161 days
966 chapatis
1932 spitting rickshaw drivers
2415 cows
3220 greetings from strangers
8050 mosquitoes…
Six
months ago I packed up my life into boxes and into a friend's garage. I
was leaving the desk-bound A's (applications, acquittals, appointments,
action lists) to begin my re-residency (re-engage, revitalize,
research, retreat) and I was so re-ready.
I had made it through
the wasteland that lies between 'emerging' and 'experienced', had done
my time in the administrative slammer, chalked up my community service
hours curating and mentoring, and cracked an Asialink performing arts
residency. I was taking my "synergies and tensions between live dance
and video documentary" and going to India!
As a 21st century
dance artist I am a techno-organic skeleton, a collection of hard and
soft parts. I see dvcam-ed, hear ipod-ed, speak powerbook-ed. My
"practice" is a balance between an external hard drive and a soft yoga
mat. My dance has released joints and an active website. The contrasts
of India have always seemed like a good match for me. Teetering between
the technological and the physical, between software and suryanamaskar 1
, India promised just the right blend of innovation and tradition. So,
too, my host organisation, Darpana, with a company of dancers and
actors working alongside a media and communications department, offered
the perfect environment for me to get back to "cutting choreography" 2.
On
October 5th 2006, as the plane left the ground and I left my home, my
job, my friends and family, I repeated after the safety announcement
"Remain calm and breathe normally". On October 6th, as I walked out
into the streets of Mumbai, I kept repeating "Oh my god!" as 16
million: honked their "horns OK please"; knocked at the car window;
crowded around the shop front card game; wound between the rickshaws,
motorbikes, goods carriers, cows, dogs; slept on the footpath; rode
side-saddle in sarees on 'two-wheelers'; talked on their mobiles; sang
their puja 3. I tried to differentiate between hunger and
panic. I realised that from now on water only comes bottled and coffee
is instant, white and sweet. I begged for toilet paper.
I
was thrown onto the catwalk, hung between celebrity and freak, where
heads turn and children gasp and point. There was nowhere to hide.
Greeted from half a kilometre away with "hello-how-are-you-which
country?" and having to pretend I know who the Australian cricketers
are. My photograph is stored in the memory of a couple of hundred
mobile phones and I have been fed (and watched eating) by dozens of
families. In India I WAS Madonna and worried about how I was ever going
to survive the lack of attention on my return!
The extremes
of Mumbai were continued if not even rivalled by my destination
Ahmedabad, the city of dust in the dry state of Gujarat (I am referring
both to climate and liquor licensing). It is home to Gandhi's ashram
and has outrageously crowded and chaotic traffic that had me laughing
hysterically (and then choking on the pollution) as I rode rickshaw
through it for the next five months. Fortunately I found a piece of
paradise amid the cacophony staying at the Retreat, one of the
magnificent old two-storey bungalows on the grounds of the former
Sarabhai home, now the Calico Museum. Sleeping in the same room that
Gandhi once stayed in while recovering from an illness seemed
auspicious and, on reflection, did begin a period of "healing" for me
as I finally found the time, space and stimuli to create my first
full-length work for Darpana's Vikram Sarabhai Festival.
The
legacy of an extrordinary family, Darpana was founded in 1948 by
Bharatanatyam dancer Mrinalini Sarabhai who was married to the famous
scientist, industrialist and founder of India's space program Vikram
Sarabhai. Mrinalini is credited with introducing the world to Indian
classical dance, touring regularly with her company from 1949. She was
innovative in her development of the art form, often drawing on
different dance vocabularies, traditional and contemporary, to
re-energize the traditional techniques and to tell contemporary
stories.
“Our work is like a catapult—one pulls back in order to spring forward"4
This pattern of innovation and social comment has been continued and built on by her (in)famous 5
daughter, Mallika, who not only manages the multi-pronged organisation
(around sixty staff working across the fields of dance, theatre, TV and
filmmaking, puppetry, publishing and design) but also remains the lead
performer in the company's extensive touring repertoire. Mallika is one
of the most dynamic people I have ever met, with an amazing CV
including Draupadi in Peter Brook's The Mahabharata. She is also so
busy that securing a rehearsal time with her longer than an
uninterrupted 15 minutes was a challenge.
