Pandit Birju Maharaj speaks on Guru Kelucharan Mahapatra

Pandit Birju Maharaj - doyen of Kathak dance - had a close friendship with the late Guru Kelucharan Mahapatra - doyen of Odissi. Here, Maharaj-ji talks about this association, and the many duets they performed together in a freeflowing conversation that touches on several other aspects of dance and dance culture in India today.

Panditji was conferred the lifetime achievement award at the Natya Darshan conference at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Chennai on 22 December 2013. This year the conference was themed 'Purush: the global dancing male', and was presented by Karthik Fine Arts and the Arangham Trust, curated by Dr. Anita Ratnam and Professor Hari Krishnan. This conversation took place on the sidelines of the conference, and was with the Purush blog team of Ranjana Dave and Vikram Iyengar.

'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. 

Responses to the conference

Suresh Kaliyath in Ottan Thullal

The PURUSH conference has not till its last day touched really on the MALE GAZE, which until recent years meant only the heterosexual aspect.The fact that such a dynamic conference is taking place in a very conservative Madras (where humour and audience are in short supply too!) and that too in Mylapore, the very bastion of traditional culture, is an achievement! Anita Ratnam and Hari Krishnan and their team of many young volunteers, have shown the way through professionalism and dynamism, what a benchmark in aesthetics (esp. of stage), range of performances (Navtej and Ottan Thullal the clear winners), time management and inclusiveness this event has been. 

Ashish Mohan Khokar, 

editor-attendance

chair-Dance History Society

Gender/less: A conversation with Leela Venkataraman

Over the past five days, we have tackled and discovered many questions, concerns and provocations, but our question from day one has served as a trigger for many of these conversations. Before an evening performance on December 21, we met Leela Venkataraman to elaborate on some of the points she made in her opening speech the previous day. 

She remarks that the female body, with its breasts - prominent, articulate markers of a certain gender, makes it slightly harder for those possessed of them to bend gender and take on roles from the opposite sex, reiterating that this is a personal viewpoint. 

It leads us to wonder why male bodies might be considered neutral. Many people point out that a bare torso allows one to locate dance movement in the body with greater clarity, which gives male bodies an edge over other bodies. Yet, it is facile to ignore the social and historical climate that makes it unacceptable for women to dance bare-bodied and achieve equal clarity. Another argument is that the flatness of the male torso offers a plainer space for the dance to be projected onto the body. Do you think that male bodies are neutral dancing bodies? Read on, and respond.

Excerpts from a conversation:

Who would you say are five dancers who have changed the game for dance in India, vis-a-vis the male dancer? 

First, of course, Uday Shankar and Ramgopal. Until that time, where was the question of Indian dance being performed there (outside India)? An odd devadasi had gone there. Shanta Rao had performed a few times. Other than that, Indian dance had really not been considered in a big way. And the fact that there was a beautiful male body performing for the first time. And both these people had such an awesome presence - that made a tremendous difference to what was shown. And plus the exotic costumes.

'I am still a one-man army' - Astad Deboo

From your memories of forging a new path for dance in India, when you started dancing, it seemed difficult enough for a man to enter the classical dance world and stick around. In your case, you explored something new and unnamed - could you talk about that experience?

I was trained in Kathak. Growing up in Jamshedpur, one took part in annual school productions. But there were no solo performances, because there was no scope for that at the school. When I finished school and was serious about dance, my parents refused, because they felt I should study further. I wasn't allowed to train, but I rehearsed what I had learnt and the solo parts I had played in the dance dramas at my school. I started watching other dance forms in Bombay. I noticed that there were many innovations in theatre, music and the visual arts. When Asha (Uttara Asha Coorlawala) returned to Bombay and was looking for dancers, I worked with her and told her that I would like to study at the Martha Graham School, where she was training at that time.

I was lucky to have had forward-thinking parents. After my graduation, I told them that I still wanted to be a dancer. Neither they nor I knew the journey I was going to embark on...that pursuing dance would become the purpose of my life.

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?

'Dance has been polarised...all bogus binaries' - Navtej Johar

Balagopal and he, as boys in Kalakshetra, had not been encouraged to dance the solo Bharata Natyam repertoire. "We were considered mainly Kathakali artists, who were taught Bharata Natyam so as to dance in the dramas. While I had done minor items in class which were male oriented, there were no suitable songs for boys. Only Rupamu joochi, a varnam in praise of Shiva. We did that varnam, dropping the line suma shara mulachewhere the nayika complains of being struck by the flower-arrows of Cupid. The padams were Natanam adinar, about the vigorous dance of Shiva, or the Ashtapadi Vadasiyadi, where Krishna cajoles an angry Radha. Balan and I learnt items such as the tillana on our own initiative, which did not go down well with some of the teachers. But because we were doing every possible role in the dance-dramas, the technical grounding was very strong. We could learn anything later on."

- From Master of Arts: A Life in Dance by Tulsi Badrinath

A response and further conversation with Navtej Johar

What was the style of dancing that were considered appropriate for men in Kalakshetra? Was there any difference in the training for men?

Navtej Johar

There wasn't really any different style at all. I think it changes from generation to generation, but in our generation there was absolutely none. It’s just that there were a few items, so to speak, which they thought were more suitable for men. It wasn't that men were encouraged to do only those things. That was the only thing, I would say. There were a couple of varnams that were more suitable for men, and now I can see why. Other than that, as far as technique was concerned, absolutely no difference. 

