The Locavore Dance Movement

I love India. I really, really do.

But after watching now for 20+ years dancers constantly heading back there for six months at a time to train, establish their career, get their photographs taken, costumes designed, supplies purchased, and earn their stripes as a performer, I have to say: Enough!

Perhaps this was necessary in the beginning, but now, why?

There are wonderful teachers here, knowledgable and hardworking artists, and resources galore. How do we ever expect to become a global art form if we work to keep it as localized and regionalized as possible?

Yes, we don't have the perfect kanjeevaram silk that Chennai makes best or perhaps the tailors for Indian costuming...but why can't we expand what that costume can be by using the materials available to us in our own neighborhood? It is not blasphemous to support your local businesses, and you'll certainly be expanding the number of people who come to learn about the work you do if artists become less India dependent.

That's what seems to be the problem. Do you need tomatoes from Italy to make a delicious pasta sauce? It's actually not going to be that great unless you're IN Italy. If instead, you opt for your farmer's market tomatoes, yes the taste of the sauce will be different, but frankly, the quality will be higher! Indian classical dancers should really start to adopt the locavore food movement except in terms of using the resources around us. Perhaps our flavor will become more "Americanized" but if you accept that with tradition and art comes change and you are NOT accepting diminishing quality, it becomes less problematic than one might think.


P.S. - I linked in Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma because that's where a lot of my food analogies spark from. Maybe you will be similarly inspired.

You Define Bharatanatyam

Last week at New York City Indian dance community meeting (http://groups.google.com/group/nycindiandance) we came back with great gusto to an age-old debate.

What can you define as bharatanatyam or Indian classical dance?

(On a side note, I wonder if musicians ever struggle with this identity crisis.  I feel it is far more accepted for them to experiment with their instruments than it is for us to go outside our box of technique).

Many, many classical dancers burn with an unmistakable fury towards troupes that claim training in a classical form and do not execute basic steps with any accepted sense of technique.  To understand better, imagine if you saw someone who said she was a classically trained ballet dancer but didn't really point her toes.

Multiply that fury by a zillion if they are a popular troupe.  Exponentiate that by a bajillion if they are not only popular but also a Bollywood troupe.

But why?  As a classical dancer, it's difficult to remain calm in the face of people we believe are misrepresenting the form, often in a way that's neither true to the style (as defined by qualified exponents) nor aesthetically pleasing to watch.  It's no small fact that there are hundreds of poorly trained dancers around the world under the impression that they are professional level (and as far as I know, I might fall under this category!) and thousands that think they have some knowledge about the form and can haphazardly add it into any dance piece.  Throw that into the mix with a diminishing and uneducated audience and you can understand how much of our community feel that these dancers and artists are to blame for some of our marginalization.  A younger version of myself would have written 35,000 posts by now on the unacceptable nature of such antics.  However, I now subscribe to the following statement

Rajika Puri made a very valid point in our meeting: it is up to us to define bharatanatyam - or any other classical dance.  Really, one of the only things you can do is put your work up, espouse your beliefs, and the people will decide.  Each of us puts our own definition of bharatanatyam out there and eventually a consensus is come to.

I think that's part of why dancers get so upset.  For every person who has good classical technique in their claim to fame, there are ten who could generally be said to have an unacceptable level of technique.  So, just by pure numbers, dancers with fabulous technique get less of an audience.  With the greater bulk of people in the world believing that classical dance is best danced by those without technique, and often shunning classical dance due to this, there is a fear that the consensus - and definition of bharatanatyam - will change in a less desirable direction.

I don't believe that the frustration towards this phenomena is not justified or wasted, as it is partly what changes the definition - when educated artists get fired up and passionate about what it is or isn't and share that opinion with others.  I do believe that we cannot cut ourselves off from what we do not like within the South Asian arts field or belittle it as the best way to change it is to support each other and accept that people will watch what they like, while also making sure to expose them to as many different works as possible - and then let them decide.  Because frankly, troupes lacking technique are popular because people simply don't know much better.

Education, education, education!  It's like when you used to like boxed macaroni and cheese or boxed potatoes until you had that truffled mac n cheese and rosemary scalloped potatoes at that French restaurant down the street that's been there forever but for some reason you just never tried.  You finally realize what you've been missing!  Yes, you'll still eat that boxed food - but your mouth still waters just thinking upon the memory of those perfectly sauced ingredients.

