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Moves

§ April 27th, 2009 § Filed under Music § 10 Comments

My sister’s dance school had a show for all the students the other day, and it reminded me of a blog post I had drafted months ago, but set aside because I couldn’t get youtube to work for some reason. I had accompanied her to a dance recital that featured four different forms of classical Indian dance – Odissi, Manipuri, Mohiniyattam and Bharata Natyam. It was an exciting set of performances, part of a tribute to Sucheta Chapekar, a Pune-based Bharata Natyam (BN) dancer and researcher who has done much to popularize the study and patronage of classical dance in the city. Leading performers also spoke at a seminar about contemporary issues facing their particular dance forms, aesthetics, audiences, etc. As I sat there, rapt, it made me think about how, in always celebrating Pune’s love for classical music, its burgeoning dance community doesn’t really get the critical attention it deserves. Thanks to my sister who dances, choreographs and teaches BN here, I have been lucky to attend quite a few shows, big and small, and think a little bit (as a complete outsider to the art form) about the way in which different forms of haute dance impact ideas of national art and culture, language and tradition, and how contemporary moves shape and reshape these practices, in a madly expanding city whose social face is itself undergoing a rapid transformation.

Given that its aesthetics are so deeply enmeshed with Hindustani music, you would perhaps expect Kathak, the northern Indian courtly dance to dominate in Pune. Above is a superb Kathak piece by the legendary Saswati Sen, in the Satyajit Ray film Shatranj ke Khilari (Chessplayers). Kathak is indeed popular, but it is Bharata Natyam (BN), the southern form originating in Tamil Nadu that has captured the middle-class imagination in Pune. Classes have mushroomed in the city over the last decade or so, some ambitious academies, and others small neighbourhood courses for young school-going girls. Many of these complete the required six-year margam, after which they graduate with their first public performance, the arangetram. Hardly a week passes in December-January or May without an announcement in the newspaper about an arangetram in the city.

These arangetrams are expensive to organize, with the students’ parents footing the bill of the theatre, costumes, musicians, jewellery, etc. Although they can sometimes resemble a debutante ball for one individual dancer, rising costs have compelled several middling families of graduating students to mount a joint effort nowadays. This, in turn, has compelled novel approaches to choreography, in a form that has traditionally revolved around the solitary performer. Many leading BN dancers perform solo; aside from the intensely personal nature of the emotions expressed in the dance, performing solo on stage for several hours also relates to the technical virtuosity of the dancer. Here is a well known BN exponent, Malavika Sarukkai:

But in the new multiple-performer format, there is a lot of innovation in terms of stage configurations and the kinds of items performed. For instance, a lot more emphasis on geometric patterns, symmetric variations, contrapuntal actions in the more physical and technical nritta pieces, rather than on solo stamina. In the abhinaya or expressive, emotive pieces, there seem to be a lot more ensemble dance-drama compositions that build on conversations, narratives and social situations. Below is a fine example of this kind of group choreography:

Another interesting innovation is in language – BN is a dance form steeped in Tamil, Telugu and Sanskrit, but now popular in a city whose language is Marathi (and increasingly Hindi). Traditional 18th & 19th c pieces continue to form the mainstay of the performances – even though the Marathi dancers in Pune have little direct exposure to the words of these poems. The language of mudra (hand gestures), is of course a primary translator, as is the emotion of the music. But of late, many younger dancers are choreographing pieces from their own languages as well. BN flourished in the Gujarati city of Baroda over the 20th century, at the famous Maharaja Sayajirao University for the Arts, far away from the Tamil heartland, and there is now a sizeable repertoire of pieces in Gujarati. My sister draws on a large corpus of Marathi and Kannada devotional and erotic poetry to compose fresh items, and nearly every arangetram I have attended in Pune has included a couple of Marathi items, even as many of the traditional Tamil pieces have also become more familiar to audiences here.

