“I have a very close connection with India,” she says, “If I don’t spend enough time here, I don’t feel like myself. I feel like a fish out of water.” This from a girl who played Mini on stage as a child in Munich to the tune of Rabindra Sangeet in the German translation of “Kabuliwallah” and would never even have dreamt then that many years later she would go on to create a contemporary dance based on Tagore in the same city. It was the Indien Institut that presented her with the idea to perform during the 150 birth anniversary celebrations of Rabindranath Tagore in 2011 in Munich. Sandra Chatterjee, with her half Indian- half German roots, is a contemporary dancer who has an inherited personal connection with the Bengali culture. But it is her own fascination with Rabindranath Tagore’s prose writing and his astute observations of and the commentary on the world of his time, that became central to her piece “Tagore on Vinyl -Travelling with Thakur”.
“In general, I am fascinated by the early 20th Century as a time period. A lot of important artistic and theoretical work was done between the 1910s and 1930s – and both legends – Tagore and Amrita Sher-Gil worked during that time.” Pursuing her post doctoral research on contemporary dance in a project titled “Traversing the Contemporary (pl): Choreographic Articulations between European and Indian Dance” funded by the Austrian Science Fund-FWF at the University of Salzburg, Austria. She is also simultaneously working there as a senior scientist in a programme area called “Contemporary Art and Cultural Production” with focus on art and science (in collaboration with Mozarteum University of Salzburg).
“In my post doc project I analyse the work of choreographers in Europe (Germany, Sweden, The Netherlands) who are working in contemporary dance but are also trained in and work with Indian dance forms such as Bharatanatyam,” says the 39-year-old.
In her productions, Sandra not only intersperses her choreography with Kuchipudi and Bharatanatyam but also weaves Polynesian, modern and postmodern dance, and yoga, thereby giving a whole new meaning to cultural coalitions. Did she always want to dance? “It was always clear to me that I wanted to and needed to dance since I was three years old. I learnt Rabindra Sangeet and dances from my cousin in Asansol.” Even as she was growing up, her connection with the Indian dance remained relegated to films like “Black Narcissus” (the character of Kanchi) and the “Indian Tomb” (temple dancer) . But as she grew up, these points of connection began to crumble “as the exoticism of them became more and more apparent to me. This, I think, was my first introduction to cultural analysis”.
Sandra’s interest in cultural analysis relates to her growing up in Germany in the 1970s and 80s (pre-unification) and always being the “misfit”. Why a misfit? “Well, I guess, the race factor plays a role somewhere. You can never be fully German. It’s easier in Austria, where I now work.”
Her earlier learning in Bharatanatyam at the age of 11 and later in Kuchipudi made her look for new avenues in dance. And so it was ballet and contemporary dance that Sandra opted for. “But this recipe did not work for me,” she says. A bachelors in Dance (ethnology) at the University of Hawaii exposed her to other dance forms – Philippino, Korean, Okinawan – and most prominently Polynesian, specifically Hula and Tahitian dance. “Living in Hawaii for four years and learning Polynesian dance changed my outlook towards life drastically. I began to connect these new experiences and the resonances between Polynesian and Indian dance. They became the key to my journey into choreography,” says Sandra, who is a recipient of the Hawaii State Dance Council’s Choreographic Award.
She observed the South Asian diaspora, how they brought out the theme of feminity through theatre and performing arts. It was around this time that she saw an exhibition of Amrita Sher-Gil’s work in Munich at the Haus der Kunst museum in 2006. “I found so many resonances in her paintings- particularly the ‘Self-Portrait as a Tahitian’ – which I could personally relate to. It was her perspective as a half-European, half-Punjabi artist straddling two diverse worlds that prompted me to relate my dance with her work. The more I saw of her work and read her writing, the more I became fascinated by the fact that even though she lived in a very different historical moment (pre-Independence and pre World War II), there seems to be so much common ground in terms of the nomadic experience and identity between us.”
“Unfinished – Iteration 1” unfolded as a sequence of abstract body movements interspersed with fragments of text and images from the life of Sher-Gil. Premiered in Delhi in September 2013, it is an ongoing process for her, says Sandra. “I change each iteration quite substantially with each new venue, city and location and sometimes new collaborators.” And in February 2014, “Unfinished -Iteration II” was showcasedat the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, during the closing ceremony of the birth centenary celebrations of Sher-Gil. “I am currently working on ‘Iteration III’ specifically for Europe, where Sher-Gil is lesser known than in India.”
She co-founded the Post Natyam Collective, an internet-based network of choreographers and scholars, along with Shyamala Moorty and Anjali Tata, with the latter having left the group. At present, the collective has Cynthia Ling Lee and Meena Murugesan on board. “Since we are not centred in one geographical location, we have devised a method of engaging in a shared creative process online. That means we alternate giving artistic assignments or tasks to the group, which we post to our blog. Each of us then comes up with a response (choreographed, written, sometimes story boards or sound collages, etc) to this assignment, which we film or record and again post it to the blog. Everyone then posts feedback. This takes anything between one to two months. We thereby stay active and in dialogue with each other artistically, without the pressure of creating a product, and in the process create a pool of artistic raw material that each individual collective member can draw on in their specific locations.”
