and exists in the body of the dancer at the present moment. The feeling is immediate and even its past can be accessed only in the present continuous tense. The dancer embodies the dance and its history. Even the most ‘fossilized’ of dance forms does not become brittle and break because the dancer’s muscle and bone and blood gives it life and shape. Hence to dance is and has always been a humanizing experience and cannot be otherwise. What is lost is the space to acknowledge that and the vocabulary to articulate it. This issue of Seminar and the resulting discussion at the Antara Collective Colloquium documented here go some way to setting the stage for further dialogue.
Sammitha Sreevathsa
Research Affiliate and Documentarian, Antara Collective, Bangalore
* The author acknowledges the valuable inputs given by Aparna U. Banerjee.