Of course, the spectre of authenticity looms large over all these experiments. Although it is now often hailed as the pre-eminent form of Indian classical dance, BN is also viewed as part of a particular Tamil heritage and there is no doubt that Chennai and other Tamil sites remain the heart of the art form. Some view these linguistic and musical innovations (with Hindustani ragas, tunes and beats) as inappropriate, doing violence to the core of BN’s aesthetics. And yet, this popularity outside its heartland has certainly contributed to its elevation into classical, national heritage. I admit I am torn. I have never been a big fan of the Ravi Shankar style fusion music that throws strange twangs and twings together (I cannot stand the phrase “world music” and most of what is peddled in its name), and yet (perhaps because I speak Marathi?) I really like and appreciate the experiments that combine Marathi compositions with BN mudra and abhinaya. Part of it is a question of time; all experiments, over time, become tradition, and in the next few decades, perhaps this linguistic variety may well become part of BN’s core aesthetics?

Although steeped in Hindu devotionalism of various (often contradictory) kinds, if my sister’s students are any indication, students in Pune are from all religious backgrounds, and I wonder how this shift from a particular regional and social set of performers and audiences to a much more diverse pan-Indian middle-class is going to shape its repertoire. An important question raised at the symposium was about the ability of these art/dance forms to address changing needs and ideas of family, feminism and individualism – can the love of Radha and Krishna continue to speak, however flexibly and timelessly, to changing notions of sexuality, gender, devotion or romance? Or, like language, music and choreography, how will BN’s core aesthetics (or Kathak’s or Odissi’s, for that matter) engage afresh with the ever-changing social? In this regard, whither their classicism?

Of course, classicism and tradition are themselves modern ideas about the past and seek to fix what is actually a continuously changing process. Scholars have analyzed this “classicization” of BN during the nationalist movement, and even before the nation, the great Serfoji composed some beautiful Marathi pieces for BN as a ruler of a princely state in Tamil country. But it remains to be seen how the resurgent categories of nation and national culture on the one hand, and the pressures of globalized entertainment, fusion dance, reality dance competitions that prize innovation and agility above all else on the other, will influence what young dancers in neighbourhood schools of classical dance like my sister’s aspire to as their career, as their aesthetic outlet, and as their passion.

Part of the Chapekar anniversary celebrations was an evening’s performance by the leading dancers from these different classical schools. One doesn’t usually see these juxtaposed so closely together; while the more geometrical movements of BN slide gracefully into the sensuous and fluid shapes of Odissi or Mohini Attam (the video right above this paragraph) from the neighbouring region of Orissa and Kerala, Manipuri from further northeast is dramatically different. But they had an interesting common thread – nearly all of them performed pieces from the legendary Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda, a medieval literary, musical and erotic masterpiece on Krishna’s life. It was a revealing exercise in the sheer potential of choreography and imagination to see the familiar ashtapadis from Gita Govinda figure one after the other in such diverse visual, physical and musical avatars. (That link also has a lot of examples from different dance forms of various Gita Govinda poems)

The piece right above is an Odissi rendition of a popular piece from this text, hariiriha mugdha vadhuu. My sister regularly performs the BN variant of this poem as a slow, langourous and erotic invocation of Radha’s longing for her lover Krishna. That day, the Manipuri dancers presented it in such an upbeat, innocent and decidedly playful interpretation in the Manipuri dance that it took me a while to recognize it through the words! Here is another Manipuri piece, also from Gita Govinda:

Unity in diversity is an extremely tired and cliched, not to say exploitative and delusional, mantra of the modern Indian national imagination, but I am tempted to argue that it is in these unexpected moments, in grasping the beauty of these creative expressions, their commonalities as well as their distinct possibilities, that the phrase gains any meaning at all. I left the concert wishing they had included a Kathak performance in it as well – but here is another famous Gita Govinda poem, yaahii maadhava, where the dancer is upset with Krishna’s infidelity – also performed by Saswati Sen. Set to raga Bhairavi, this is so much more plaintive and weepy than the rather more furious and sarcastic BN interpretation I have seen.

In the end, I gotta say –
1) Some of these videos are short and not of great quality, but I love youtube.
2) Madhavi mami is a bit surprised, but thrilled to bits that her wire baskets have got such a positive response. Let me see if I can get some detailed instructions and post them here. Thanks so much for the feedback!