A workshop with Kumudini Lakhia

I was lucky enough to take a kathak intensive workshop with Kumudini Lakhia, the mother of modern kathak dance, this past weekend.

Anamika-Navatman Intermediate Kathak Students + Prashant Shah! (I tried to find the group shot with Kumudini but couldn't)

It was absolutely incredible. Possibly one of the things I continue to feel surprised by - and also, on some level, completely expect - is that in the basics, dance technique across the board is fairly similar. There is no accepted dance where you can compress your spine, or not use your pelvis to create a turnout, or arch your back in a standing position.

What clicked from this particular workshop is that in dance, excess movement is never appreciated. While that may seem obvious in bharatanatyam, where the linear lines and strength convey that, you'd think the opposite with odissi and definitely kathak with its incredible soft (looking!), fluid, supple movements. Kumudini repeatedly emphasized solely moving the wrist from point A to point B with no extra openings, tweaks, etc. Even the hands were just these appendages that followed.  She went so far as to give us a math lesson. "What is the shortest distance between two points? A line! Don't add any thing else in!"

From working with Nrityagram (and following them for years now) and continuing work with kathak, the final word in all of it, regardless of what you are trying to convey to an audience (strength, severity, lightness, fluidity, happiness) you must whittle down your work to it's most basic ingredients. Like food, it in fact the simplest things that are the hardest to execute because of the required precision and control of body to perform them.

I'll leave you with the following:

Some lovely points Kumudini made, which I just wanted to share directly (making no comment on the truth of these):

"It is better to be a bad original than a perfect copy."

"What is the real difference between the dances of India? It is whether they are based on Krishna or Shiva." She went on to explain her theory - kathak, kuchipudi - these are based on the lightness of Krishna. Odissi, Bharatanatyam - within the strength of Shiva.  What was really interesting was the division has nothing to do with technique, simply the mood that the dance conveys.

There was a point, also, where she described her theory as to why the hands are where they are below in this common kathak pose:

Kumudini's opinion (which differed from that of her guru's and spoke that it was simply her interpretation, NOT right or wrong) was that the hand pointing upwards was the idea that kathak was infinite, like the sky it references. The hand pointing outwards, was to the horizon, always showing that there is more to learn, more to grow, more to explore.

How the Western thought process begins to affect Bharatanatyam

Continued from my globalization killing off art and culture post...lol. Yes, I do recognize my flair for the overdramatic.

Just as industrialization began to wipe out the natural world at alarming rates, killing species every day, globalization and cultural hegemony seem to do the same for culture and art.

Cultural hegemony was, and has always been happening. Along with it, art and ritual and customs disappear, but usually at a slow enough rate that there is an acknowledgement and reversal; or preservation of rituals that are being affected.

So is it just natural change or something to be really worried about?

In the scientific process, the starting point are the underlying facts of the situation: in this case, that change within art – ritual – natya (theater, dance, music, etc) – however you choose to note its existence – is as sure as death within the human race. Change in and of itself is not bad. But removal and loss without thought or proper prerogative is. The question then transforms: what change is natural and thought out, what is forced and thus undesirable?

If you look at the example provided by the age of industrialization - you see a forced change within the world that has been created by a rapid demolition without knowledge or second thought with no method of retrieval and re-establishment in a satisfying way. So does change due to cultural hegemony belong under “natural” change or “forced” change?

For instance, I attended a lecture with Elizabeth Sackler that brought to light examples of this phenomena exactly. Eager to display Native American culture and show America’s love of their work museums would put Native American ritual masks under glass displays. The unfortunate part of all this was that it was a violation of the masks’ use and thus of Native American belief systems which put the Western world right back at square one: disrespecting minority cultures allowing America to show just how unequal “the other” is.

A good example of a more natural (though not necessarily more harmonious) cultural hegemony is when the Mughals came to India. Though the Mughals were the rulers they melded their arts with ours to create such wonders as the Taj Mahal, and the North Indian dance form Kathak, which coexisted with other forms such as Odissi and Bharatanatyam and hundreds of other regional variations of what was considered to be classical dance, none better than the other, and all giving itself up to some way of spiritual enlightenment and social/community construction. Even better is that you don't hear very much research here on how dancers were upset about this change (I wonder if it's just not recorded...)

Oftentimes, neither the culture in power nor the culture playing into it realizes it is happening...in a culture’s eagerness to show respect and equality America, England, and other Western countries still force the “other” to fit into their forms and expectations. The result is simple: a power play.

On the other side of the coin, there is the idea that minority cultures should not be so upset with Americans, for it is part of the Western way and culture to act in this manner. If the Western culture were endangered, perhaps minorities would not be so difficult about these points. It is still important to note, however, that it is only within the Western world that countries feel entitled to take that which is not theirs to examine, document, notate and use as they please. Indians cannot come to America, remove the Liberty Bell, and stick it in one of their museums - but England is allowed to take the crown jewels of South Asia and put them on display in museums for "preservation". So, until perhaps India can do that - or England gives back those crown jewels...well, we seem to be stuck in a role where cultural hegemony is bound to happen. And one where we must question changes with a critical eye until that power play is equal...and pluralism is restored.

Interesting Ties

Kathak is the precursor to flamenco.

To be more specific, kathak as it was practiced in the 11th century (when the gypsies are thought to have gone to Spain and created flamenco along the way by grafting other cultural influences) is the precursor to flamenco.

If followed the trail of those gypsies, would we be able to pinpoint the changes in kathak and understand the methodology of changes in tradition better?  Would we find specific ruptures or generation to generation fluidity within the modifications?  Was it one band of gypsies that popularized it or several who made similar changes across space?  Why and how did the guitar come into play? The shoes? The change in costume?

To that end, what of the Mughal era in India where kathak as we note it now came into existence?  I wonder if kathak had the same rupture from its past as bharatanatyam did during the British takeover, from changing the form quite significantly to even changing the name...

It would be extremely interesting if someone did a comparative study of the Mughal and British eras to see how these two cultural takeovers affected the art around them.  I'm sure you would find some sort of patterning or similarity in the way kathak and bharatanatyam was created.  Of course, there are the obvious ways where the government sponsors political art that lauds their system, and art that comes out as a means of protest (Hedayat's book The Blind Owl or much of Picasso's work).  But can we expect that the oppressed in the Mughal era were just as conscious of the change and similarly protested against the changes in the traditional aspects of their form each time?  In short, did kathak artists also do their best to resist change and as a result stagnate and codify their form for a bit?

Or perhaps, as is my usual M.O., I am overestimating the significance of the changes that occurred.