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Challenges confronting art forms
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How has the change in context affected the contemporary dancer's identity and her relation to tradition? LEELA VENKATARAMAN reports the opening day deliberations of Natya Kala Conference now on at Krishna Gana Sabha.
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THE SPIRITED opening day deliberations of the Natya Kala Conference had some distinguished minds, of outsiders and an insider, looking at the dance scene bringing into focus some of the challenges confronting art forms which were nurtured in the natural gaze of those born to them, now having to live in the glare of the proscenium. How has the change in context affected the contemporary dancer's identity and her relation to tradition? Dr. Rajeev Bhargav, Head of the Department of Political Science, Delhi University, spoke of evolution of theory and its practice as a cooperative and social rather than a single person's endeavour, involving submission to the authority of practice, its validity depending on soundness of arguments used and also its beauty and aesthetics. Its transmission would include imparting skills, conceptual sensitivity, understanding of relationship between concepts, reason and arguments, its words, assumptions, presuppositions and internal coherence, etc all forming terms of reference providing for standards of excellence against which to judge one's own practice. All these were labelled as `internal goods' against which lay `external goods' like power, status, pelf, socialising, etc. A dancer `doing theory' enters into a relationship with past practices and also present day compulsions, which require responding to new situations and dialogue. As long as she/he discriminated between internal goods, which admit of no winners or losers and external goods, which are individual based and not shared by the community, there would be an awareness of standards of excellence - not fixed in time but evolving over time. To have a tradition means to be involved in debate and not become opposed to reason or conflict. If external goods became the motivating factor, standards would fall, reducing tradition to orthodoxy.
Identity is not just a matter of mind but of the body and its actions and Rajeev Bhargav wanted to be informed of whether and where the argument in dance was taking place today and what the dialogue was and whether dancers as products shaped by alternate traditions of modernity were addressing and negotiating issues of identity.
For Sadanand Menon, the word tradition had become devalued. When a top dancer like Malavika Sarukkai, last year pleaded that there was no need to intellectualise what was enjoyed so much in the dance, it was making an unabashed demand for suspension of disbelief looking at cultural heritage "surgically lobotomised from the area of the mind." While scholars and Universities abroad were having a close look at Indian traditions, we seemed content with a repertoire locked in its own archaic domain. Appropriated by the upper caste elite, Bharatanatyam in particular had disenfranchised the subaltern marginalised community practising it for ages, and the dance in its `smug sublimated' form had been invested with false notions of exclusivity. Amrit Srinivasan known for her research on the Devadasi, referred to dance as a vocation and said that it was wrong to fix it too much in the temple context - for the temple itself both realistically and metaphorically bridged the divide between the other worldly monastic traditions and the householder's world. The dance was a response to an inner voice and the dancer, a woman in Bharatanatyam, drew her private support from both men who provided the music and women, particularly daughters who followed her vocation. The dancer's household, without the husband/wife domesticity had its own division of labour.
Today's dance emphasised individual creativity and relations with a community providing managerial assistance had changed. When marriage is no longer taboo for the dancer, what happens to the sexuality within the dance, she asked, for dancers deal with their bodies as instrument. She wondered if the present situation was a move towards amateurism (meaning that there could be no professional dance without the Devadasi) and what the role of the temple was when the living institution with the Sadir dancer as mediator was missing. Dance without a self-developing instructional purpose now had pleasure as its product.
Dancer Sonal Mansingh spoke of the versatility of the contemporary dancer who traversed many spaces, geographical, historical and artistic. The dancer was equally at home performing in melas, inside auditoriums and in a temple courtyard or the sanctum of a temple like Hayagriva in Assam. Her physical space could not be characterised as secular or sacred. With ritual now transforming into art forms, the concept of space had acquired different manifestations. There was also inner space and even God was a product of the mind ("Devanam manase srishti"). There were no props here or contest between reality or poetics or whatever. The space between dancer and audience could be thought of as a rainbow with the two groups occupying two ends of it. As for the dance, it could be by just a performer or a dancer, its treatment being "sabdaartha, bhaavaartha or Goodhartha" depending on the dancer's ability. To think of a historical development due to a number of political/social happenings as a motivated movement by the upper castes to disenfranchise the Devadasi and to acquire power, seems to ape the arguments advanced by western scholars, who while discarding orientalism, also intellectualise it. The devadasi's internal goods had suffered already with the crumbling of her support structures - namely the temple and royalty. A Bala, one remembers, still survived and was acclaimed for her art by the same upper castes blamed for `appropriating' the art form. How long will this caste blame game be the only plank on which we can start any dialogue on Bharatanatyam? While the argument that tradition had been reduced to a strait-jacketed mould may well be true in many cases, to make a general derisive statement against the entire dance community would be to ignore the islands of excellence which also exist. The uniqueness of Indian classical dance has been its ability to dovetail the sacred and the secular by being a meeting point for both in its intermingled strands. Freedom to approach the dance in different ways should not be curtailed. In fairness to Sadanand Menon's arguments, the classical dancer needs to be more open to criticism and dialogue about her art form.
There seems no meeting point in the attitudes of the for-and- against groups.
As Dr. Kapila Vatsyayan in her concluding intervention maintained, the entire dance history and institutions like the Koil and the art form were too complex, with both having to communicate at too many levels and criticism could not take an either/or stance. What was needed was evolving an epistemology of discourse not coloured by conditioned minds or theories fed on western evaluations. As Rajeev Bhargav said, the new spaces created by the changed context of the dance with different performer/audience and performance space could contain potential for healthy development in art. It was strange how as an outsider, Rajeev Bhargav in his `insider and outsider goods touched upon a basic dilemma of the present wherein the dancer in the glamourised dance scene was so enamoured of the glitter of society, closeness to political power and appearing on the famous page three of the society columns in newspapers, often losing that focus on excellence.
When Kalaivani of Koothuppattarai through the song, "Varugalamo Ayya," expressed in her enactment the agony and anger, the shrunken image and the bitterness, and mixed feelings of Nandanaar, who just due to the accident of birth (attributed to past sins) is denied entrance into the sanctum of Nataraja temple, where he wants to pray to atone for his so called sins.
Crouched in the birthing position "Bhoomiyil pulavanai pirandene" to highlighting the frustrations of a devotee, Kalaivani's impassioned and brilliant presentation was something that traversed all categories of geography, history and art.
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