South Asian Dance Was a Term Unknown to Either Practitioners Or Audiences in the UK

PAPER 6

DANCE IN INDIA TODAY, DANCE-DRAMAS, CREATIVITY WITHIN THE CLASSICAL FORMS, INDIAN CLASSICAL DANCE IN DIASPORA (USA, UK, EUROPE, AUSTRALIA, ETC.)

MODULE 30 INDIAN CLASSICAL DANCE IN UK

Until recently South Asian dance was a term unknown to either practitioners or audiences in the UK. South Asian dance was known as ‘Indian’ or ‘Asian’ dance, neither of which was technically correct. ‘Asian’ was too vague; ‘Indian’ was too specific and left out dance forms of other countries that formed South Asia. On the other hand, South Asia refers to the whole sub-continent regardless of political boundaries (it includes India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Singapore, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia – countries where different forms of Bharata Natyam, Kathak, Odissi, Kathakali, etc. are practiced). Hence South Asian dance has become the accepted term to indicate dance traditions of the sub-continent.

As in the case of most colonized countries in the tropical belt (the developing countries), their traditional art and craft forms were often dismissively labeled as ‘ethnic’/ ‘exotic’ by their colonizers (the developed countries), and not befitting of the ‘classical’ description. The same fate was suffered by Indian classical dances in the UK, even though dancers such as Uday Shankar, Ram Gopal, Shanta Rao, Krishan Kutty and Mrinalini Sarabhai had performed to accolades and widespread appreciation in Britain between 1920 and 1965. It 1 was the Asian Music Circle’s (a local organization promoting and interpreting Indian culture to a non-Indian society) efforts at getting dancer-couples as teachers to the UK (such as US Krishna Rao and his wife, UK Chandrabhaga Devi) that saw the first organized, long- lasting series on Indian dance classes in the UK in 1966.

A few years later, the expulsion of Indian communities from East African countries (Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania) saw a vast influx of British passport-holding Indian/Asian communities take refuge in the UK. Now, there was a huge community in the habit of cultural consumption – an audience. Almost overnight, the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan (also called Institute of Indian Culture) grew by leaps and bounds, from a small office in 1972 to 1977 when it opened a huge West London cultural centre, offering a platform for performances.

Simultaneously, a change in perception was taking place in British white society. The 1970s witnessed a series of public debates on the place and nature of the arts. Young practitioners, especially a huge student population, challenged old and set assumptions that sited the arts in conventional ‘art houses’, galleries and dance studios. New performance work made its way defiantly onto the street, into non-art venues such as pubs, schools, garages, ware-houses. Community arts workers and supporters based themselves on council estates and in working class communities, seeking to engage the inhabitants to release the creativity they passionately believed was part of every single living human being. The story of the immigrant, of the culture that was a treasured part of personal identity, was for the first time seen not as exotic but as a valid device for personal expression and survival.

In 1976, a report on the state of ethnic arts titled, The Arts Britain Ignores, prepared by the Arts Council, UK, came as a significant supporter of Indian classical dance in its struggle to move away from the marginalized ‘exotic’ to the world of professional arts.

This incisive report was prepared by Naseem Khan, who trained in Bharata Natyam under the Rao couple at the Asian Music Circle and was later co-director, Academy of Indian Dance and chair of Aditi. Having established their credentials for authenticity, purity and classicism with those who believed only in Western classical ballet traditions, the Indian dancers in the UK, however slowly moved away from the desire to re-state the longevity of the classical Indian dance (as was the case with dancers in the post-Independence Indian decades of the forties, fifties and sixties) to confront the challenge that Indian classical dance was faced with in the UK – it needed to enter into a dialogue with local structures and voices in the UK.

By the turn of the century, some of the changes that took place were so radical and so rapid that some people were no longer able to recognize South Asian dance forms in the way these are practiced and presented. There continues to be a surge of dance activity aimed at expanding and merging forms, rejecting traditional content and seeking to be more attuned to contemporary life while articulating the specificity of being British and working in Britain. And yet, in the background, there is also a call to adhere to traditional values, to preserve the authenticity of the traditions and most of all, to resist facile dilutions. Young British South Asian dancers of today insist that expansion and innovation must come from within their traditional practice and are generally unwilling to compromise their artistic

3 integrity. These young dancers are almost always better trained than their senior counterparts because of the numerous dance schools that have sprung up in the 1990s. But the problems they face are also very different from what their seniors had to deal with.

The expectations of British audiences have changed -- there is a demand for quality and high standards which was not there before.

