On Living With The World , as the title may suggest, is about exploration. “The idea is that there are ways of looking at what it means to live in this world, there is a sort of extended way of looking at the world where everybody exists and another way of looking at it where you have created your own world,” explains director Vinod Ravindran who is working with a group of nine dancers — Ajeesh K Balakrishnan , Anishaa Tavag , Dayita Nereyeth , Diya Naidu , Masoom Parmar , Pia Banglowala, Poorna Swami , Priyabrat Panigrahi , Shikhar Martolia — on the piece. The performance is produced by Bharavi (with sound design by Sachin Gurjale).
“These connections could expand from you to everybody else and from everybody else to you, one makes choices to be cut off or not cut off from everything, to be lost in the crowd or try to belong there, there are many ways of looking at the idea of living with the world.”
The nearly hour-long performance, he explains, is an attempt to look for some of these meanings through movement.
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“I wanted to work with movement that is specific to this project, I didn’t want to get into the narrative idea of telling a story that leads an arc. We wanted to see what we can find in these ideas or how can explore them, without being forced by the timespan of the performance.”
The dance itself is not stylised or categorised, in the sense that it cannot be characterised as pedestrian or functional, for instance, but it does contain a certain aesthetic.
“There is obviously no simple way of looking at this idea, there are multiple ways, multiple ideas that come up when you think of living with the world. One of the things is that life is everywhere, it is happening all the time, it is constantly moving and evolving, it is just present everywhere around us,” he says.
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“One of the things we wanted to make sure the performance has is that quality of not being where the performance is happening, where the audience has to merge these two boundaries, to begin with.”
The group has also been looking at visual representations of life, through images, which helps them identify connections. This then enables them to (perhaps) translate that movement individually, in duets or in groups.
“The performance itself is happening over several spaces inside Shoonya, not just in one studio, so to speak. When you go to a performance, there is usually a clear idea of where the audience is, who the performers are. This demarcation doesn’t exist with the show. There are things that happen simultaneously, it is also possible that some people may not end up seeing every single thing in the show. That is how we have designed it. However, it should be possible to end up seeing everything we have created since some of the things repeat themselves in different ways, in different spaces” he adds.
“I find sounds to be powerful. The soundscape created for the performances is ambient, it is not intrusive or overpowering, one might hardly notice that there is sound.”
On Living With The World will be presented today, September 7, at 7 30 pm at Shoonya - Centre for Art and Somatic Practices, 4th Floor, Rear Wing, Brahmananda Court, #37, Lalbagh Road. Call 7760832226 for details.