'ADDA AT RANAN' - Creating Dance: Content, Context, Confluence

As part of INTERFACE 2010 - the biennial performance festival presented by Sapphire Creations Dance Workshop - Ranan hosted an adda with performance scholars, critics and participating artists - - Sadanand Menon (performance scholar) - Sunil Kothari (dance critic) - Jacek Luminski (dancer/choreographer from Poland) The varied adda audience and participants comprised dancers, critics, students, musicians and others. Click the image for photographs.

Sadanand Menon's opening comments:


This is a very, very comfortable size of a group for us to have a conversation. The idea itself is fantastic – to have these meetings and informal gatherings. It’s as important as working with the body – working with the mind, sharing ideas. And obviously even more important than just writing. I’ve been peripherally part of the dance world for some years, and the general experience is that there is a lot of conversation behind people’s backs – but nothing in front. And that is very, very important for anything positive to develop. Unfortunately the media scene in India at the moment does not encourage too much reflection around arts practice, whether fine art, literary art or performing art. So we’re left to ourselves to discuss our own work. It’s not in the newspapers, and publications are few and far between. We don’t really have a sufficient bank of Indian scholars who are reflecting on Indian dance. Much writing on Indian dance in the last five years has been happening abroad. We are in that kind of a context. So in this context, the theme that has been proposed of looking at the creating of dance, trying to understand the beginning point is very important. 

At one of the seminars that we had in Jorasanko, Jacek Luminski had an interesting point. There were five of us from the Indian context, and he was listening but not being able to participate. So I asked him at the end, “what did you think of it?” He said, “It was interesting, but I’m not able to get an idea of what is your concept of the body.” And that should be the starting point for anybody in the performing arts: what is the concept of the body? Where do you start out, where do you place yourself? Does one understand the source of movement? You put your hand out – where is that movement beginning? You must know.

                        The creation of dance in India has had a strange kind of a politics and history in the last roughly 100 years, and that is linked to the national movement, that is linked to the need to create a sort of authentic Indian art… it has that kind of a complicated history. With the result that certain shortcuts have happened. When you want to make a dance revert to available material, available repertoire, you have mostly mythological narrative, storytelling through dance. So these narratives became the foundations for making dance. All this together created what I would call a rather unthinking procession of productions. The type of ballets that were done in Kalakshetra – Kalakshetra is India’s first and biggest dance institution in Chennai, where every year they train around 300 dancers. The themes for the ballets were invariably from the Ramayana, or from other mythological sources. The question would be, why the Ramayana? Why couldn’t have it been something more connected to that time? But this emerged as the most appropriate thing for the new Indian vision that was emerging, the new middle class… the most comfortable thing. And subsequently all the solo dancers have also followed that path.

                        So when you come to the contemporary moment, that is the post 1980s roughly, the question of content began to be something to deal with. I remember in my association with Chandralekha, this is something that occupied her mind in a very dense way. She used to narrate a very interesting story about her own arangetram in an auditorium full of very, very important people. This was during a great water famine in Andhra Pradesh. At one point she came to this abhinaya piece where the sakhis are talking about the return of Krishna from Vrindavan to Mathura. And everyone is very happy, they are cleaning the village, decorating their houses, they go to the Jamuna and collect water … and she is enacting this whole thing. She is playing the sakhis who are sprinkling water, and then in one flash of a second in her mind the thought broke, that here I am playing this abundance of water on stage through my art, but the context is water famine. What am I doing? She said, at that moment I became a split person. My dance continued, I must have broken it for a split fraction of a second. Nobody in the audience would have caught it, but my guru caught me. But that split between the beauty and sensuality of art and the harshness of reality … how to bring these two together?

And this became later her search for a different content, not the narrative, mythological content. Each production was abstract, the themes were non-linear, there wasn’t sequential story-telling. It was like breaking that strain of Bharatnatyam which is inherited. So this question of where does one begin became a very important point. It was very interesting how she was linking whatever was happening in her life with what she put on stage, her own preoccupations. They could be political preoccupations, community preoccupations, environmental concerns, they could be artistic and aesthetic concerns, but it wasn’t that life is separate and art is separate. There was an attempt to bring the two together.

Many of you may not know that we had a rather unhappy episode with the Tamil Nadu police for about 7-8 months, when they decided to charge both Chandralekha and me with sedition. We went to the court, it became a cause celebre, and this that and the other. And because that charge was sedition – today I can talk about it in a jocular way – but at that time it was chilling. Because sedition is not an ordinary case – it can fetch you the ultimate punishment. And there was a condition imposed that you had to go to the Magistrate’s Court every two weeks, and the atmosphere there is very brutal. So Chandra would come back and look very crumpled. She was known for her radiance and her personality, but at that period she was looking very crumpled. I said, look at yourself in the mirror. People world over come to you for inspiration, what is this. She said, what you’re saying is right. And that day she picked up the phone and called her nattuvanar saying, please come – I want to start my dance practice again. And she made Shree. In Shree there is a whole sequence of women whose backs are broken, who look like they are crawling and then the whole attempt to regain the spine. She said, that’s my story. When that court case happened, I lost my spine. There was a chill in my spine, the fear had entered my bones. Not that she was afraid politically, but the brutality of the whole thing, the ugly world into which she was thrown. And the only way she could recover it was to work with the body. And it was so powerful, that the group of nine dancers we worked with got it immediately – just that transmission ‘recover your spine’.

So how do you begin, what do you work with, what is the material that you have? I know for a fact that many of you who are working with new dance today in India are very young people. So this search: what am I looking for, what is my material? Because as far as technique is concerned, as far as form is concerned, as far as stagecraft is concerned that will come. But if you don’t have content, already you’re lost. And the search for content will have to begin with this basic question – how do I look at the body? What are the principles with which you understand your body? Ideas like weight, balance, gravity, lightness – very simple ideas, but begin from there and from there new content will emerge.


[More excerpts from the transcript will follow soon. We would welcome responses.]