Astad Deboo pulls up a black metal folding chair in the tiny space of a back verandah and cat-like sits on it. There is a bucket of dirty water and a wet-mop on the floor behind us, at Alliance Française of Madras, where he is due to perform on the last evening of the Prakriti Poetry Festival. It’s also the morning after the cyclone that destroyed the tree cover of the city. I half expect Deboo to pick up the mop and weave a series of movements in and around our two chairs.
It’s a Merce Cunningham moment. It conforms to the best traditions of contemporary dance in the late 1960s. It is when I first saw Deboo swoop down the stage at the Prithvi Theatre and demolish the barriers of what constituted a dance performance.
“What was it like performing at the Prithvi Theatre that cataclysmic first night in Mumbai in 1969?” I ask him.
Does he remember it as I do, the short series of six movements in which Deboo trampled upon the canvas of contemporary dance in India and laid it wide open to different interpretations? Did he actually feel the pain when he slit his arms with a blade and allowed blood to drip? Or later, in what became a showstopper moment, contort his lithe body, so that his tongue became part of the performance. He licked the floor of his stage as though it were his most beloved other. The floor. The stage. The dancer. The audience. We became one with the performance. Deboo became contemporary dance.
He laughs when I ask him whether he actually rehearsed licking the stage at Prithvi. “You never think about these things. They happen spontaneously, sometimes,” he replies. “But I had been preparing for that performance ever since I returned after my years of travel across the world. I was 30. I had been exposed to some of the most exhilarating modern dance performers in the world, travelled to 32 countries by that time. In Japan, in the U.K. where I learnt the dance technique of Martha Graham at London Contemporary Dance School; for a year in South America, Brazil, where I imbibed the Capoeira martial dance form, which is a bit like our Kalaripayattu, and, of course, I had been to the U.S. also. It was a tremendous time of experimentation in dance, not just Martha Graham or Pina Bausch or Pink Floyd and Alice Becker Chase of Pilobolus, but in theatre and art and music. I knew that I had all these worlds within my dance language that I wanted to explore.”
“I had trained in Kathak, originally at Jamshedpur where my parents encouraged me to learn dance at a very early age, and later in Kathakali. There were people like Satyadev Dubey and Jennifer Kapoor who encouraged me at that point in time. That evening at Prithvi Theatre was the beginning of my journey here in India.”
I interrupt him to ask whether he is a practising Parsi or Zoroastrian. Astad lifts his T-shirt and shows me the plain cotton vest and sacred thread, the sudreh and kusti that he has knotted like a good Parsi must do every morning.
“I could have been a priest,” he says. His father worked at Jamshedpur. He could be a Parsi at home, a Christian at the school taught by Jesuit priests, and a student of Islamic traditions because of the Kathak dance teacher. The influences he imbibed included that of the Bengali families, the Biharis and South Indians, all of whom enriched his idea not just of who he was, but what being an Indian might be.
He is now in a messiah-like phase. All that is in the past. He is 69. His wiry hair is pleated in neat rows of silver grey on both sides of his head. But he is remarkably fit. Fit enough, as he confesses, to engage in a 60-minute solo performance on a bare stage, with his present collaborator, the music composer and American of Japanese origin, Yukio Tsuji.
I am worried that in his latest piece titled ‘Eternal Embrace’, inspired a poem by Sufi poet Bulleh Shah that refers to ‘maati’ or ‘dust’ or ‘sand’, he is getting back to his dust-licking days. It is a piece that was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum in New York for their Islamic wing.
He needs to go beyond Rumi, says Astad, since Rumi has become commonplace. He finds a kinship with the Punjabi speaking Bulleh Shah, who talks of the eternal cycle of worlds being in a flux when he says: “The soil is in ferment, O friend/ Behold the diversity/ The soil is the horse, as is the rider/ The soil chases the soil, and we hear the clanging of the soil.” (In some translations, the soil become dust, earth or mud.) In his dark cotton robes that swirl around the stage like the storm that has destroyed the garden in which we speak, Deboo is once again the destroyer and the creator.
“Answer the riddle, O Bulleh!” sings the poet.
Deboo is both the riddle and the answer.
Geeta Doctor is a Chennai-based writer and critic.
