Articles

I am a dancer. Dance to me is.......

Sitting in my room and looking out of the window I am watching green leaves dancing on the tree. Every leaf is dancing in a different manner and still in the same direction so that we can understand and feel the presence of the wind and its direction, just like dance and the dancers. All the dancers on this planet dance in their own way, with or without their own music and still in the same direction of expression. We all want to express as much and as loud as we can. Dance as I always believe, is the first ever expression (or one can say the language) of humankind, through which he or she could talk. It's strange that since our birth till death we just want to say something, through whatever medium or idiom we select.

I am a dancer. Dance is my language. At this point of time and age I can easily say that dance guides my life, whatever I do, it comes out as another experience for my dancing expression. Dancing is not just dancing a learned skill but when a dancer dances he or she dances with full awareness of their body and mind, this awareness comes through practicing dance, because one has to practice so regularly and repeat thousands of times the gestures, foot-work, movement, expression, etc. so that all these movements can become natural, and in this exercise dancer has to be aware of each and every limb of the body to forget the whole body while dancing, and then only, one can see the dance instead of a dancer. What else is 'Sadhana'?

'Sadhana' is a complete concentration on one. No one is around, neither physically nor metaphysically; the mind should be free from any other thought. If we think of the word 'Sadhana', mind automatically relates to another word - 'isolation'; like two sides of a coin, you need peace and quietness to concentrate. Dance takes you one step further where you do practice alone to be confident in front of hundreds of people and concentrate on your expression while facing them alone on the stage, here the music helps and sometimes you do forget what you have done minutes before on the stage, and believe me that is the strongest sign of a wonderful performance. It proves that practicing dance gives you such inner strength to match the spiritual power, where dancer dictates the scene, or connoisseurs eating out of their hand. This strength gives the personality to a person with knowledge of other disciplines.

No art can be practiced alone, because in Indian ethos all the arts are related to each other or there is always a shadow of some other art over the practicing one, like - there is music in painting, poetry in sculpture, painting in dance, and sometimes all of them together. Being a medium of two or three dimensions, a medium of audio-visual together, dance has a space, capacity and vastness of translating almost all the other streams into its own language.

Each Indian classical dance form has a very distinct feature in the name of 'nritta', the basic grammar of the particular form as well as the abstraction within the form, which is hugely image oriented. Dancing body in itself is a strong image or a form, to create an abstraction through that instrument is a difficult task but a continuous process. All the dancers are accepting this contradiction with a challenge.

In all the dance forms Kathak has a maximum space for 'Nritta'. This abstract part is so important that, to become a good performer one has to master this abstraction. It's interesting that a dance form which originated from 'story-telling' grew with the time as such that, from the stories of mythological characters, and social issues, it now changed its face completely. Kathak has become a dance, which tells the story more of the body than of the other. Body moves in lines - straight, vertical, diagonal, etc, through the movements. We create fast and moving images on the stage. In this whole process the dependence on written or spoken words are fading out. Gestural language becomes so powerful that one can put almost every expression into the abstract movement because they don't have any fixed meaning. How smooth the transition is, it shows the perfection of a dancer. How dancer can create his or her original statement out of the given thought is the beauty.

If the question is 'what dance does to the body' then the list is endless - from the discipline to confidence to dedication to devotion to sensitivity to inner strength to the spiritual power. All these aspects make the basic texture of dance. Dance doesn't happen out side the body, first you're inner being dances then only the expression comes out as an echo of the soul.

As I said earlier that dance takes you one step further of ''Sadhana', because 'Sadhana' has a hidden or sometimes obvious desire to achieve 'Moksha' or salvation, but dancer only dances to feel pleasure, there is no fixed goal in that sense. 'Sadhana' itself is the 'saadhya'. It is the strange combination of mind and the body, which pushed you to the limit that you only feel to dance and nothing else.

Dance always starts as a hobby, then becomes a habit and the third and final stage, is addiction; that's how you grow in dance. Dance takes you beyond the body where you don't feel pain. All the physical problems cannot stop the activity called 'dance', because the body becomes so tuned and immune from these earthly limitations. We have plenty of examples all over the world where in spite of one or the other physical ailments dancers performed on the stage and gave memorable presentations. You can take examples from the lives of Anna Pavlova, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham. From Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra, who had a difficult problem with his knees but as soon as he got onto the stage one couldn't see anything accept dance. There is also a very cruel example of the great Kathak dancer Late Pandit Durga Lalji who collapsed after a very successful 2 hours performance.

As a person, I always felt that because of dance I could understand and become aware of my whole being. Dance opened a complete horizon in front of me - with full of knowledge and sensitivity. Dance, as I see now, is my way of living, my religion, my belief and the only expression I have. It's becoming more and more mine every day, when I practice. Dance can give a kind of fulfillment in all the moments of pleasure and pain - it becomes a source of outlet and support.

According to Indian philosophy "bhakti" culminates in dance or one can say that the ultimate expression of "bhakti" is dance, where the devotee just forgets the body and dances in abundance and to reach up to that point is the only aim of the devotee, but here the dancer starts his or her journey from dance and doesn't want to reach anywhere accept dance, that's what the Upanishad's says about life. We Indians believe that there is no end, life moves in a circle, no beginning no end, just the movement, a continuous movement tat's what the dance is all about.

Published in : Annual Art Journal, Volume 5, April 2004-March 2005 The India Habitat Centre, Delhi