One of the issues not yet addressed in Britain is the existence of different pockets of South Asian artists somewhat disconnected and not quite interacting, as well as other artists from Asian regions other than South Asia, Afro-Carribeans and so on. They rarely come together in a genuine effort to communicate and explore each other’s forms without the mediation of the white man’s culture. Multi-culturalism in the UK has very much to do with the white, male, European culture vis-a-vis other cultures which have no time for each other and are engaged in a dialogue only with the white establishment. For instance, the India-based Bharatanatyam dancer Mallika Sarabhai has worked with Peter Badejo, whose dance vocabulary draws from the richness and complexities of African forms. Dr. Padma Subrahmanyan is another India-based dancer who choreographed a Bharata Nrityam piece to traditional Japanese Koto music. She even composed a piece for Gamelan played in Singapore in 1992.

This kind of exploration has not had any impact in Britain as yet. There is still a degree on insecurity and uncertainty within the South Asian dance community and all other non-white communities for that matter, almost a fear of losing identity if they were to interact artistically with one another, without Western culture as the

4 reference point. The sole exception, as of now, is Pratap and Priya Pawar. Pawar, who trained at Kathak Kendra, was sent with his Odissi dancer-wife, Priya, as cultural ambassador to the West.

They went first to Guyana where they began to understand and work with local practice of dance. So, although their teaching, both in the West Indies and later in Britain, held to its traditional line and direction, the performance work they produced began to explore overlaps, echoes and sharings. For example, they set Kathak beside Flamenco and Caribbean dance, demonstrating that rhythmical and percussive patterns were important to all of them.

The Dancers and Dance Schools:

In addition to Asian Music Circle and Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, one of the early organizations to start dance classes and performances was Nava Kala. It claims to be Britain’s oldest Indian cultural association and its energy lay in the East African immigrants, mostly Gujarati Indians. However these three organizations were not associated with any particular dancer or choreographer.

The first known dance school, with a dancer as its head, was the Academy of Indian Dance. Founded in 1979 by Tara Rajkumar, a Mohiniattam dancer trained in India, her academy aimed to see a fully validated syllabus for a dance degree course in Britain. In 1983, she took a bold step forward when she commissioned a dance drama that eschewed a religious or classically based theme. Choreographed by the Dhananjayans (dancer couple from India), it presented an

5 adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book! The performance, named

The Adventures of Mowgli, featured dancers whose work was to take them into different directions later: Shobana Jeyasingh as Bagheera the panther, Pushkala Gopal as Baloo the bear, Unnikrishnan as Mowgli, and Pratap Pawar as the particularly splendid tiger Sher Khan. It created a form that could contain and sustain different classical styles (Bharatanatyam, Odissi and Kathak). It also tried to address the knotty problem of presentation of dance-drama, with the inherent challenges of dramatic shaping, a narrative voice, expressive choreography and the ability to hold an overall rasa / रस or mood. The work broke new ground by attracting uninitiated new audiences, reassured by an apparently familiar story but its arrival on mainstream stages also made the contrast between the Indian dancers and Western dancers extremely apparent. As compared to professional Western dancers, the Indian dancers struggled to hold their own as professionals, drawing their strength from their Indian training rather than from the infrastructure, resources and support available to Western dancers.

Shobana Jeyasingh’s experiments with Bharatanatyam began in the mid-1980s in a cautious and careful way, first placing it in unison with the work of Jayachandran, an Indian dancer trained in Western contemporary dance. Having established the Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company, she steadily expanded her range and scope, delving to increasing depths, using commissioned music by contemporary Western composers like Michael Nyman to help deconstruct the elaborate and ordered vocabulary of Bharata Natyam. As a

6 choreographer, therefore, her work is often labeled as ‘East-West collaboration’, something she does not agree with because this hides the fact that she and the British composer actually share a common British culture. One of her early productions was Making of Maps (1992) in which she challenged the idea of ‘home-ground’; as a child and young girl, Shobana lived in four different countries and the only connecting factor was the fact that she was always a city dweller and felt at home in that particular pacing of life. The score for Making of Maps was therefore made up of the sounds of a city: the hum of a conversation, traffic, railway stations, and domestic sounds. This was composed by Alistair MacDonald from Birmingham. Woven into the composition were fragments of a Carnatic music ensemble rehearsing, an ensemble put together by Ramamani who lives in Bangalore, India. The music she composed for the piece emerged as a quote within the overall composition. It had an accessible entrance that the age of electronics has given to all types of music. The dance was choreographed to adapt to changes in density of structure or speed that responded to the differing musical structures rather than perceived cultural changes. Carnatic music composition by its nature dictates the ebb and flow of movement. MacDonald’s music, by contrast, afforded the dance movement the freedom to breathe and find its own pacing. She has worked with British choreographer Richard Alston on Delicious Arbour and her own production Romance with Footnotes (1993) has received outstanding reviews. In 1995 the Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company (SJDC) and the London Contemporary Dance School (LCDS) conducted a n exciting 7-week pilot project to explore the educational and artistic benefits of

7 offering dancers with a varied training background, expertise and experience complementary training in different techniques.