Not even the Kathakali training…

Not at all. Not at all. I was completely untouched by Kathakali. I was very close to Jannu Anna (Janardhanan Sir) and I learnt a lot from him, but I never …

Q and A with Pavitra Bhat

Pavitra Bhat

Critic Leela Venkataraman opened the Purush Conference by suggesting that emerging polarities between the male and female should not be treated as entrenched entities, but as two sides of the same reality, each validating the other, and perhaps giving a special identity to the other. Referencing sculptures in the Mukteswara and Puri temples in Orissa, she pointed out that they do not always lend themselves to popular perceptions of 'feminine' and 'masculine' movement. The arch of the Puri temple, for instance, features women in acrobatic bandha nritya poses – a dance that they are no longer encouraged to perform.

Is gender implicit in the dance or is it what the dancer brings to the performance? Or is it of no consequence altogether? How does one start by addressing the idea of the male Indian dancer through his place in society and in how he interprets representation and identity in performance to unpack terms like maleness, masculinity and effeminacy? Excerpts from a conversation with Bharatanatyam dancer Pavitra Bhat, who opened the conference by dancing to a section of Patanjali's Shambhu Natanam Sloka.

A chat with Ramli Ibrahim

On the sidelines of the Purush conference that began at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan this morning, we caught up with a few delegates for some short conversations. Some excerpts from a chat with Ramli Ibrahim - one of the dancers mentioned as a game-changer for the male dancer in a response to our first Provocation.

Who would you say are some dancers who have changed the game for Indian dance, vis-a-vis the male dancer?

Shanta Rao

The male dancers like Ram Gopal and Uday Shankar and also people like Shanta Rao and Yamini Krishnamurthy. These are the four great ones, and also Kelucharan Mahapatra and my guru of course, Debaprasad Das.  They had a strong effect of changing some mind-sets vis-à-vis the male dancers. Because they transcend the gender thing – all of them, whether it is Shanta Rao or Ram Gopal, who is androgynous. These are the people that projected male dancing, but at the same time not in the stricture of the maleness or macho masculinity that we talk about. And because they are pioneers, with the aura they surround themselves, people forget about the question of gender. People talk about the dance. And towards this they have contributed very much – towards this transcending of the gender question.

Why PURUSH?

Created and curated by Dr. Anita Ratnam (Artistic Director of Arangham Trust) and co-curated by Hari Krishnan (Professor of Dance, Wesleyan University, USA), PURUSH is a five-day festival, dedicated to explorations of the male dancer in India and the diaspora from classical traditions to contemporary manifestations, from hyper masculine aesthetics to female impersonation, from historical colonial modernity to twenty-first century global realities. 

Featuring powerful performances by established and emerging male dancers, PURUSH also includes discussions and panel presentations with leading scholars from the fields of dance history, cultural studies, and gender studies, interrogating the past, present and future of the Indian male dancer.

A note on the festival by curator Anita Ratnam

Why PURUSH? I feel this is not even a question that needs asking but a subject that needs exploring and discussing. We presume that the world of dance means that women dance and men choreograph or teach. In India, men were the gurus and women were the dancers. Even today it is men who command more power and financial resources in the dance world with larger grants and more elaborate productions than women who are a majority as performers. 

In 1995, I curated and directed an evening of classical dance called PURUSH - Dancer, Actor, Hero. The world was a very different place then. I had recently returned from the USA filled with ideas about marketing, media relations and professional approaches to dance after my 12 year experience in broadcast television in New York City. The two day event, held at the Alliance Francaise auditorium and at the Music Academy hall were sold out with cars parked as far away as Narada Gana Sabha and all along College Road and people sitting in the aisles. It was a triumph of content and a co-ordinated plan of media, visual communication and direction. It was exhausting.

The evening of classical dance toured the US to great success in the Fall of 1995 and the topic was kept alive with the clutch of male dancers and gurus who were so grateful for the "exposure" they were given in an ocean of female bodies on stage.

18 years later, the dance scene is even more heterogeneous. There are so many Indian (South Asian) men in dance and other aspects of performance and scholarship. Issues of sexuality are no longer taboo although the classical dance world is still reluctant to discuss these sensitive issues. Themes are bolder and the young performers and a new generation of teachers is having to relearn new methods of teaching and transmitting the tradition to an international clutch of students. Teaching via Skype is becoming common and students from Azerbaijan, Iceland and Buenos Aires continue to flock towards our shores to learn from male gurus. 

Also with the proliferation and growing confidence of the NRI teacher who left India 30 years ago and who are now respected elders in their own cultural constituencies, a brash new generation of jean clad nayikas (Uttara Coorlawala's term) are occupying centre stage in arenas around the world, performing in denim, shorts, tank tops, sneakers, t-shirts and oodles of aplomb.

The 2013 conference is a culmination of a three year effort and perhaps, an 18 year old investigation about what it means TO DANCE. As a woman who has invested most of her life in the re-imaging of female icons on stage, I have always found that the proverbial VISHNU, KRISHNA, MURUGA and SIVA characters were not necessarily MALE but more 'qualities' that were embodied for public understanding within masculine images. Having said that, I have realised that today's male dancer in India is the busiest artiste in the dance world. They are constantly racking up air miles, flying from one city to another playing these male Gods or Demons for enthusiastic small town teachers.

Curating this conference along with my friend and collaborator of 18 years, Professor Hari Krishnan, has been a true adventure. Our dream plan has to be constantly tweaked, adjusted, altered, shelved, re-imagined and pushed every which way until we arrived at a template. This conference is the most ambitious ever. It is spread over 5 days, three venues and almost 100 artistes in attendance. On view will be radical physical theatre, traditional folk theatre, classical and contemporary dance from around India and the world. Keeping in mind the logistics and challenges of the auditoriums in Chennai during the annual December season, artistes, speakers and scholars have been invited, who could each contribute to the palimpsest called PURUSH- the global dancing male.