thinking about dance

one movement in time

In this quarantine period, I have had ample time to reflect on my relationship with Bharatanatyam, an artform that has been my companion ever since I began trying to relate to, understand and belong in this world. 

My parents put me in a Bharatanatyam class when I was three years old. For the next fifteen years, I danced all the time except during those times I went to school, read my lessons, ate and slept. I was on auto-pilot surely and in retrospect, it now occurs to me that my engagement with the form may have been a tad too mechanistic, technical and self-congratulatory.

I performed for accolades, I performed to win competitions, I performed to please my dance teacher because I loved her like I love my own biological mother, and I performed because I enjoyed being on-stage with all the sublime lights, shapeshifting colors, live orchestra and bright costumes. I have of course organically internalised the finer nuances that involve learning an artform. There is an innate sensitivity that develops towards rhythm, aesthetics, music and such paraphernalia but in my case, there was no purpose; I failed to build a relationship with Bharatanatyam outside of my Guru, the practice space and the performance arena. This artform just came my way, it happened to me, I befriended it and I went about dancing because I was taught how to dance. 

One day, my Guru fell ill, and she passed away after a few years of battling a chronic illness. Life, the way I knew it, had come to a halt. I got lost during these years, trying to meander and navigate in a world that neither had Bharatanatyam, nor featured her, my Guru. I eventually started learning and dancing again, but this time around, I was motivated to learn for a couple of reasons. I wanted to revisit an artform that meant home to me, a home that I was emotionally attached to but nevertheless made no attempts to understand. I also wanted to confront and come to terms with a kind of grief that I nurtured as a comfort zone to cope with my loss. 

In this time, I developed some sophisticated ideas about the world, and an unfortunate, why even a foolish kind of idealism seeped into my thinking and dominated my worldview. I recall telling myself that I should get back to practice and performance only if I deemed myself ‘perfect’. I had to have the perfect body, the perfect aramandi (‘half-sit posture’), the perfect abhinaya (‘expression’), the perfect movements and the perfect mental landscape to practice. 

Every practice session in these few years became a gruelling punitive exercise because this time I was devoted to executing perfection and lost focus on the moment and the movement. I did not observe how these movements took shape in my body or how my mind responded to these patterns. I went about re-learning dance without acknowledging the process, all the while trying to envision a borrowed, abstract idea of perfection -- something I read in a Plato or a Kant,  something I saw in a sculpture in Mahabalipuram, some phrases in a raaga I had developed a taste for -- that I wanted to create and believe in. I knew what it meant to another person - a dead western philosopher or a sculptor from ancient India - but I never embarked on the journey of figuring this idea out for my own self. 

But during the quarantine, I decided to approach Bharatanatyam differently. Maybe it was even a distress call; a desperate need for insight and light. And fortunately for me, I had the time, curiosity and willingness to pause and to re-orient. 

In the last two months, I practiced my adavus(basic steps), a traditional Alarippu(an invocatory piece) and a Thillana (a rhythmic, kinaesthetic number performed towards the end of a recital) everyday. I made an effort to observe my movements and my own mind. One of the things I consciously recognised was a pavlovian response to failure. I would unquestioningly endure, build resilience and repeat the movement if I did not get it right. I was also not bored by repetition. In fact there was a sincere, perfunctory willingness to repeat the same adavu or a Thillana, over and over again, every new day, indifferent to the boredom such acts entailed. All of them, certainly, are compulsory virtues to have for a dancer but these acts of endurance and repetition warrant meaning only when one makes the effort to understand the process of discovery that happens in these vulnerable spaces of experiential learning. 

I found new ways of expressing the same adavu, new voids to fill while dancing the same thillana, and new ways of relating to my body through flowing into crevices and spaces that hitherto remained unexplored. Every act of repetition became an act of exploration -- an internal dialogue that enabled a form of communication with my own self. There were moments that I remember when I felt I had achieved the perfect movement, and those moments came as a surprise when I was least expecting for them to happen. These perfect movements did not correspond to traditional ideas of greatness but there was a sense of recognition, an internal validation of sorts, that made me feel liberated and free. These moments passed by me as quickly as they came, in a jiffy, but what enabled that recognition was my steady awareness to that still moment of alignment. 

I also had the time to stop at movements that consumed a lot of my energy instead of running away from them, out of fear and cowardice. You see, dance is all about exerting stamina but the stamina flows and changes from movement to movement. I tried to decode why a simple movement should consume so much energy and in that process, I learnt to weigh in the right amount of energy to exert over a specific kind of movement. Too much energy tired me out. Too little energy led to a shabby production. Finding the centre of gravity that is unique to me became important. And when I discovered the internal centre, the external movement flowed beautifully in all its simplicity, humility, alignment and elegance. 

I suppose one learns a lot about life by closely engaging with art. In these spaces of solitude, I think I have built a very fine friendship with this person inside me who is so different from what I know of her. I may also have found a really understanding companion along the way ih this artform, in between those frames of stillness and movement. I am only grateful that Bharatanatyam was patient - the form loved me enough to reciprocate only when I was ready to receive.