At a recent performance of Conditions of Carriage: The Jumping Project in New Delhi, a group of stragglers desperately scanned the space for empty seats and found that there were none to be had. A conspiratorial usher pointed to a group of viewers in the front row: “They’ll be gone in a minute.” Sure enough, a minute later, they had moved. The people upfront were now performers, fanning out across a square pit. Hemmed in by the raised platform that ran along the performance space’s periphery, they jumped. Alone and in tandem, they leapt in the air, crossing each other as they jumped backwards onto the platform, landing quite unerringly. The ten ‘jumpers’ had all the intensity of tightly coiled springs – their faces screwed up in concentration as they followed the beat, and their unrelenting gaze boring holes through the walls. Does jumping in a performance make the jumpers ‘dancers’ though? The Mumbai premiere of Conditions of Carriage tonight proposes to unpack this question.
Performing the body
Featuring ten performers including Athreya, the cast of Conditions of Carriage is drawn from a cross-section of professional backgrounds, body types, fitness levels and age groups. They are Parkour artists, dancers, theatre people, clothing designers, art therapists and lawyers. A preoccupation with the functionality of movement unities them, becoming an important and accessible way of scrutinising the body in space and time. What has emerged doesn’t have to be termed ‘dance’. “My need is to create greater rigour in looking at the body,” says choreographer Athreya. “If I say I am [creating] a dance, that already dictates the contours of this work. Of course, everyone in the piece comes in with the notion of wanting to be performative.” According to the choreographer, functionality is a better way to demand the mental and physical rigour the work needs. “We are so engrossed in performativity – if I am the performer, what should I do for you to watch me?” she asks. “This is why people tend to look at contemporary work as highbrow and serious.” Athreya hopes to push boundaries to see what other kinds of consciousness can be present in a space. The performance tonight is intended to be open enough for a lot of people to feel they can participate in it. The functionality lies in understanding movement as an action rather than an inscription. “There is a job to be done. There is a puzzle to be unravelled,” she says.
On the field
The training for the piece focused on how the performers would move through space and build the endurance required to sustain 45 minutes of jumping. Arriving at it from the device of the body, Athreya encouraged the performers to look at alignment, posture, weight shifts, balance, gaze, focus, spatiality and interrelationships. Besides working in tandem with each other, the performers had to define their relationship with the square pit they operated in, finding connections between the space and the spine. Plus, there’s the question of the in-between spaces. “In the act of jumping, some are very light; others are melancholic. Some execute well while others struggle. The combination of all these things is what makes the work possible,” she says.
In proposing jumping as a political act of performance, Athreya begins to question the semantics of a performance. It doesn’t have to suggest hyper-aesthetic propositions or rely on the virtuosity of acrobatic and impossible movement. Instead, the experience of allowing diverse bodies to be seen in tandem with each other already begins to propose an alternative means of expression. Also, Athreya finds that the act of jumping is infectious, since “it is something you have always wanted to do”.
Community concerns
Even as she tours with Conditions of Carriage , Athreya is on the brink of embarking on a new project. It brings back recurrent questions about conditions, ecologies and choices. Why make work? Who should be in the work? Why make work that can ‘travel light’? In how she navigates these questions, she finds herself returning to the notion of the ‘community’. It can be an elusive and liminal concept, rarely sited in formal entities such as organisations, foundations or schools.
Making work, then, has little to do with the production of a performance; instead, it is rooted in how she can make deep connections with a large number of people. “Everyone is a potential collaborator,” she says. “In the last five to ten years, we’ve begun to understand how this field of contemporary dance is not just about departures from the classical.” She’s of the opinion that people can come from anywhere and have a serious conversation about social origins, expressivity and the relevance of contemporary movement. It’s important to invite people to take ownership of the field. “This process has afforded me a greater area of play. It has made a lot more people interested and empowered,” says the choreographer. “But does that make a community? Do we have something common at stake? I don’t know.”
Athreya now seeks making work with uninhibited thought in response to a prohibitive performance ecology that has come to value compactness and portability. It’s an endeavour worth embarking on even if this means rethinking the relationship between creation and performance.
Conditions of Carriage will be performed at The Mumbai Assembly on Dec 20 at 7.30pm. Entry is free, however registration is required. RSVP to joyce@indiaifa.org
The author is a dancer and writer
