When the Drama and Performing Arts Department of the Sri Shankaracharya Sanskrit University, Kalady, Kerala, invites you to present a paper at a symposium on ‘contemporary’ Indian dance, you have to wake up to the fact that something new is in the air.
India’s cultural bureaucracy has been notoriously hostile to the idea of anything ‘modern’ or ‘contemporary’ in dance. Though current dance scholarship has tried to point out that the re-invention of ‘Sadirattam’ and ‘Dasiattam’ into Bharatanatyam in the late 1920s was, in fact, a ‘modern’ moment in Indian dance and not the ‘recovery of tradition’ as it has all along been made out to be, pretty little has happened officially or otherwise to claim a modern space for Indian dances.
Though Uday Shankar, one of India’s earliest modernisers in dance, was among the organisers of the very first ‘Dance Seminar’ of the Central Sangeet Natak Akademi (SNA), in 1958, no special effort was made to track any new or innovative tendencies and give it any special status. While some papers did hint at ‘scope for development’ for traditional forms, no one really caught the bull by the horns.
We needed to wait another 27 years for the SNA to organise, in 1985, the ‘Nava Nritya Utsav’ and seminar in Delhi, for official acknowledgement of changes happening in Indian dance. Subsequently, the SNA has had ‘Choreography Festivals and Symposiums’ on a few occasions in 1990, 1997 and 2002, but never really with any sense of seriousness or with the idea of contributing to the development of dance.
Strangely, the thrust for opening out the space for new thinking in Indian dance came from non-state actors like the Max Mueller Bhavan (MMB) and the National Centre for the Performing Arts. The ‘East-West Dance Encounter’ of 1984, in Mumbai, by Dr Georg Lechner of the MMB, created conditions for some serious enquiry into the future of dance, which had painted itself into a corner with its complete disconnect with both social and artistic realities of the time. It also welcomed and recognised new work from Chandralekha, Kumudini Lakhia, Uttara Asha Coorlawala and Astad Deboo.
Dr Lechner was to repeat the ‘Dance Encounter’ in 1985, where Chandralekha presented the radical ‘Angika’, which was to change the trajectory of contemporary dance in India. Her aligning of the principles of body, movement and breath found in dance, along with those in Yoga and Kalarippayattu, comprehensively reoriented the approach to dance work in our context.
In 1987, the ‘International Symposium on Theatre, Dance and Martial Arts’ organised by Padatik, Kolkata, was another important forum that sought to approach the problematic form and content in Indian dance from a different angle. Dr Lechner was to continue to actively engage with the question when he organised, in 1993, the ‘New Directions in Indian Dance’ symposium followed, in 2001, with ‘New Directions in Dance — East and West’ as part of the ‘Festival of Germany in India’.
Today, it is a signpost in history that the fallout of all this was to echo — not in India, but — in faraway Toronto, Canada, in 1993, where India-born Sudha Thakkar Khandwani’s ‘Kalanidhi Fine Arts’ was to organise the seminal festival and symposium ‘New Directions in Indian Dance’, which brought together some of the most important performers, scholars and academicians in India, North America and the UK to consider the tension and synergy between the old and the new in Indian dance.
A few weeks ago this January, ‘Kalanidhi Fine Arts’, Toronto, once again hosted a festival on contemporary dance, dedicated to the memory of the late Chandralekha. Not only did it showcase Chandra’s 2001 production ‘Sharira’, but the local Menaka Thakkar Dance Company also learned and performed a 30-minutes excerpt from Chandra’s 1991 production ‘Sri’, re-titled ‘Shakti’.
Bucking the trend of official apathy, 2009 will be witness to several important events and seminars on contemporary developments in Indian dance. The ‘Attakkalari India Biennial, 2009’, in Bangalore last week, culminated with the ‘Sir Ratan Tata Trust Colloquium on Movement Arts’, with special focus on body, movement, thought and technology. At the end February, the University of Hyderabad, is organising an international seminar on ‘Re-imagining the Image’, which will specifically address issues of the visual with reference to dance.
Later, in November this year, World Dance Alliance — India, is holding an international conference “Re-Searching Dance”, in New Delhi. Open to all those concerned with dance in the context of society, politics, documentation and other areas of contemporary relevance, it is sure to push the debate around dance in India towards new frontiers.
Being an integral part of most of these symposiums, past and present, due to my link with Chandralekha, I am getting a ringside view of some fascinating conversations on the history, politics and movement generation strategies of the thinking dancers and I am convinced that something new is afoot. No wonder, the vibration is being felt even in Kalady.
