A few weeks ago, Bharatanatyam dancer Vaibhav Arekar took to social media to express his dismay at being priced out of Kandivali, the northern Mumbai suburb where he rented studio space. The modest, two-level structure where he devised work and conducted rehearsals for his dance company, Sankhya, was no longer available to him. He was now considering moving his work out of the city he has always called home. In doing so, Arekar is articulating a choice many artistes have made—to leave the cities in search of spaces that can sustain a consistent and rigorous artistic practice.
For many artistes, solitude has always been greatly alluring. As early as 1939, the choreographer Uday Shankar was building an arts centre in Almora, while in the Western ghats his counterpart Madame Menaka was establishing a residential dance school in Khandala. Solitude apart, rural or semi-urban environments have attracted artistes with clean air, inexpensive living and the possibility of engaging with the local community. But this also means building workspaces from scratch and, most importantly, developing the patience to work in sync with the unhurried pace of nature. It means planting trees that require years of nurturing and dealing with failed crops and bad weather even as one is immersed in artistic work.
It’s hard work
Few collectives succeed in weathering these challenges. Adishakti, the theatre laboratory on the outskirts of Puducherry, has suffered at the hands of Tamil Nadu’s violent monsoons. Yet, the artistes who have lived there since 1993, when Adishakti’s founder Veenapani Chawla moved from Mumbai to Puducherry, find immense gratification in what they do.
Their work has a loyal fan following, and comes from a slow creative process that can only function without deadlines. This has afforded opportunities for nuanced research about the connections between breath, expressivity and gesture, mooring their theatre in strong technical and psychophysical foundations. Such work can’t be sustained in a city, they feel.
The Company Theatre has built an artistic community around its activities
Adishakti’s current artistic director Vinay Kumar said, “Most artistes fear moving out of the city because they feel they are cutting off the flow of opportunities. There is a misconception that networking will lead to an acceleration of creative work. In the city, you can never step back and look at your work critically.
The city is harsh on people and you spend half your time surviving. Everything is a rat race. After a point, it doesn’t offer anything you need to create a work. You have to think about how to make opportunities available to yourself even in a remote place and be very confident about the body of work you create or intend to create.”
For artistes who have recently taken the plunge, precedents can be deeply reassuring. Theatre director Atul Kumar of The Company Theatre was excited by the theatre of Adishakti, that of Habib Tanvir in Chhattisgarh, and by dancer Protima Gauri’s Nrityagram on the outskirts of Bengaluru. Fulfilling a huge desire to be part of one of these collectives or start his own, in 2012 he set up a workspace in Kamshet, 110 km from Mumbai, after a round of fund-raising managed by his Bengaluru-based collaborator, Nirmala Ravindran. Since then, The Company Theatre has created and rehearsed all its productions at the workspace, besides inviting a host of other theatre groups to use the space for their own work.
Kumar is emphatic about what this has meant for his practice. “We never had an artistic practice in Mumbai or Delhi. We would meet for a few hours after work and with whatever space remained in our minds, we would make theatre. At the Kamshet workspace, we rehearse for eight hours but we spend all our time with each other. It has allowed us to question our work and not get complacent. It lets us focus on making work that is risky and challenging,” he said.
Kumar’s company recently toured a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream made with contemporary dancers. During the tour, Kumar found himself meeting viewers who were interested in contemporary dance but had never watched any of his earlier theatrical work. The time and space to explore new dimensions of performance has meant an influx of new audiences.
Meanwhile, for Arekar, the fragmented nature of artistic practice in the city is exciting in its own way. Having studied and practised dance as a middle-class Mumbaikar, he is at peace with the restricted experience of space that this upbringing has enabled. Despite the challenges of city life, he runs a company with full-time dancers. “If you are a professional dancer, you have to commit to practising for hours. There are no reasons for practice. You cannot always expect an audience or sponsors. We have to dance to blank walls. My training system was dedicated to creating performance opportunities for the next generation of dancers. But for that you need space; 24/7 space,” he said.
Mental space
Arekar’s online post triggered an outpouring of moral and logistical support from the arts community, making him weigh his options. The city has made him broad-minded, he feels. It made him recognise that his idiom of Bharatanatyam has to speak the language of today. For these reasons, he is unwilling to sever his connections with the city. Also, he is wary about the cost and effort required to build and sustain a new space in a new environment.
His recent performances in two- and three-tier cities, however, have led him to consider smaller cities as options. He said, “Moving out of Mumbai might give us mental space too. I don’t know if it is financially viable to build my own space, because I am also focusing on my career as a performer for the next decade. However, if I considered the outskirts of the city, where artistes might be able to travel to the space, or a city like Solapur, where I am reaching out to the same number of viewers for half the money, I see an opportunity to explore classical dance far beyond the realm of physical movement.”
That artistes independently set out to establish new workspaces is emblematic of our arts ecology, where there is little institutional support extended to them, necessitating a reliance on personal and community networks for resources.
The journey to becoming self-sustaining is an arduous one, yet communities like Adishakti, The Company Theatre and Nrityagram have managed that, generating an income from a mix of workshops, performances and by building an artistic community around themselves so that they are able to lease their arts infrastructure to other artists or projects. Finally, no matter where they choose to do it, making art is about simple economics. As Adishakti’s Kumar puts it, “You need to do business, make money and subsidise your art.”
The author is a dancer and writer. She loves socks, the more toes the better.
