The six-day March Dance Festival, Edition Two, presented ‘contemporary body-centric work’ from artistes who find inspiration in fields other than dance, such as yoga and philosophy, writing, illustration and Indian sign language, besides conversations and workshops on the process of creating by international dancer-choreographer Antonio Carallo and senior artiste Navtej Singh Johar. The emphasis was on the process rather than the finished product.
As well-known contemporary dancer Padmini Chettur declared in her opening statement, ‘We wanted to move away from the spectacle and look at the allied practice of the dancers, the origin of, and the way one can enter the works.’ Host Helmut Schippert, director, Goethe Institut, Chennai, said, ‘.. We are happy to support contemporary interventions as something new happens when we push boundaries…’ The festival was presented by Basement 21 and the Goethe Institut, Chennai.
March Dance’s programming included workshops all day followed by conversations and shows most evenings. On the first evening, contemporary dancer-actor Krishna Devanandan engaged Navtej, a Bharatanatyam dancer and yoga teacher from Delhi, in a conversation that traced his journey from his alma mater Kalakshetra in the early 1980s to today.
In 2010, he was a Bharatanatyam dancer with an unconventional approach. To quote him, “Though I was in love with Bharatanatyam, I had been suspicious of Bharatanatyam and yoga, until one day, I had a shocking revelation that both were ‘reconstructs’, not more than 100-200 years old. I turned to and have become a scholar of history and different philosophies of the body. Here too, I felt the interpretations of ancient texts had been distorted and I realised that from a civilisation with room for debate, we had become a civilisation of received knowledge.”
He was also disillusioned with the presentation of Bharatanatyam — the pressure for it to be ‘uplifting’ and the custom of explaining, “lest I be not understood.” In his view, instruction kills artistry. Rejecting the idealist movement, and the using of art and poetry for instruction as against resolution, he moved away from dance.
There is, however, something that keeps him engaged with yoga-sukha. “This is a Sanskrit word meaning ‘pleasurable repose’; it has no parallel in any language. This is what you feel when you lie down in Shavasana at the end of a one-and a-half-hour yoga session. For me, this is a juicy state, when my body blooms. Somatics is the basis of my practice. For me, somatics is the way of listening to the sensory responses of the body. It is about engaging the body from within and extinguishing the externals. The basis of somatic practice is a delicious emptiness. We live in a sukha-deprived culture. If I give myself a sukha experience everyday, not immoral, not dependent on anyone else, by just paying attention, I have induced space within”
As regards taking somatics into dance and yoga, Navtej feels the practice creates more than a heightened awareness and sensitivity, it creates confidence which is incorporated into a performance. He feels the dancers who come to him do not need to unlearn what they know, as is in most cases. There is freedom and liberation in the training, which in turn influences the dance. There is more surety and one doesn’t feel the mind is overtaking the body. One will be able to understand the intention of the body.”
Navtej referred to ‘Abhyas Somatics Lab,’ the performance next day as a showcase in which practitioners follow different sessions on individual headsets with their eyes shut.
“There are usually no observers in class. The students when they are being observed, apart from being self-observed, put them out in a sense of — I am going into a private moment but not succumbing to the pressure of delivering. This is a training for people to get acquainted with it.”
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Meghna Bhardwaj
Meghna Bhardwaj is a young Delhi-based dancer with a doctorate in Performance Studies, and has trained in ballet, modern and contemporary techniques. Her tool for entering into the creative process is dance writing which she does as a dance researcher. Through the words she ‘thinks out’ the dance, and through the words, she explains the process of creation, contextualising the triggers.
Meghna’s ‘Edges’ (Beginnings) included three media formats — a textual installation, film and a live solo performance. The 18-minute solo was the third in a trilogy — Edges, Edges Duet and Edges (Beginning).
She had started out with a solo that referenced a table with edges surrounding the dancer, after which she re-visualised the piece as a duet (with Sanchita Sharma). By default, she seemed to have used the same name but her work this time seemed less graphic and more internalised. There is no spatial reference, but created as a response to Jan Eerala’s short immersion film on ice and water, along with a stored memory of movements.
‘Edges (Beginning)’ was intense. There was no sense of ‘performance’. She used yoga asanas and a movement vocabulary that created misaligned body structures using the entire body, from the small joint in the neck to the tiny joints in the toes.
From the shoulder stand, she crawled onto her knees and walked on her palms and toes, resembling an animal prowling around the performance space with creaking bones, although disjointedly at times. The struggle begins as she lies on the floor, one moment of calm preceding frantic wriggling. She tries to stand up on one foot but trips over instantaneously as if in convulsions. This falling over, time and time again, required sharp technique as her body made contact on the floor with a loud thud. The spurts of the high energy struggle also resulted in panting and shorter breaths that could be heard in the partial darkness. The search continued until Meghna goes back to the shoulder stand.
The struggle could be contextualised to align with the film (Jan Eerala film edited by Marcel Zaes) that had shots of snow and underwater images, played in the background. But the images were too hazy to register any correlation.
The partly lit effect provided by minimal lighting heightened the sense of the unknown. Her all-black track pants and T-shirt blended into the darkness, while her stiff braid seemed to not want to conform.
The sound track (Marcel Zaes) made up of crackle sounds and flat notes on a piano, were non-committal, the jagged-edged piece could well have been suggestive of an animal in the snow.
The other performances at ‘March Dance’, included ‘Say, what?’ by Avantika Bahl Goyal along with Vishal Sarvaiya dealing with the interaction between two people, who alternate between using and not using sign language; Malavika P C’s ‘Ringarotus’ dealt with long form drawings and its associated impulses, while Deepak Kurki Shivaswamy’s ‘Trance/IT’ used the pure physicality of the entire body in isolating and challenging different body parts within a defined geometric space. Eclectic choices for enquiring minds.
Published - April 05, 2018 03:07 pm IST
