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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Kinetic translations
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Kinetic translations

A big, new competition puts the spotlight on contemporary dance—and reveals the genre’s challenges

Playful: At the competition, Mehneer Sudan explored the dramatic possibilities of an encounter with a maalishwali. Photographs courtesy Prakriti Foundation (At the competition, Mehneer Sudan explored the dramatic possibilities of an encounter with a maalishwali. Photographs courtesy Prakriti Foundation)Premium
Playful: At the competition, Mehneer Sudan explored the dramatic possibilities of an encounter with a maalishwali. Photographs courtesy Prakriti Foundation
(At the competition, Mehneer Sudan explored the dramatic possibilities of an encounter with a maalishwali. Photographs courtesy Prakriti Foundation)

First, a disclaimer: I dislike competitions. I can watch So You Think You Can Dance with a certain horrified fascination, but I know I’d never like to play artiste or arbiter in this alarming scenario.

So when I heard of the Prakriti Excellence in Contemporary Dance Awards (Pecda), my first response was caution. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see dancers strutting their stuff before a bunch of aesthetic magistrates. At the same time, new work in Indian dance interests me, and always has.

In 1993, I attended the “New Directions in Indian Dance" symposium in New Delhi. I remember being fascinated by the range and depth of the questions unfolding before me. It was an explosive discovery of ferment, of churning, of bodies stretching, minds extending. The event reconfirmed that the excitement generated by the much-documented East-West Dance Encounter of 1984 was for real.

I discovered dancers unafraid of spilling out of forms, of colliding, tripping, falling into interstices. Whether they were moving towards a new frontier or blind alley was irrelevant. Everyone seemed willing suddenly to make new mistakes. Something heady was in the air.

Their questions were varied. Some asked about context, the historical moment they inhabited. Some asked about content—the need to make it more relevant or to do away with it altogether. Some asked about form—the need to recover the body’s mother tongue, to uncover the abstract mainsprings of movement or to turn polyglot while retaining their own signatures. Some wanted to blur the boundaries between high and low art, demotic and mandarin; others between stylization and realism. Still others talked of bringing not just everyday life into dance but everyday life into dance. As I watched Astad Deboo, Chandralekha, Aditi Mangaldas, Navtej Singh Johar, Maya Krishna Rao, Daksha Sheth and Roger Sinha, among others, share their work, I felt privileged to witness the whole gamut of reasons that impel human beings to speak not just in different tongues, tones, modes, registers, accents, but to speak in the first place.

photoI have since seen my share of soulless multimedia spectacles and programme notes salted with grandiose claims about “cosmic rhythms" and “cutting edge" experiment. Enough for me to know that there is mediocrity on both sides of the ostensible “classical-contemporary" divide. But I retain my respect for Indian dancers who ask inconvenient questions. Poised in an uneasy cultural limbo, they’re never classical enough to be respectable, hip enough to be Shiamak Davar, or sexy enough to be Bollywood. The result: terminal levels of invisibility and trivialization.

So I saw the logic of this competition—one that empowered the prize-winning choreographer to spend a year creating a fully-funded production (mentored this year by the Akram Khan Dance Company), intended to make a six-city tour of India in 2013. It was a fillip for original work, as well as a fillip for innovative ways of looking at dance. As Prakriti’s dynamic founder Ranvir Shah and creative director Karthika Nair write in their concept note, “There are few platforms to showcase and facilitate contemporary forms and languages of dance in India… The aim is to support the finest and most innovative dance, to provide a space for vision and creativity."

The 11 pieces showcased in Chennai last weekend were works in progress. The “competition" mode also meant a grim focus on performance rather than the more unguarded climate of a symposium.

But once you came to terms with this, there were the rewards. Particularly refreshing about this pageant of young choreographers was the absence of anxiety over cultural identity. No attempt to underscore Indianness, or engage in any facile flag-waving. The spectrum of dancers was diverse: from Attakkalari-trained Diya Naidu who sought to examine the Tibetan notion of the bardo to Padmini Chettur and her minimalist essay on bodies and walls; from dancer-actor-choreographer Gilles Chuyen’s meditations on dharma to dancer-singer-actor Swati Mohan’s Ways of Seeing; from contemporary-dance-and-martial-arts-trained Chitra Arvind’s movement mosaic, Flight From the Shadow, to Mehneer Sudan’s curiosity about the dramatic possibilities implicit in an encounter with a maalishwali (masseuse).

What emerged, above all, was a glimpse of artistes (of obvious technical prowess) who dared to wonder, to flounder, even to fail. And my eventual questions were less about individual dancers than about a cultural scene in which all of us are implicated.

photoMost of all, I was seized again by my long-standing sympathy for dancers as a tribe and the essentially outward-bound aspect of their art. How difficult it is to find a point of integration between an inner creative imperative and the dynamics of performance. While the reader-writer relationship still remains intimately one-on-one, dance must withstand, even celebrate, the harsh glare of the stage lights. Surely that calls for another level of negotiation between the inner and outer worlds altogether? How does one create work that is internal enough to be true and external enough to be throbbingly tactile? Not an easy proposition.

Then came the other questions. Is it enough for a dancer to frame a question cerebrally and then translate it kinetically? Surely the main aim is to ask questions in and through the body? Not a simple synthesis perhaps. But only if this split is resolved, however waveringly, do concepts become more than abstractions and movement more than decorative technique.

This provoked more questions. Does seriousness of intent get confused with solemnity? Is there a place for humour? Is the pressure to be “profound" the hangover of our old revivalist impulse to turn dancers into cultural ambassadors? And what about joy? While we saw flashes of it during the competition, I often wondered about that old-fashioned ecstatic dimension—the mix of exuberance and exactitude—that dance distils in its inimitable way. Must we forego that in our quest for new directions in movement?

Finally, prize-winning time arrived. An international team of judges gave a special jury recommendation to Light Doesn’t Have Arms to Carry Us by Chennai-based choreographer Preeti Athreya, a ferociously focused exploration in music, spoken word, movement and moving image. Particularly striking was the fact that the use of multiple media never diffused the intensity or voltage of Athreya’s choreography.

The winner of the 5 lakh cash prize who will be mentored by the Akram Khan Dance Company, however, was the markedly different, but well-deserved, contemporary dancer Deepak Kurki Shivaswamy. His dance duet, NH 7, based on life in a metro, was a delightfully textured montage of rapid surprise, precision and playfulness. “Fresh" was the jury’s word for it.

And “fresh" is perhaps the operative word. If Pecda can promote something valuable in Indian dance, it is this. Not self-conscious or sanctimonious innovation, not the pressure to be trendy, fashion-conscious, tritely contemporary. But the ability to share the wonder of the body, the intelligence of sinew, the dynamism and viscerality of the embodied idea.

Freshness will do. Freshness is plenty.

The winner of Pecda will perform in 2013. The Akram Khan Dance Company will tour this year with The Park’s New Festival, a festival of contemporary dance which opened in Chennai and travels to Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai and Delhi. For details, visit theparksnewfestival.com


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Published: 01 Sep 2012, 03:54 PM IST
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