In a city known for its rich cultural heritage and its continued preoccupation with classical performing arts, contemporary dance festivals are a rarity. From Friday through Sunday last week, the Goethe Institut, Chennai, and Basement 21 Collective hosted a contemporary dance festival, ‘March Dance’ with works from Padmini Chettur, Mandeep Raikhy, and Preethi Athreya.
The choreographies were diverse, yet the three were similarly bold, without apology, and stark, without ornamentation. None were staged on a proscenium as they used the intimacy of democratic spaces and ‘eye-level’ viewing. There was no narrative, no music, except in parts in ‘Varnam.’ They challenged the audiences to be silent, to concentrate and to be patient even while making them uncomfortable, as during the intimate duet between two men on a charpoy, in a bedroom-like setting in ‘Queen-size.’
In her opening remarks in the ‘Ways of Working’ session, Padmini said, “The March Dance Festival for me signalled a sense of coming of age of the practice of contemporary dance in India, with the choreographies not struggling with history or with being aspirational. In the late 1990s, there was the pressure of import of ideas from the West. The western influences have been imbibed and absorbed, and we have the confidence to strike out on our own. My concern is for the young artiste, who is interested in contemporary dance. There isn’t any place for them to learn and grow. My ten years with Chandralekha gave me a good grounding and I hope Preethi got something out of working with me, but for the others, where is the opportunity? The March Dance Festival is a small beginning to make inroads into the conservatism of the city.”
For Preethi, a former Bharatanatyam dancer who moved to contemporary dance, post-graduate from Laban Centre, London, the conservatism translated into a sense of defensiveness about her work. “There is nothing beyond a cursory interest here in Chennai, not even curiosity,” she says matter-of-factly. The feeling of loneliness made her move away from the solo culture to group choreographies. “We were 27 at one time, but we are now 10; over the last year we had four intense work periods, when dancers would fly in at their own cost and stay with me. The producers are the dancers themselves. Padmini and I have been partly funded for the latest productions by the private arts organisation, India Foundation for the Arts.”
Sandpit at Spaces
The inspiration for ‘The Jumping Project’ came from a sandpit in Spaces — Chandralekha’s and Dasharath Patel’s creative arena. The dancers’ preoccupation with the bio-mechanics of the body as they negotiated the pit, using it as a foil for life’s challenges and as a playground, jumping on and off with well-defined technique, walking and sitting around it, and so reflect on their lives, made for the crux of the 45-minute show. ‘The Jumping..’ afforded a 360 degree viewing, performed in natural light on the terrace of the Goethe Institut, with benches placed along a square perimeter creating a pit with the enclosed space.
The economics for a performing artist seem to be the similar across genres. There was a discussion on making ends meet. Mandeep (Delhi) spoke of his comfort with collaborators from outside India — Yasuhiro Morinaga (sound design) and Jonathan O’Hear (light design) — who, he feels, can best ‘dress up’ his work. Besides the collaborators, he says getting dancers to commit for a period, say three months, is difficult. He promises them a minimum fee, produces the work with the help of a few private sponsors and then waits for international festivals to invite him. One thing he is particular about is not paying for spaces, preferring casual places such as libraries, dining rooms or even law chambers. “We always keep a donation box at the door, even if the collection will cover only our travelling cost,” he says.
Padmini’s journey also began with Bharatanatyam under the famed Guru Subbaraya Pillai. The varnam she performed at her arangetram when she was 12 was ‘Mohamana’ (Bhairavi, Ponniah Pillai), the same piece that she pegged her latest choreography ‘Varnam’ on. “I see my work as an ongoing research of the body. It is not for everybody — it is tedious and arduous. I am a slow maker of works. For the last year I have been trying to produce something of quality; the dance community has to go beyond the need for easy understanding and allow an image to find its own meaning,” she explains.
Padmini feels that the gaze at visual art spaces seems to best suit her works. “I have learnt to adapt to be able to perform in any situation. I have done only two solos since I started out in 1993; ‘Beautiful Thing 2’ commissioned by the National Arts Council, Singapore, in 2011 was a grand production, but soon after I was asked to present it in a mill by the Clark House Initiative. Even with ‘Varnam’ that was presented at the Kochi Biennale, the venue David Hall was a beautiful heritage building, but couldn’t accommodate the set I wanted to create. So I used six chairs and the gallery lights, and tried to adapt to the daylight streaming in... I have also become flexible towards a moving audience, as it was in Kochi,” she expands.
‘Varnam’ is a layered presentation of snippets from the Bhairavi varnam, its translation into English, translation of a Kshetrayya padam, besides works by Jeanette Winterson, Anais Nin, Junot Diaz and Kuzhali Manickavel. The texts, besides the varnam, are interchangeable, but the common thread is the feminine perspective.
Powerful emotions
Words are powerful triggers indeed. As the love poems, the violently sexual text and the heart-wrenching soliloquy of a wife dealing with a husband, who is lost in an extra-marital affair, were read aloud by the dancers in turn, powerful emotions wash over you. But they go no further, as the dancers act as a counterfoil, deliberately playing down the emotions, by remaining poker-faced and making mechanical gestures. The movements, seated or standing were subtle and tension-filled, suggesting a mechanical response to the strong overtones; the background of a revving engine, was symbolic in its own way.
It was interesting to note that the dancers needed to buy into the production both physically and emotionally. These productions, without ornamentation, can strip you of any artifice. Padmini, Mandeep and Preethi belong to the tribe of pioneers of a modernist era in Indian contemporary dance as they have each created a unique identity based on Indian and western sensibilities, and are involved in building the ecology and the practice for the future.
