Coincidentally, two events of the week gone by were woven round opposite time frames — one trying to recapture in a dance production the throb of a vital past when India struggled for and attained Independence, and the other deliberating through talks on major departures in different art disciplines of today.
Spun round the conviction that a nation which forgets its past does so at its peril, Jashn-e-Azadi was conceived by Nehru Bal Sangh as a yearly carnival for the youth (this year observed in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru) celebrating Independence Day and rejoicing while the youth is simultaneously made aware of the sacrifices made by countless freedom fighters who valiantly laid down their lives for the birth of a new independent nation. The programme at the Satya Sai Centre, apart from speeches by political personalities like Karan Singh —underlining that freedom was won at a cost, leaving many unfinished tasks yet to be completed of providing the basic needs of life to every citizen of the country — comprised a dance theatre production “Jashn- e-Azadi” by Sadhya, choreographed and designed by Santosh Nair. Cleverly put together by a judicious selection of readily available data, with a soundtrack made up of well known and much-sung patriotic lyrics — it resonated and struck an immediate chord with the audience — coupled with Shammi Narang’s voiceover, the interpreting body language combined both traditional movements taken from Chhau and Yoga, and contemporary departures set to woven-in beat music passages, patterned with Modern Dance influences. While a Rani Jhansi, Tantia Tope or a Mangal Pandey sequence rejoiced in ‘Hatya Dhar’ movements from Mayurbhanj Chhau, and a “Vande Mataram” playing in the background had feats of Yoga with three dancers erect in a sheersana posture, the choreography saw riveting formations representing images of freedom, like birds flying in the air with dancers balanced atop dancers silhouetted against a painting, or scenes where properties like narrow stretch-cloth wound round wrists of performers was pulled and manipulated by other dancers to create visual geometry of lines, with the Union Jack flashing at the back to symbolise our people being oppressed by marauding East India Company soldiers. It was a fast moving production. The defiance and courage of a Bhagat Singh or a Chandrasekhar Azad came out in the proudly erect walk, as hand-cuffed prisoners being led to the gallows, fearlessly opting for death rather than caving in to a foreign force. Flashes catching Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Maulana Azad, Aruna Asaf Ali to Gandhiji’s Satyagraha movement, the Salt March, Civil Disobedience and finally that memorable moment of dawn with Pandit Nehru’s “Tryst with Destiny” — it was a colourful cameo rendered by extremely competent and well-trained dancers turned out in simple elegance, all costumes in aesthetic colours — and it served the purpose for which it was presented very well, with the young audience thoroughly involved in the action.
Art Matters
Art Matters, in its latest session of touching on various art issues, put the focus on “Major Departures of Arts in our Time”. Theatre person Anuradha Kapur sought to concentrate on Feminist Theatre since the ’80s when raising consciousness on social justice began to engage the attention of theatre activity with productions like “Aurat” by Jan Natya Manch and street theatre performances. As she said, while the emperor wore no clothes, the empress had none to wear.
Crafting an intelligible language of gestures, theatre went from the Baroque and spectacular and over-exuberant sans rationality, to the Gay world and gender reversals and destabilisation with female impersonation and later male impersonation. She mentioned names like Neelam Mansingh, Amal Allana, Maya Rao and herself. Maya Rao’s “Ravana”, created in 2012, caught the contrasting qualities of this anti-hero, her theatre using an individualistic blend for the body language, which had Kathakali, Modern Dance, Rap, snatches of Malayalam, English and mumbling and what have you. Touching on the influence of the Brechtian technique, and the whole process of physicalisation in theatre, characterisation, thinking through the body and creating a social body at a time when Realism was not easily accepted, made for an interesting talk along with a few visuals.
Abhay Sardesai, art critic and editor of Art World, cited the works of three artists whose newly charted paths remained in a constant state of departure, their art having a flexible, porous identity. How Bhupen Khakhar with his work on homosexual relationships, by giving voice to the silence of a repressed minority, also created a newly critical audience, and how Nikhil Chopra in his work seemed to reclaim a lost world of high life and feudal power, and how M.F. Husain through his freedom of expression (leading to the brutal way he was treated which represented a moment of rupture in our consciousness), were all examples of the constant pressure on art to give up its right to annoy and shock people.
With her creations of English poetry, Arundhati Subramaniam spoke of how, drawn to Bharatanatyam and Yoga, she had seen the grandeur and symmetry of the body geometry in the performances of artists like Kamala, Vyjayantimala and Yamini Krishnamurti. She began to ponder on verbal choreography where words like dancing, sweeping and careening seemed much like dance movement. The tyranny of paraphrase, somewhat like “the desperate light of shopping malls”, made her want to get away from language becoming just performative, to a higher level, where poetry as a metaphor created images and statement in a kind of magic archaeology. Chiming in with the questions she was grappling with came dancers groping in new directions voicing their dissatisfactions at imitative performances where women pined endlessly for their Lord and sringar became tame desire with no carnality.
In the seminar on “New Directions” mounted in New Delhi, led by George Leichner, radical departures like the work “Burning Skin” seemed to strip bare the mind of the Indian Diaspora, and she met artistes like Chandralekha whose art departures, using the spine as a metaphor for resistance, showed her how to resist readymade language and save what you are creating from ‘terminal triviality.’ These were the new gatekeepers of the dance, different from what was called innovative and was only conceived in a hurry to arrive.But having interacted closely with classical dancers like Alarmel Valli, Arundhati also saw departure as a ‘deep homecoming’ in those not in a hurry merely to reach their agenda to somebody — but who through an immersion in the art journey acquired the right alignment and thrust, and here lay an inner departure leading to a deep homecoming.
Here, there was no performing in a comfort zone, even doing the well-trodden margam, for the challenge was in making the dance your own language and statement through a searing, concentrated journey with many failures. The departures here, while inward, were no less important.