At the same time, there were many individual dancers such as Alpana Sengupta who were playing with the form, seeing what innovation might mean in practice. Others like Pushkala Gopal and Unnikrishnan also began working with Western theatre directors, mostly Hilary Westlake, on works like Beauty and the Beast that challenged their own attitudes as traditional classical dancers.

Nilima Devi studied Kathak at the M S University, Baroda, and post- marriage moved to Germany and from there to Leicester, UK. She founded the Centre for Indian Classical Dance (CICD) in 1981, with a structured syllabus for a six-year diploma course in Kathak for a formal qualification. The Institute has become an important part of Leicestershire’s pioneering dance provisions under the umbrella of Asian Youth Dance. In addition to a very busy teaching and performance schedule, Nilima has been concentrating on choreography where she blends the traditional with the contemporary in creative ways. One of her early experiments was choreographing a 7-minute Kathak dance piece on Beethoven’s Piano Concerto n. 1. In 1989, she choreographed a production of The Ugly Duckling, a dance ballet set to a creative score of Indian music and with 50 school-children as a support cast. It became so popular that it was re-produced in 1992-93 with a different set of dancers and is likely to be re-choreographed in the future.

Her next production was The Triangle, with herself and two senior students as the performers. This work was a mélange of small creative pieces threaded together by a common contemporary

8 theme but focused on Indian images. In recent years she has worked with Kumudini Lakhia, very senior Kathak dancer and teacher from India, who directed the Institute’s new production, Rainbow, based on the abstract philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita.

Vena Gheerawo is a dancer of Indian origin but born, brought up and educated in the UK. She studied dance at the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan (also known as Institute of Indian Culture) under Guru Prakash Yadagudde. Amongst the youngest of the South Asian performers in the UK, she came to India for further training under Dr. Padma Subrahmanyan.

With so many activities afoot, a national organization for South Asian dance called Aditi was established in the UK in 1991. A pioneering and unusual body, it was set up after lengthy discussions amongst dancers and its aim was to support them, help their dance forms acquire a higher profile and generally work towards its integration, but not absorption, into the mainstream. It is based in Bradford and run by the dancers themselves.

In addition to South Asian dancers of Indian origin promoting the cause of classical Indian dance in the UK, there are also several British choreographers who have collaborated with South Asian dancers to create wonderful dance pieces whose base is the classical Indian dance. Amongst them are Richard Alston and Chris Bannerman. Alston has worked with Shobana Jeyasingh on Delicious Arbour set to Purcell’s music. Bannerman has participated in a work by Subodh Rathod, choreographed using a combination of Bharatanatyam, Kathak and contemporary dance. Both men agree that it was a fascinating experience for them to do these works since

9 it set them thinking about what is dance, what is within the Western dance tradition, what is within the Indian dance tradition, and what does it mean when the two traditions come together.

With the advent and quicksilver progression of electronic technology, dance notation, combined with video and the computer will play an important role in the future. These developments in technology can make dance, especially South Asian dance, much more accessible in Britain than it ever was in the past. It will make the study of movement and gesture and thereby make the analysis of a particular form much easier. Technology is likely to impact form as well, and the actual act of choreography. When dance is viewed on screen (as against on stage or a formal platform) dance appears very different and modern-day choreographers need to keep this reality in mind in their work. Technology is likely to break down the sense of isolation that dancers and choreographers often feel and get them to develop connections; and it is therefore expected to change a lot of things on how dance is practiced, imagined, conceptualized and choreographed.

South Asian Dance and Higher Education in the UK:

Many dance educators have begun to acknowledge that the dance cultures of other countries have much to give to British dance in terms of diversification of styles and larger movement vocabularies.

The end of parochialism in dance has started to become a reality and it appears that British dance culture is welcoming of classical, contemporary and traditional folk dance forms and dance influences from Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia, China, South America and other cultures. As this trend strengthens, South Asian dance forms 10 will no longer be perceived by many mainstream dance workers and dancers as minority arts for minority groups.

Presently there are a number of institutions that have introduced the teaching of South Asian dance at post-school levels. These are Surrey University, University of Roehampton, Middlesex University, University College Bretton Hall, the London Contemporary Dance School, De Montfort University. (Please refer to their websites for updated information.)

Note: The above information is summarized from the book, South Asian Dance: The British Experience. From the series, Choreography and Dance, An international journal. This was printed in 1997-8 and so the information provided is up to those years. The webliography given below offers numerous links to websites and web pages related to dancers and dance teachers of South Asian Dance, a number of them who have emerged after 1999, including the talented Akram Khan. The British Government has also recognized the contribution of dancer-choreographers such as Shobana Jeyasingh, Nilima Devi and Akram Singh by honoring their achievements with MBEs (Member of the British Empire) and other public awards.