The Kanara Catholic Association hall in Bandra’s Ranwar village plays host to weddings, first communion parties and local celebrations. Pink chair covers and wine in disposable glasses are a common sight. However, a few days before Christmas, those walking past the hall were piqued by the analogue pulse of a metronome, unconsciously synchronising their pace to its dependable rhythm. Inside, a group of ten performers jumped in a square pit, performing Preethi Athreya’s Conditions of Carriage: The Jumping Project. In the hall’s avatar as home to the arts space The Mumbai Assembly, functionality and performativity were on the menu, the audience later breaking the fourth wall and entering the pit for a discussion with the artistes. Athreya’s performance in the final days of 2016 was reflective of where dance in Mumbai was headed this year.
Blurred lines
This past year has been transcendent. Interdisciplinarity has been a buzzword, and it is harder to sort the arts by discipline and place them in cubbyholes. Cinema, performance and the visual arts are speaking to each other, colliding and mutating into new artistic expressions. This was evident at the recent Kochi Biennale where choreographer Padmini Chettur’s Varnam became one of the ‘artworks’. Looking at the varnam – the central composition of a bharatanatyam recital: afresh, Chettur uses temporality, rhythm, translation and gesture to explore the multiple subtexts of emotionality that the composition holds within itself. While the piece was performed live in the week after the opening of the biennale, it stays on as a film which is sensitive to the multi-dimensional nature of the work.
This cross-pollination also pervaded the classical arts. Kolkata choreographer Sharmila Biswas’ Antar Yatra brought Odissi, kuchipudi and bharatanatyam dancers together, with liberal dashes of influence from folk theatre, martial art forms and a smattering of musical traditions. Dancers in the production used textiles, puppets and cut-outs as props to link three stories narrated in three dance forms to each other. The large-scale work toured to several cities, including Mumbai, as part of a charity fundraiser in July.
At the NCPA’s Nakshatra Dance Festival in October, simple fare was on offer in the form of unadorned group work in classical dance. The choreographers presenting work included Leela Samson, Madhavi Mudgal and Priti Patel. While their presentations were often culled from a body of work made over decades, they still resonated with the need to be aware of the times and perhaps respond to it.
Arts and education
The summer and winter vacations, which usually mean a lull in the performance season, saw dancers actively trying to make work for children. Several arts spaces programmed workshops and performances for children. The Mumbai-based Odissi dancer, Jhelum Paranjape choreographed From Farm to Jungle, where elegant animals from the forest rubbed shoulders with their street-smart fellow beings in the urban jungle. Even schools became performance spaces, with a captive young audience that is keen to engage with the arts through education. Perhaps we will see dancers respond to this need in greater ways in the years to come.
The long, unfulfilled wait for patronage is coming to an end, with artistes taking initiative in organising tours that showcase their work widely. Earlier in the year, artistes from Adishakti, a theatre collective in Puducherry, revived an iconic work, Ganapati , taking it on a spin across the country. They were hosted and supported by local performers and art collectives in the cities they travelled to, and often performed to packed houses. In December, the Delhi-based choreographer Mandeep Raikhy did the same with his intimate performance piece Queen-size , performing in eclectic venues in Mumbai and Pune, including an architecture college, a dance studio and a rooftop cinema hall. The tour was supported by ticket sales and private donors and was able to reach out to diverse kinds of audiences – arts enthusiasts, students and the queer community.
Grass roots
In many ways, this ‘decentralisation’ of the arts has taken it beyond canonical arts spaces where programming is conservative and increasingly subordinate to marketing potential and commercial appeal. Artistes such as the Adishakti repertory and Raikhy have extensively relied on social media and community networks, bringing the focus back to fledgling community-run initiatives that fuel spaces integrated into existing urban settlements, allowing a variety of audiences, including local residents, to access the arts. This also augurs well for dance in the current socio-political landscape, where policy decisions that once seemed absurd and laughable are proving themselves to be quite real. Artistes are being questioned about their political and personal allegiances, their subject matter and the nature of their work. In being asked to conform to agendas that bristle at subversion, dance is losing its sharp edge. The space to question, change and evolve is fast eroding, flattening dance by reducing it to apolitical, representative manifestations of form.
The year ahead then banks on dancers, whether classical, contemporary or interdisciplinary, to exploit the potency of the arts and its capacity to trigger change, so that their voices as artists and political beings are heard.
The author is a dancer and writer
