'Vulgarity is a perspective' - Hari Krishnan

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. 

Ruminations from Rustom

Some points that came up in a brief conversation with Rustom Bharucha on the steps of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan after the morning session on 21 December. The trio of lec-dems from three schools of Bharatanatyam – Thanjavur, Vazhuvoor, Kalakshetra – and Rustom was very taken with especially the second presentation. It was slow, but solid, and – in his words – there was very clearly a man on stage.

Several presenters in the conference – and also some others we have spoken to – have referred to dance as genderless. This may be true when one is talking about how a practitioner approaches his or her art: but does the same hold true when one looks at the audience where societal notions of what is masculine and what is feminine must necessarily affect the perception of the body on stage? No performing art can avoid being presented directly before an audience – there is no via media, the artist HAS to be present, the body HAS to be present. And Rustom felt it was about time performers started thinking about these issues.

This observation took him back to his intervention at the end of the papers presented by Ann David and Sandra Chatterjee the previous day. The papers had been built around the work of Ram Gopal and Uday Shankar respectively, and Rustom pointed out that Ram Gopal’s sexuality had not been touched on at all. Was it possible not to address questions of gender and sexuality in a conference built around the idea and image of a male dancer – especially in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision on Section 377?