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.

Yamini Krishnamurthy

Yamini was a great dancer. I’m not a great admirer of what Yamini says, but that’s besides the point. As a dancer, she is an inspiration for a lot of both male and females dancers, and for that she is remembered. At that point of epiphany, at that point of transcendence, she represents everything, and that’s what we want.

For you as a dancer, what two or three characters would you personally like to explore?

I think the act of transformation is what I want to see, not what exactly the character does. The narrative has been set, but how this is being said is the recurring … that’s why we go back to myth, because of the archetypes. We see ourselves in the archetypes. This happens in the magic of dance much, much more. People say, dance says a thousand words and can encapsulate what you read in the book. This is what I’m looking for.

But even if you’re talking in terms of the transformative capacity and purpose of dance, and how you are talking of archetypes is how one should look at them – often one gets stuck in the representation of a character. So maybe some characters because they have been addressed so many times, there is a greater possibility of getting stuck. So if you look at it from that point of view, are there other characters you feel free the dancer more to look at archetypes in this way, because they have not been done so much.

I think we have to look at it from the point of view of the individualistic or collective. The concept of the Nataraja or the Natavara is so deep from the collective consciousness. From the individual point of view I find Nijinsky, for example, such a wonderful character that is full of pathos and humanity. He changed the game for ballet, but at the same time, he is a candle that burns itself out. So that is a whole weight of things available for me, I feel. And it changes all the time. And that’s why I think that when you do a work it’s not about doing a work quickly, but about soaking and digesting something for a long time. And when the time is ripe, you bring it out. This happens to me. If the time is right for me to bring something in terms of Shiva or Krishna or later on, there’s a time that I will do something that is much, much more myself as a kind of a human, mundane person… this where I think as an artist I celebrate many identities. And this is something that I enjoy very, very much. I truly, truly find that sometimes we want to compartmentalise ourselves into only one stuck category. And that’s not true. We are so many. This is why the male has got to integrate the anima, the female has to integrate the animus, in order for the full beam of creativity to come through. And this is why I feel also that the person who is neither this just nor just that is more consummate as an artist.