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| Hari Krishnan, photo by Stephen De las Heras |
Hari Krishnan is the artistic director of Toronto-based inDANCE and a Professor of Dance in the department of dance at Wesleyan University. Krishnan is a disciple of KP Kittappa Pillai and R Muttukannammal, specialising in devadasi (courtesan) dance and contemporary abstractions of Bharatanatyam. Here, he chats about his understanding of caste politics in dance, his works Uma and Frog Princess, and his notion of 'Queering Bharatanatyam'.
You work extensively with the devadasi repertoire. I have seen The King's Salon. Given that it is so embedded in, and connected to the woman's body, how do you interpret the repertoire?
As a male dancer? The advantage of working with the devadasi community as opposed to the middle-class Tam Bram community is the completely different set of value systems embedded (in the communities). There is a more progressive way of looking at art, identity and the human body. Throughout my documentation, analysis and training with the devadasis - many women from several devadasi families of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh - they were welcoming and generous in the way they took me in and gave me information. But most importantly...I won't say it is androgyny – but the fact that I was a seeker and an eternal student coming in with an immense amount of respect, humility and a context of who they were in society, in what their identity is. Gender was very much a non-issue with me, in the way I worked with them.
So, the pieces I learnt from them, and (in) my documentation – (in) the way they performed for me in terms of video archives – they performed the most erotic compositions in such a sophisticated way. That is what I want to stress. The mistaken assumption is that devadasis were vulgar. Vulgarity is a very recent phenomenon in the early part of the 20th century, by caste politics. Vulgarity is a perspective. The ability to be so extraordinary in such an ordinary way is where I see great human possibility, and it is in that humanity that I connect to devadasi dance immediately.
