Dance as ritual and transformation

Meet Peter Chin, think exotic, says LEELA VENKATARAMAN.

CHOREOGRAPHER, composer, dancer, vocalist, costume designer and now theatre director, Peter Chin wears many hats. Of Chinese, Irish and African descent, Chin was born in Jamaica, lived for a while in Jakarta and is now based in Toronto. You cannot get more multi-cultural than that.

A self-taught dancer, with an individualistic style, Peter Chin's Modern Dance Involvement was a happenstance, when his professor, in the university where he was studying visual arts, told him, as part of the performance art course, "Do anything you want. But tomorrow you must cast a spell." A musician with no dance training or ready tools to create dance, Chin had little to lose and he plunged into the fray, "fearless and unselfconscious".

In Chennai recently, to participate in "The Other Dance Festival", Chin, relaxing in the living room of friends in Kotturpuram, talked about his dance journey.

Dance, for him, has to go beyond representation. It is not just "to represent transformation but to transform on stage - to create a ritual", as he put it.

Unlike many dancers of Eastern origin who have settled in the West, and get a little irritated by the categorising of east/west, Chin firmly believes "blood memory tells". He cannot explain how, without any learning, his dance has imprints of tai- chi. Now, without any prompting, he shows "the African in me coming out" in movements. He can only explain the phenomenon as inherited cultural memory, for the only formal training he has had in Balinese, Javanese and Sumatran dances was at University in Central Java. "But I was a poor student who played truant and watched a lot of dance outside - which helped me more." There was very little of the flow and energy in these traditions which his body could associate with.

With no vocabulary of learned movement, or spatial memory to guide him, Peter Chin's quiet work in the studio was tough and too complex "to call myself a dancer". And to recognise oneself as a choreographer took even longer. "But the support and enthusiasm from the community has helped a lot."

Dance as a continuum between what he is and what he does takes a lot out of him. "It is scary. It involves being unafraid to investigate body, soul, mind and emotion. It is baring your soul to the audience. To do this, over and over again. I do not know how long I can do it." He talks of the constant dilemma in reconciling such unimpeded opening out of oneself, with an ego, which, in a competitive world, will not allow the dancer to be quiet, forcing him to look over his shoulder in a "who is better" kind of anxiety. Being conscious of this is winning half the battle. "Here, there is no room for fantasy, no self delusion - it has to be a real dialogue with myself."

The constant inquiry into the manifest and non-manifest world is felt in Chin's dance productions, which are multi-disciplinary and show a layering of influences. In "Dag" created for, and premiered at, The Other Festival, metaphysical overtones blend in a human/non-human world, where animism, shamanistic thought and Buddhist symbols are all interwoven in a dream based theme "Death activates gifts". Death of any part, now played out, leads to an emptiness - thereby activating space for gifts from the soul to come in. It all sounds like hocus pocus, till one begins to understand the separate strands of thought and how they integrate. An incantation of whispered and uttered sounds by the dancer creates breath patterns and vibrations in the body leading to movements that express both uplifting joy and desolation. The dance suggests visual images of creeping and crawling creatures and of Nature, which for Chin is "free and sacred".

"I use pure sound, and am influenced by organised spiritual thought. Dance is like a shamanistic activity. It is going really out into the wilderness of Nature - communicating at all levels.

"Our connections with the wild are not new. What is the Jungle Book?" he asks.

In music too, Chin's taste is eclectic embracing a whole range from Renaissance music, church music, tribal chants, Buddhist music with the typical sounds of gong, long pipe and cymbals, to an orchestration of insect sounds.

Peter Chin's latest challenge is directing a theatrical venture, a responsibility given to him by Canadian composer and writer Murray Schaffer. To be presented outdoors, the play is based on a Tang dynasty legend - it has a brilliant underworld palace rising out of the watery sheet of the lake. Like all other things that he has done almost naturally, Chin is ready to enter yet another phase in his career.

Recollecting the greatest moment in this eventful art journey, Chin talks about an ensemble work in which he asked each dancer to give him a symbol out of a dream, around which he wove movements to fashion a solo piece for that performer which, with the dancer's own inputs, had to lead to transformation on the stage. Each dancer had his own expression and yet was part of a united whole. "There were people crying and thanking me, asking, 'How did you know that this was me?' The humanness and openness of that work created some amazing energy for me. The audience too was in tears. That was the closest I had come to making real ritual on the stage - it was most gratifying. And when I received acclaim through an award, it seemed as if it was too much of a good thing. I had never done ensemble work before."

The absolute freedom to create and the accepted pluralism of modern dance is for Chin the most exciting aspect of the present scenario. "Anything can happen here." And Chin's own dance career so far is a case in point.

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