Thinking dance, talking sense
Pioneering American choreographer Merce Cunningham. -- AFP
IN THE prevailing climate of dwindling dance scholarship in India, `Sethu' an endeavour by Kri, encouraging activities to build bridges of art understanding through scholarship, is all to the good. Modern Dancer and Choreographer of `Think Dance', Jill Sigman, with her background in Philosophy from Princeton University and Art History, held the floor, at Habitat's Gulmohar Hall, with an evocative lecture, substantiated by video clippings from her dance productions, on the `Why and Wherefore of Modern Dance in the West' - a lucid analysis, helping initiate people into the kind of considerations underlining post-modern dance activity in the West. She began with how the new thinking in the Western dance world ruffled all existing attitudes to dance by questioning romanticised Ballet and what was regarded as its hegemonic cultural agenda, with its absorption in the perfection of lines. Discarding the virtues of mere visual beauty strung round narrative preoccupations, and stripping dance of all its virtuosic cushioning, the propagators of the new dance embraced `pedestrianism' and celebrating the ordinary unsung, so to speak.
Dance to provoke
Merce Cunningham's real bodies moving in space and time, and the new love for movement based on everyday tasks, divested dance of all glamour. Rather than entertain, dance was made a tool for intellectual communication where the viewer was not a passive spectator. Very little was mentioned about the dancer's intentions, and it was left to the individual spectator to make of movement what one interpreted from it. Dance was meant to provoke even while it did not function as a language, the totality of movement in a work creating its own meanings for people. Movement while not following any set pattern could by its very quality suggest different moods. Modern Dance often resorted to `layering' where unconnected visual juxtapositions either supported or counter pointed the dancer's moves.
A video clipping of the dancer moving against a video of a pigeon strutting and posturing, showed how actions which individually could have gone unnoticed, by their unusual putting together, attracted attention. The light technician working in full view of the audience as the dancer performed, dance being performed in an arena where several unconnected activities are all being done simultaneously, quick shifts and transitions where actions in different time cycles are juxtaposed, or creating visual metaphors through moves like a performer slowly balancing and moving on a collection of drinking glasses placed bottom-up on the floor (suggesting fragility?) are all devices resorted to, and for each point mentioned a video excerpt from Jill's production provided the example. The non-linear method of presentation was preferred for being more true to life.
There was an interesting clipping of a team effort by a group of persons with a dog moving their bodies in different ways with an occasional imitation of what the dog was doing. Soon however the entire movement pattern became doglike. There was another clipping going into the body language of news casters to explore what, if any, type of movements characterise a professional group whose utterances are unquestioningly accepted as truth.
Social issues are dealt with in Modern Dance, not in any propagandist sense but as a way of bringing home the reality. Using characterisation or presenting dance in changed contexts as in a museum or a market place, could impart a new tone to the presentation and this method is often used to sensitise people in new ways. Humour introduced through commentary, dialogue and droll situations is a feature.
The excerpt of an exchange from a production, between Jill and her mother on what constituted feminism and the attitude of the older generation to the bra burning symbolism, was hilarious.
Clearly there is a yawning cultural gap between Modern Dance in the West and what is done in the East.
Kri's experiment of an interaction between Bharatanatyam dancer Rama Vaidyanathan and Western Modern Dancer Jill Sigman is the encouraging practical aspect of Sethu.
LEELA VENKATARAMAN
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