A New Voice

As young dancers today, we time and again find ourselves in situations where we are compelled to justify, stand up to, defend, qualify, apologise for the practise of dance. While the answers to these immediate questions is not of consequence, the question I ask myself as a young dancer is whether we are training the new minds in the business to be equipped to answer these questions – not for the world, but for themselves. The first edition of the Annual Dance Conference – Nava-dhisha – hosted by the Trinity Arts Festival of India, was envisioned as a space for young dancers to shape, express and exchange thoughts on this central idea, with steering inputs from senior experienced artists.

This research project supported by a Junior Fellowship from the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, is based on the premise that the purpose and practice of the classical arts in the Indian sub-continent is fundamentally towards advancement of human knowledge. The key role of art towards this end lies in the training and sharpening of cognitive and intuitive skills. If this is indeed what the Indian performing arts are designed for at its core, could it fundamentally change the way we understand the social interface of our art forms? This is the main question that this project seeks to address.

Published in 2019, this book is a collection of 9 essays written by young dancers and scholars in the field of Bharatanatyam, based on talks given by them at the Inaugural Navadhisha - New Voices in Dance Conference held in December 2017. The essays reflect the voice of today's dancer, pondering over the central question 'Why do we dance'? Is dance even an essential activity of human life? What do we really mean when we use the term 'spiritual' to define the practise of Bharatanatyam, especially in the context of today's generation of dancers. What is the social relevance of the Indian dancer, and dance itself?

The pada varnam, which has come to be the centrepiece of the traditional Bharatanatyam repertoire, hinges on the Nayika. Contrary to the grand variety of situations in padams/javalis, the emancipated voices and the agency of the women we see in them, the Nayika of the pada varnam seems to be of a single kind. Every traditional varnam recurrently, and almost insistently, features a woman pining in love. She seems fragile, languishing in the ache of unsatiated love. From Saami Ninne Korinanu (18th century) to Innum en Manam (20th Century), the rhetoric is clear. “I seek you. Will you not pay heed? I suffer from the torment of separation. When will you come to me?” Surely, this persistent choice is telling us something.

The evolution of an art form is in the hands of its collective community – a combination of the practitioners, the academics and the patrons. Many of us dancers today grapple with the idea of presenting an expansive set of ideas and concepts through dance – including telling stories of today, telling non-traditional stories, representing present-day concerns etc. The immediate challenges we face with executing these ideas all converge at a basic question we are all asking – how do we do this while not tampering with the core spirit of the dance form? How do we do this while we in fact we are fully exploiting the grammar of the form and augmenting its distinguishing features. Can we come together for a productive exchange of ideas, thoughts and work to bring us collectively closer to some of these answers?

As Bharatanatyam reaches out to an increasingly global audience and student base, the question of relevance of the content we present arises often. The particular aspect that comes into scrutiny time and again is the Nayika in Bharatanatyam. While almost all dancers present these Nayikas, do we treat them and their stories as mere artefacts to be preserved for curiosity or can we see them as powerful voices that can resonate with and, even influence, today? As a dancer of today, it has been important to me to engage with the idea of the Nayika to rediscover its relevance for me, viewing it through the lens of my own environment and influences growing up.

There is a subtle, yet pervasive, treatment of gender fluid themes in the entire breadth of ancient Indian literature. The idea of ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’ is constantly challenged, without much ado, with negotiable boundaries of sexual and gender identities. This lecture-demonstration will look at how such multifold nuances of gender can be kept alive and relevant through the centuries by a performative medium such as Bharatanatyam.

I understand spirituality through Art, rather than the other way round. By redefining spirituality as a non-intellectual embodied experience of reality, I can comprehend the ‘exhilaration’ that I feel and in a way harvest it to further intensify the experience. Uniquely, art facilitates a transference of this experience to someone who walks into the auditorium with zero preparation, zero background or zero intent – which I think is extremely powerful. In this sense I feel, dance, its practice and its consumption, in themselves, become a gateway to spiritual experience regardless of faith, personal beliefs or content of presentation.