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Making the right moves
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Raised completely in an atmosphere of dance, Madhu Natraj moves between Kathak and contemporary movement art with the true grace of a dancer, much as every Indian coexists with the traditional and contemporary, writes SHILPA SEBASTIAN R.
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Photo: MURALI KUMAR K.
FASCINATED Madhu Natraj was introduced to an entirely new movement vocabulary. She studied it further and set up her own contemporary dance company
Madhu Natraj took to dancing at a very early age. With Maya Rao, noted Kathak dance exponent for a mother, Madhu “learnt dance through osmosis. I grew up in the green rooms and to the sound of music and dance. By the time I was 15, I was satura
ted with dance because of the politics of the art. It drove me away from the form,” says Madhu, who then studied commerce and journalism.
In spite of all this she was still drawn to dance. “It is like dance chose me.” Though she has her foundation in Kathak, Madhu is more known for her creative movements and contemporary dance.
“My first exposure to contemporary dance was in Delhi where I met this dancer from America who asked us to create 20 movements with just the index finger and 20 movements using just three joints in our body! That you could something like that led me back to the eternity of creativity. I returned and started training myself in choreography. I did debut as a Kathak dancer, but continued my explorations in the contemporary form.” Madhu then took off to the US to further study this style.
It was during her stay there that she decided “to create something like this with our own movements, one which is based in our own roots. Then there will be Indian contemporary dance”. Madhu was back in the city with the ambition to create her own movement vocabulary and started STEM Company (Space, Time, Energy and Movement) in ’95 and later started the Natya Stem Kampni. “There was no contemporary dance company when we started, though there were some solo performers. When we got on stage, we came in for tremendous criticism, as anything new is not welcomed easily. It has been a long and lonely journey,” she recalls. Even after having travelled the world over with her contemporary dance, Madhu still returned to Kathak. “I did not want to make a choice between the forms. It is like a dual identity for me. It is like a typical Indian co-existing with the traditional and the modern.” She has no problem with any form but with the rigidity of the system.
You need an open mind
Being an artiste, one should have an open mind, she says. “My mother, who is 80, is more open minded than an 18-year-old who walks into the class. Sometime I feel the chasm between the classical and the contemporary form has widened and each section looks at the other distastefully. My mother says that what is contemporary today will become tradition tomorrow.”
What hurts Madhu is the mediocrity that has seeped into dance. “People do all sorts of ugly movements, even Bollywood ‘item’ movements in the name of creativity!” Making a living with dance was not easy either. Yet, Madhu grit her teeth and was determined to make a living out of dance. “Being a dancer was a conscious decision. So I never tried to change my profession.”
She started by creating a brand image for dance. “We took up corporate work. It did not adulterate or bastardise the form but we made the dance short and explained our work before we presented it.” This young dancer believes that dance also acts as therapy. “It creates a strong emotional support system in a person. Dance can correct motor disability. Even the spastics enjoy dance so much.”
But a section of the society believes that the disabled should not be made to perform on stage. “Why deny a person with disability a chance to dance? What defines dance? Anything is dance. You can see it everywhere. Dance belongs to everyone. If there’s someone willing to dedicate the time and effort to work for such a cause it is wonderful. There is a difference in what the intention is. It’s vulgar to have arangetrams, where children who are not yet prepared to get on stage are made to dance for the sake of the money involved,” says Madhu.
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Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Mangalore
Puducherry
Tiruchirapalli
Thiruvananthapuram
Vijayawada
Visakhapatnam
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