Challenge…the
word that re-surfaced time and again in all contexts, artistic and
personal. Make a full-length contemporary video work with Indian
artists only available part-time in the next eight weeks—challenge. In
that same time, re-train stamping upright classical Indian bodies to
roll through their spine and open their hip creases —challenge. Finding
ways other than verbal language to communicate ideas. Dancing on marble
floors. Getting across the road in one piece…challenge.
The
clichés—of "finding" yourself in a foreign country—are unavoidable.
When you are dropped into a culture so different, diverse, colourful,
vocal…so 'in your face'…you can't help but make art about that
experience. Seeing these Indian bodies so strongly connected to
ritual—movement, song, physical labour—I found myself thinking about
our connections to our bodies and our physicalities and to what extent
our actions imprint on our emotions, our patterns of thought, our
identities…What we hold on to and what catalyst can bring something to
the surface.
The personal scar connects to conflict on a
global scale. Wars or illness are an outward expression of this
repressed personal hurt. 6
Mallika was asking
for a theme and a title within the first couple of weeks I was there.
This was not just for practical reasons (promotional materials for the
Festival) but also cultural. Their approach is much less abstract, they
tell stories (often historical or widely known legends/events) and they
do it with movement vocabularies that are commonly understood by
audiences. A particular mudra or hand gesture has an accepted literal
meaning. Interestingly, I had incorporated a particular hand mudra
(Tripatako) to act as a cultural "marker" in a choreographic phrase
before finding out that it meant "flag". As I researched the "theme"
for my work, I revisited the writings of one of my dance mentors,
Deborah Hay. She draws on Buddhist philosophy and creates what are
almost conundrums as choreographic and improvisational scores. 7
She talks about her body being "unfixed" which became the title of the
live dance and video work I was to make and then re-make over the next
few months.
I am unfixed
A mess of molecules and memories
A speck of dust
A river of blood
An exhalation
My past, present and future merge in this moment
I know you intimately and still we haven’t met
I am taking it all with me and leaving everything behind.8
Unfixed
was performed on December 28 as part of the Vikram Sarabhai Festival
marking the official ending of my 3 month Asialink residency. I called
it a ‘contemporary dance documentary’ combining live dance and video
projection, shifting between the three dimensional live body and the
screen body—shifting from the present moment back to a remembered self
or forward to a potential future. I performed an opening solo and a
closing duet with Mallika in this first version of the work, which had
become a personal account—a documentary of my experience of living and
working in India these past months. I played with projecting life-sized
bodies onto bodies, ghosts of selves, alternate identities, textures
and elements (water, sand, smoke). I blurred the edges of the body,
suggesting that nothing is fixed—our bodies, our futures, our
destiny—and that we, as trillions of particles of matter are in flux
and, so, are connected to each other and the universe.
The
day of the performance I heard Bowie singing "we can be heroes just for
one day" and I took it as a good omen. It was….full house, flowers,
interviews, accolades, relief…and a return invitation from Mallika to
re-stage the work for the Mumbai tour in March.
I
re-grouped for three weeks in January with a week of Goan sunsets and
trance clubs followed by two weeks back in Oz re-packing and renewing
my visa, then flew back to Ahmedabad for stage two. Mallika was keen to
have a version of the work that they could keep in the repertoire
beyond my visit. It also turned out that my tourist visa did not allow
me to perform in the work in Mumbai, so I began the process of
'virtualizing' myself. This necessity was a creative blessing…it
foregrounded the concept of "duet" between the virtual and the live
self (past and present, east and west) and created a different access
to the body, its detail, its psychology, its spoken memories, its
kinesthesia. Dancers moved in and out of their own life-sized
projections or in duet with a physically absent partner. This second
time around I was able to dig deeper. The dancers and camerapeople knew
me now, they had experience with my aesthetic and my working methods,
so we could use our time to refine technique, improve shots and to
develop material more collaboratively. I sourced moments from the
dancers’ personal lives (including my own), moments that were charged
with emotional significance for them (one of the “hardest” and one of
the “sweetest”). This developed into live dance phrases as well as
video projected material that had ‘meaning’ for the dancers, enhancing
their performance as they shared memories and relived traces of the
emotions connected to their histories.
