Dance in/and Space

Dance in/and Space

Submitted by: Neha Tickoo (this piece was previously published in November 2014 newsletter at Bibahan, an experimental theatre group based in Kolkata, India)

“Sunil Shanbag : So if you were to put it in concrete terms, when you enter a space, what would you look at?

Astad Deboo : Challenge.”[1]

The word “challenge” and it's utterance by a dancer. That is all that intrigues me to enough, for the moment,  to be carried on to shreds. This word sums up all of the essence and purpose of the creative enquiry that an artist like Deboo undertakes, in relation to the space that he inhabits and moves in.  He begins with so much curiosity and speculation that eventually in the gradual process of movements, his presence and the space become inseparable, or one can say that the space feeds into his presence. Similarly, the understanding of performance in unconventional spaces of public interaction and spectatorship has had intrigued me for some time, given my own practice as a dancer-performer engaged in fresh perspectives. It unsettled me that almost always classical dance had to be subject to and depend on the availability of the illusory auditorium stage, which then involves an industry of it’s own, with respect to lights, sound, marketing etc. Evoking space with and for dance then becomes one aspect which challenges the dancer in me and provokes me to challenge it back. I take the cue of “challenge” from this understanding further to, first of all, discuss how space in performance history, both theatre and in dance has been invigorated and then how I propose to challenge space, through the platform of this dissertation and practice.

In the field of dance, there have been productions and explorations that have left indelible impressions by taking forward the notion of challenging not only the physical body but the space of performance as well[2]. In fact, Valerie A. Briginshaw’s book Dance, Space and Subjectivity[3], tells us that there seems to be an explosion of dance related spatial explorations in recent times yet maintains her lament that investigations about space through the medium of dance have hardly been undertaken for theoretical analysis.(Introduction, p5) Many of the dancers have worked and re-worked on innovating the content and the form as advanced performances but the modes and styles of performance presentation seem to remain stuck to the proscenium, majorly. The politics of proscenium has been well debated and discussed. One of the few people who have tried to venture beyond the closed notions of dance performance spaces is Astad Deboo[4].

The hint is also towards the ways dance-movement arts as a whole have been perceived and projected. True, there have been dance practitioners and theorists working methodically to measure the tides in dance and movement art trajectories across the globe. There have also been practices, internationally breaking the notion of public and conventional art spaces through the medium of dance and creative movement. Take for example the work done by The Movement Party[5], a group based in Poland; or the works based on Indian classical dance by a South Asian group called ‘Akademi’[6] based in the United Kingdom. But although there have been researches conducted like about for example: One of the significant pioneers in this regard is the Post-Natyam Collective[7], which uses the cyber space to create ‘long-distance choreographies’ on the computer screen while actually each dancer is situated at very different parts of the world. Yet to understand various creative and experimental tides arising within the dance fraternity, not much documentation work has taken place to garner the energies of dancers enlivening the open spaces of public contact like busy roads, market places, metro rail platforms, or public lavatories, etc.

In the case of Akademi, while it does incorporate classical Kathak performed in various open spaces, what it lacks is conceptual contextualization in the site that is used. Their mode of performance seems to represent South Asian classical dance cultures and bring them out in the open in cities like London, to an audience with western sensibilities. While their works do harbor an immensely interesting and spectacular quality[8], their site-specific choreographies include multiple numbers of performers and make enough use of technology like lighting and sound eventually to create an illusory effect. Additionally, as stated earlier: they play to a largely Western audience; most amongst them are not familiar with South Asian performance traditions and the politics of representations and aesthetics that are involved. Given such conditions, dance does not then become as socially rigorous and intervening or questioning. The element of “challenge” which Astad Deboo speaks of, gets decreased in and becomes ineffective.

One of the questions that arises is regarding the how's and why's of dance. To address this question one shall be look towards understanding the distinctions in perceiving dance, as a whole. As a speculative answer to such questions, one can think back to the ‘Gutai Manifesto’[9] and the inception of Butoh Dance[10] in the post WWII Japan. I believe that the very moment of inception of Butoh dance in significant here for the discussion, and not the dance itself. The point is that, dances emerge and various languages in dance undergo several many changes as times pass. Butoh itself has now transformed into something entirely different than how it was conceived to be, at the moment of its birth.

At this juncture, then, we need to understand the role of dancer as a public intellectual. Theatre practice enriched by the likes of Bertolt Brecht Eugenio Barba, Augusto Boal, Jerzy Grotowski has engaged itself into a mode of social reflection and critique. Then again, even Dance and Movements have in their very being, contained possibilities of change. The case of Pina Bausch[11] is an able example. The radical changes she brought in dance theatre (Tanztheater) were significant moments in German dance scenario. Yet some of her pieces for example, Victor( 1986) which was the first “residency piece”, as she called them and  Nur Du (Only You) in 1996 along many others which was performed when she travelled to Rome and Texas in US, respectively. Most of the non-proscenium performances she worked on came when she was able to travel to other parts of world.

Furthermore, this discussion brings us to one of the indispensable concepts of the ‘flaneur’. As has been conceived not just Charles Baudelaire[12] but Walter Benjamin, in Return of the Flaneur[13] ( 1929) the concept which he deeply analyzed in The Arcade Project (1965). In this project Benjamin undertook clicking photographs of the arcades all along Paris to form a huge compilation.

The Flaneuse, a lone female wanderer can also be a dancer. A Flaneuse is what has been sought out here in this article but is she really to be found? Where is her spatiality? If she is a wanderer and a dancer in the city-scape, then can she be found and located, and identified? What and who does she narrate of then? These are few questions then, I see not to be merely discussed but practiced as an experiment in the laboratory of the city-scape and its architecture.

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[1] Astad Deboo, dancer/choreographer,  in conversation with Sunil Shanbag, co-founder of Arpana, a theatre group, From Pg. 28, in the book Beyond The Proscenium – reimagining the space for performance , edited by Anmol Vellani,

[2] Take for example Chandralekha’s complete body of work, which dealt with challenging many notions of traditional dance, essentially through the medium of the dancing body. She did not shy away from taking  note that essentially human body is erotic. This she depicted by incorporating Yoga, Kalari, and Bharatnatyam.

[3]  p1-9 Edited by Briginshaw, published in 2001

[4] Refer to Deboo’s works like Five Minus Three, performed at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai,  and also his performances Great Wall of China.

[5] http://movementparty.com/tag/site-specific/ (Accessed on 5 March 2014 ) explorations of movement across diverse landscapes and terrains— from ponds, beaches, parking lots and public squares, to abandoned railroads.

[6]http://akademi.co.uk/portfolio/waterscapes/(Accessed  on 5 March 2014)

 http://www.youtube.com/user/AkademiSouthAsianDan,  for classical dance in site-specific works and videos

[7] http://www.postnatyam.net/about-2/(Accessed on 5 March 2014 )

[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KFJFymbe6M (Accessed on 6 March 2014 )

[9] An art movement spearheaded by Jiro Yoshihara in 1954, in the post WWII Japan. Jiro wrote the manifesto for the Gutai art movement and it talked about the need for human society to look deeply into the aesthetics of the dead and decaying. This art movement involved many performance, installation and new media artists like Wolf Vostell, Allen Kaprow of Happenings etc.

[10] a dance  movement and a performance style that emerged in post war Japan, foremost dancers were Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo. the dancer of this dance form resembles to unborn fetuses and in essence perform all that is de-generative in life n art.

[11] Bausch (1940-2009) was a German practitioner of modern dance, and choreographer.

[12] Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life", (New York: Da Capo Press, 1964)

[13] Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings II 1927-1934