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.

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?