Contemporary Dance in India edited by Astad Deboo and Ketu H. Katrak for MARG, June-September 2017, Volume 68, Number 4. Published by The Marg Foundation, Army and Navy Building, 3rd Floor, 148, M. G. Road, Bombay 400001. Pp: 95. Price: Rs 350.
He’s been called "The Father of Modern Dance in India.” Not surprisingly, Astad Deboo’s image dominates the cover of Marg’s special issue titled Contemporary Dance in India. It captures Deboo caught in a swirl of creamy fabric that has acquired a life of its own much like that of the fabled whirling dervishes of Istanbul. The ecstasy of finding the still center, within a tensely wound sequence of dance movements is beautifully evoked. It is charged with the supreme devotion that Deboo has strived to convey in his long association with contemporary dance. You don’t need words to understand it.
It is one way of enjoying the special issue edited by Deboo and Ketu Katrak. To drink in the images and enjoy the moment that has been carefully choreographed for the lens of the camera. These include luminous images of different dance exponents who fall, twirl, roll on the floor, crawl, or perhaps leap, into their definition of what constitutes contemporary dance in India today. Some of them also depend on being performed against exotic backgrounds, with dramatic props and with light effects. Or to use the acceptable short hand — they are "site specific.”
In their introductory essay the editors quote Sanjoy Roy: "Contemporary dance is by its nature multifarious and multiheaded, unruly perhaps but one that values freedom of expression and thought.”
Astad Deboo (left) and Ketu Katrak: insights and images
It’s almost a warning. How do you channel such a diverse agenda? The editors acknowledge for instance that there could be a parallel dance world emerging in what for want of a better term is called "Bollywood-style dancing.” Especially very popular on the electronic media are the dance competitions where completely unknown groups of dancers, most of them from the fringes, use many of the choreographed movements initiated by "serious” dancers, into their repertoire. They obviously strike a jarring note in the more austere landscape of those engaged in their quest for a language of contemporary dance.
Or as Deboo and Katrak note very kindly at the end of their essay: "Bollywood dance does require skill and technique undertaken by youthful bodies moving at dizzying superfast paces, including hip-hop and acrobatic movements that are impressive. Its performers are therefore different from contemporary Indian dancers who aim to make their audiences think and engage with a work’s abstract movement or social themes that may not necessarily be entertaining, and may even make audiences uncomfortable in facing certain social realities.”
So let us accept that there is and perhaps has always been a distinction to be made between the masses and the classists. Or what constitutes an acceptable canon for contemporary dance in India. The lead essay by Leela Venkataraman gives the reader "An overview of Contemporary Dance in India” with style and brevity given her long association writing about the various dance forms in the country. Even she, however, warns "Critiquing too, particularly in the contemporary scene, becomes more challenging with the performative aspect reflecting multiple landscapes — even classical Odissi in Kuala Lumpur for instance, showing an aesthetic different from the original in Odisha.”
The editors have done the next best thing and invited various different dancers and choreographers and some pioneering promoters of contemporary dance to present their point of view. They have also provided an eclectic "Who’s Who” in the dance world with photographs. Again, this begs the question of why some names have been left out — that of Uttara Asha Coorlawala for instance, who pioneered the genre in the 1970s with her use of vibrant costumes and adaptations of East and West. A more recent entry might be Preethi Vasudevan of "Thresh.” It could be argued that they have chosen to teach or to perform for the most part outside India.
Rhythm Divine II, performed in 2014 by choreographer Astad Deboo (center) with
Pung Cholom dancers at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Bombay
Photo: Farrokh Chothia
Chandralekha in the Narabahana sequence from the 1985 production
of Angika Courtesy: The Chandralekha Archive, SPACES, Madras(Photo: Sadanand Menon)
Some of these essays have a clarity and commitment that is excellent. They emphasize the problems of trying to find good teachers, create a musical journey with musicians that will be as challenging to them as performers looking for new forms of expression. Others tend to be exercises in self-promotion. Many of the issues are common to the different groups, a lack of performance space for instance, poor funding, or institutional support, training or finding good teachers, as also the growing intolerance to accepting new ideas.
These have led to some often hilarious sounding conversations that take place at the end of the essays when individual artistes explain the approach to their work. For instance in discussing the work of Preethi Athreya who has studied the way people jump, or leap together, falling to the ground maybe as a demonstration of the powers of gravity, Rakesh Khanna makes this observation: "This quality of physical effect is something that I found profoundly moving — reminiscent of planets and their orbits.”
When Athreya remarks candidly enough: "The harmony is not the result of wanting to create an aesthetic experience but a natural outcome of a human work culture.” Khanna however persists: "When I watched ‘Conditions,’ I found myself thinking about the human body as a primate body and about our species arboreal ancestry. About how maybe, at some deep level, we miss leaping through the trees.”
Right then, you want to say, not falling off the chair laughing, "Contemporary Indian dance takes us back to our deepest desires and the freedom (to) leap through the trees.”
In his long and singular career Deboo has actually leapt across some of these binaries. Who can ever forget the first time he performed at the newly installed Prithvi Theatre auditorium at Juhu, Bombay? In an intensely performed series of vignettes, Deboo ended one of them by moving across the naked stage floor licking it with his tongue. As if this were not shocking enough in the distant era of the 1970s, he followed this by actually slicing his forearm with a blade and letting the blood drip, dramatically onto the floor. Venkataraman describes how in one of his appearances at the generally august, for which read tradition-bound Music Academy at Madras, Deboo sucked his own toe as his rendering of the baby Krishna sequence. The audience was not amused.
Then again on another occasion at Madras, Deboo presented a dance ballet involving young, hearing-impaired dancers. He had trained them to a level of excellence. It was one of the most moving performances. His dancers transcended the barriers of cultural differences of age, language and gesture and created a universal expression of joy through dance. As with his other collaborations with the Pung Cholom dancers, or martial art Than Ta performers from Manipur, Deboo’s life in dance reads like a roadmap full of signs leading to different paths that contemporary dance has taken.
Or as he tells Ramaa Bharadvaj in her essay "Astad Deboo: Pilgrim, Pathfinder, Protagonist” to explain what he means by contemporary dance, he replies, "It is the dance done ‘Now’ in terms of concept and movement.”
"And what is a ‘Now’ movement?” she asks.
"It is a movement that has all my experiences in it.”
The Marg issue is a multifaceted collection of all the divergent paths created by Deboo’s incredible journey through dance.
Long may he continue: To leap. To dance, perchance.
GEETA DOCTOR
Doctor, a longtime contributor to Parsiana, is a writer and critic.