I have carried my grief like a tumour
worn my mistakes as fractures in my skeleton
held disappointments in my tendons
This country is acting on me like a leech
drawing the poisons to the surface
bleeding me
We share a private moment
a vulnerability
a clue to the other 9
If
I had to use one word to describe India it would be "extremes"—between
the beautiful and the horrendous, the progressive and the archaic—and I
am continually reminded of that relationship adage…that the things you
start out loving about someone are the same things that you end up
hating about them. I was impressed by the Indian connection to their
spirituality and their colourful and vocal use of ritual in their
everyday lives. But then I read about the daily suicides, the numerous
murders and suspicious deaths. I began to learn about the ongoing
communal violence, the caste inequities and the gender discrimination.
A lot of these issues were raised in Darpana's physical musical theatre
piece, Unsuni. Adapted by Mallika from Harsh Mander's book Unheard
Voices, the piece 'gives voice to five of India's millions of voiceless
people through a series of monologues'—street kids; manual scavengers
(collecting human excreta by hand); families who lost their land
through trickery or displacement; the sole surviving Moslem woman from
a Hindu attack; lepers. The scenes are cleverly punctuated by musical
numbers which spoof popular Bollywood songs by appropriating the
choreography but re-writing the lyrics to match the issues raised in
the piece. In what is an extraordinary social and artistic commitment
Darpana is performing the work 100 times this year at colleges all
around the country in two languages (a Hindi and an English version).
When I left they were up to show 48. After each performance they hold a
discussion of the issues raised and encourage students to sign up as
volunteers for what is the beginnings of a nationwide youth movement.
(www.unsuni.net)
I conned my way into getting a trip to
Kerala by offering to shoot and edit a documentary of the company's
tour of Unsuni in February. I saw the show 15 times in English, 3 times
in Hindi, and am currently wading through 16 hours of footage shot in 8
different towns from one end of Kerala to the other. Aah, Kerala—god's
own country of mosquitoes, moustaches, and masala dosa. I saw more
men's legs (wearing their hitched up mundus) and varieties of banana
(not necessarily connected!) than I ever need to again! Over ten days I
watched lighting technicians strip live wires with their teeth in
Kannur and an elephant-led parade to a river bed performance in
Kuttipuram. I swam with snakes, ate vada with one hand while
videorecording a press conference with the other, spent many many hours
surrounded by South Indian teenagers who did impressions of Hindi
actors and made me sign their diaries, got a fairly decent proposal in
Kollam, and saw my life flash before my eyes on many of the bus
journeys between shows.
161 days
countless connections
1 Salute to the sun (yoga sequence)
2 Dianne Reid. Cutting Choreography: re-defining dance on screen, Masters Thesis, Deakin University, 2001.
3 prayers
4 Mrinalini Sarabhai. The Voice of the Heart, HarperCollins, New Delhi, 2004.
5
In addition to being India's highest paid dancer, Mallika is a well
known film and stage actress, has been jailed, attempted to sue the
government for its bad handling of the Gujarat riots in 2002, and just
before I left in March was the focus of a protest by local rival TV
producers.
6 Excerpt from my journal/choreographic notes, October 2006. www.hipsync.com.au/blog.html
7 Deborah Hay. My Body, the Buddhist, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England: Wesleyan University Press, 2000.
8 original poem used in final soundtrack translated into three languages (English, Gujarati, Hindi)
9 original text used as voiceover in the revised opening section of Unfixed
- Dianne Reid
