Geeta Chandran was inducted into Bharatanatyam at the tender age of five and like any good student, she picked up the nuances in no time. She learnt her dance like she learnt her maths, science and English and got no brownie points for the prodigy that she was. Later, she took up a regular job and worked hard until a day came when she was ‘guilty of not dancing enough’. “I would be too tired and my guru would be waiting for me. I had to make that decision, turning a blind eye to the pay package and embracing what made me happy. I wanted to justify the time that I wasted and because I was so delayed in making that decision, I processed what I learnt with a lot of documentation,” Chandran reminisces. And so there was that day circa 1991 when Geeta along with eight students laid foundation to Natya Vriksha – one of the leading dance companies in the country today, which has choreographed several mesmerising productions over the years. Today, Natya Vriksha celebrates 25 glorious years of performance and existence.
Any dancer who is serious about the art form would know how fundamental and central the formative years are. “But my mother sent me to learn dance because it was just something she wanted me to do. There was no binding decision made that this was a career prospect. But the teaching itself was so elaborate, it was hard to resist. We went for our class on time but never knew when we would return. Such was the training imparted that I knew six varnams , five jatiswarams and three alaripus by the age of 14! All this from a repertoire so rich, ranging from Tyagaraja to Swathi Thirunal and so on. Maybe we didn’t dance to the best of our capacities but knew the depth of dance along with the poetry and the music that it contained,” she says.
After years of tutelage under Guru Swarna Saraswati, Chandran went on to learn under Guru Dakshinamoorthy, the master-performer who taught her all about stagecraft. “While Amma (Swarna Saraswati) was all about soulful dancing, he was a dynamic performer with immense stage presence. My pedagogy comes from him. I began customising my dance to suit the body and looked at one adavu in so many different ways. Minor things like placement of the shoulder, distribution of the arm, its length, etc. made major changes to the choreography,” says Chandran.
Looking at the omnipresence of a performative art form like dance, it almost resembles a stream of free flowing water, refusing to contain itself in one realm. A good example of the interdisciplinary approach to dance is the way in which the nritya draws from various academic domains like sociology, psychology, philosophy and literature to name a few. As a dancer, it is extremely important to be intrusive about the ethos that co-exist, something like a prerequisite to being creative. “I’ve seen people outsource their work to scholars but they are scholars, not dancers! They cannot see things that you can if you read the same text. The process of this discovery makes you richer as an artiste because you filter things, and what cannot be used now can be used later. You can study a deity in so many ways. We’re all capable of filling ourselves with rasa but even that has become a luxury today. Travel, poetry, observation add to your vocabulary and you can visualise it the way you want. I think that is quite liberating,” Chandran adds.
Quite commonly, the different genres of dance have blended into one another in the past few decades. There have also been dance-theatre or dance-painting collaborations in the past, something many purists find unpleasant. “My question is, are you dancing today the way the devadasis danced in the temples? This form of Bharatanatyam was only reconstructed in the previous century. The elements that you hold so sacrosanct are also things that people revisited in the early 20th Century. So to say that this is what Bharata wanted you to do doesn’t seem right to me. Bharata’s treatise was on dramaturgy to begin with, not even on dance. To me, adaptation is a technique that adds a lot of cultural elements. If one adapts in a way that is sensitive, aesthetic and without tampering with the philosophy, I don’t think that is wrong,” she remarks.
Keeping these ideas central, Geeta Chandran’s Natya Vriksha will showcase Anekanta, culled from the Jaina philosophy – a production, taking on the multiple realities to every issue that is cultural, political, social and economical. The two-day Bharatanatyam festival will have solo performances by Chandran and group choreographies by her disciples on 3rd and 4th November, 2016. The performances are guided with intellectual inputs from scholar-author Sudhamahi Reghunathan.