Ragamala Dance Theater - at the cusp of change

I had the privilege of seeing Ragamala Dance Theater perform their show "Sva" in Washington, D.C. in the fall of 2008.

I left with mixed feelings.

While I found the choreography quite interesting and the Taiko drummer collaboration  an unexpected meld, the execution confused me.  These dancers were extreme in their movements: there was no subtlety within their limbs.  Extensions became rigid hyper-extensions, eyebrow raises meant to show compassion or karuna became rapid up-down movements.  At first I was aghast, off put by their supposed lack of technical skill and then, I started to wonder...

In bharatanatyam subtlety and grace/laya is usually considered the mark of a mature dancer.  This was discarded - on purpose - by Ragamala.  I wonder two things about this conscious (yes, it is conscious, I was informed by one of their dancers) decision -- one, if their intention of removing this aspect also removes it from the realm of bharatanatyam; and two, if the super forceful nature of their dancing is a wise choice in dancing the form.  It's a question that questions what the "essence" of bharatanatyam really is.  What makes their dancing belong under the bharatanatyam umbrella, what makes bharatanatyam beautiful?

The problem stemmed from their use of traditional pieces with full intention of achieving a performance experience that duplicated more traditional dance aesthetics (such as starting with a kauthuvam) that made the viewer question the execution.  I didn't enter the theater thinking I was going to be watching different and significant stylizations of a traditional piece...so their rendition just didn't sit well.  But if I had come in not knowing what bharatanatyam was, or knowing that they were changing aspects of it for aesthetic purpose, I might have had a completely different take on the evening.  So the intention - of the troupe and the audience member - mean so much in this context.

So the question transforms yet again: at what point does changing valued aspects of it: form, structure, lexicon, and execution - differentiate between expanding boundaries and the creation of something new altogether? If the performer doesn't acknowledge the change they have created should I judge the dancer on what I expect to see, based on the expectations she herself has created through her visual look and her dance description?

It is clear that intention - and carefully relaying that intention to the audience member - has a great deal of meaning in South Asian performance.  I actually think that intention is key in any rasa experience - it's like asking for tiramisu at a restaurant and receiving raspberry lady fingers and orange marmalade on top of a marscapone mouse.  Yes, the second sounds delicious - but tiramisu is so well known that had I not known of the variations to the dish before I ordered I probably would have been upset receiving it.  Not only that, but if you took the marscapone and made it a ricotta mouse, it becomes a deconstructed cheesecake.

At some point you can't imagine having tiramisu without raspberries, and at another point it's just become cheesecake.  So where is Ragamala in all of this? Tiramisu with some bells and whistles (so still bharatanatyam) or cheesecake (postnatyam?).  Or have they left the dessert genre altogether? :)

Interesting how food can make a three paragraph delve into the highly interpretable much more clear in a matter of three sentences, eh?

On Food, Dance and Tradition

A year or so ago, I read the Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan and was fascinated by our gathered food knowledge. Before science, how could Mexicans have possibly known that corn supplemented the one nutrient that black beans could not give them? Yet, they ate the two together religiously, as if they knew one without the other was useless.

In fact, it's only recently that we've tried to base our food knowledge on science, which seems to be ineffectual. Our obesity rates and trend diets that change every year or two confirms just that.

As usual, I've related this to dance. In my discussions on traditionality, I touch upon the question of dissecting traditionality. Like deconstructing food, does deconstructing the parts that make up bharatanatyam or classical Indian dance, and then putting them together in new and unexpected ways add up to the sum of its parts? I often wonder if this deconstruction - where we analyze the form, decide that we'll keep pieces of it and discard others to our liking - is a bit like separating the black beans from the corn and deciding to throw away the corn. We've just lost something essential to the dance form, the process, the choreography, and we have no way of knowing it's importance for sure.

Essential to what? That's a good question. I suppose if we go to rasa theory (and my own belief) that you won't ever get to experience truth or that "I've-got-chills-but-this-is-more-than-just-that" feeling by choreographing or dancing in this manner.