Globality Of Gestural Narration In Bharathanatyam – Part 2

Pre-Narration

Pre-performance explanations have characterized Bharatanatyam performances over the course of the 20th century. In the mid-1920s, when a Brahman lawyer E. Krishna Iyer initiated his mission to resurrect Bharatanatyam as a cultural treasure, he did so through lecture demonstrations as well as performances, which he offered in cities and towns of Southern India.[1] Jewish-American dancer Ragini Devi’s first international tours of classical Indian dance forms in 1937 and 1938 consisted of lecture demonstrations as well as concerts[2]. In the mid-1940s, Ram Gopal introduced to his tightly designed series of short, classical Indian dances brief verbal explanations, which preceded each dance with a sketch of its overall theme. The specific practice of executing mudras while offering a verbal interpretation of sung poetic texts rose in popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s. During the early 1990s, the practice became so prevalent that dancers imported explanation into Indian performance contexts, including into Bharatanatyam’s home city of Chennai, formerly Madras.

The demand for translation signals Bharatanatyam’s 20th century history of re-contextualization and its long-standing international circulation. The practice of interlocution both responds to and obscures the dance form’s participation in a global culture market. It reveals the kind of historical double binds[3] with which the late 20th century Bharatanatyam dancer contended. The practice of verbal explanation thus speaks to the 20th century predicament of Bharatanatyam in which the dance form appears internationally as both an emblem of national and diasporic identity and as a “high art” that transcends national and linguistic (language oriented) boundaries. At the same time, however, verbal translation paradoxically accords the choreography, an inscrutability while also demonstrating its translatability. This kind of pre-performance synopsis lines up two thought systems: an English verbal frame-work and a South Indian choreographic one. The explanation of mudras in succession interprets the “Eastern” choreography through the “Western” linguistic system. The English-language epistemology thereby emerges as the means through which the audience finds the choreography intelligible. Thus, this style of translation relies upon a theory that treats the English language frame work as a mere explanatory device without its own cultural coding. A spoken interlocution thus risks representing Bharatanatyam more as a means of entry into a cultural field of reference, than as a set of choreographic choices and compositional devices.

Descriptive/ Narrative Aspect of Performing

When a dancer, viewer, or promoter presents Bharatanatyam as both requiring and evading translation and treats the English language explanation as culturally “neutral,” s/he revisits the central premise of the 18th and 19th century orientalist treatment of Indian literary and scholarly texts. The orientalist model of translation rested on the assumption that the “Eastern” text required the intervention of an interlocutor who, through his specialist knowledge, could unlock its anonymities for “the West.” The public (viewer) who received this information, within the orientalist paradigm, inhabited the position of subject rather than object of knowledge. The representation of “foreign” texts and practices within 19^th century European society thus did not encourage viewers/readers to examine their own cultural investments but rather reinforced the presumed objectivity of their own social and political position.

Pre-performance translations, like the textual material of the colonial orientalist period, characterises Bharatanatyam as an object of knowledge, to be uncovered and explained by an expert interlocutor. Nonetheless, they invert an orientalist division of labor by conflating the roles of “native informant” and translator-author. As such, the translating dancer generalizes her own subjects’ position by interlocution for the dance form. The act of translation, then, marginalizes the dance form for its international viewership, designating it as that which requires explication; but at the same time, this translation universalizes the dancer’s status as she adopts the position of the agent of information. The very appearance of verbal translation, however, complicates even this dichotomy between subjects and objects of knowledge. While a pre-performance synopsis foregrounds the dance’s “foreignness,” its standardized mode of delivery reveals the dance form’s history of international circulation. Bharatanatyam, as well as sadir,before it circulated internationally and responded to global discourses on dance. This trans-national circulation dates back to, and, in some in-stances, anticipated the Bharatanatyam “revival” of the 1930s and 1940s.[4] The international performance careers of both Indian and non-Indian dancers inflected the re-figuration of the previously marginal sadir as the respectable concert form of Bharatanatyam.

Conversely, Balasaraswati’s[5] emphasis on expressivity won admirers among pre and early modern dancers such as Ted Shawn and Martha Graham who found in her claim that interior experience articulated universal themes a corroboration of their own views on artistry. The early 20th century re-figuration of Bharatanatyam as a stage practice likewise intersected with a global, modernist concern with the reinvention of dance as a serious “high” art. Revival period practitioners like Rukmini Devi and Balasaraswati both invoked discourses of individual creativity in their representation and legitimation of Bharatanatyam[6].

In the 1980s and 1990s, Bharatanatyam circulated through ever more global trajectories. The dance form operates as, in Arjun Appadurai’s [7] terms, intentional cultural reproduction for nonresident Indians in places as divergent as Los Angeles, Singapore, and Manchester. Bharatanatyam likewise provides a means of maintaining nationalist sentiment in exile for Sri Lankan Tamils in Canada, Germany, and the U.K. Translation not only operated as a method for negotiating this international circulation of dancers and choreographies, but also provided dancers with a strategy for marketing their performance work in transnational dance milieus. By the late 20th century, Bharatanatyam’s reputation as a reclaimed and respectable tradition produced a proliferation of trained and accomplished dancers. Chennai, for much of the last century, housed a surplus of Bharatanatyam dancers in relation to its viewing public as did other Indian and international metropolises. In order to develop a career as a performer, a dancer, facing such a surfeit, can contend with her competition by cultivating new audiences. This task presents obstacles as the complex coding of Bharatanatyam requires specialized skills on the part of audience members for full comprehension. When a dancer translates a piece before performing it, she bridges a perceived gap between content and perception, thereby enabling a broader range of spectators to access the piece.

Although verbal interlocution reiterates an orientalist problematic, the factors that foster the appearance of interlocution unsettle orientalist notions of a static tradition. The 20th century’s translating Bharatanatyam dancer, rather than representing an ancient, unchanged culture, grappled with numerous contemporary paradoxes. While some practitioners of the 1980s and early 1990s used verbal interlocution to contend with competing pressures upon the dance form, choreographers of the mid- to late 1990s, especially those working internationally, developed projects that “translate” epistemologies, choreographic devices, and poetic texts, foregrounding rather than masking their transnational position.

These projects align different linguistic, movement and musical vocabularies in such a way that they subvert a tendency to place European thought systems as the primary framework of interpretation.

Reflections on Narrative Bharathanatyam

Dance as a form of expression has always existed in human civilization. It serves the purpose of a language that translates thought and words in a beautiful manner. The visual imagery created through dance has an aesthetic appeal which is subjective to the culture. An image translated into a movement slowly leads to building of the vocabulary of dance, and the process continues to evolve into a dance form. The term classical when associated with a dance form reflects its rich history from which it has flowed. Does this mean that a form of dance does not exist which has no narrative element? This we know is surely not true. Dances have existed and evolved new grammar which may just explore a thought without a narrative structure to it, which may or may not be the same as perceived by the audience. Did the content richly contribute to the physical form of dance or did they exist separately and came together when required? The answer to this question is important, as it will help in understanding how far Bharatanatyam can be ‘the form’ that we associate it today with.

In Bharatanatyam Abhinayam plays a major role. Abhinayam means to convey an idea. So the dance form tends to always convey a thought, an idea or an image preconceived in the narrative aspect. It does not give scope to read your own image in the dance, at least in the way as it is practiced now. People are exploring different content away from the margam. Seeing a video clipping of a production where a dancer based in UK uses Bharatanatyam to show a football match, it was very interesting. It showed that the place where she lives is full of football lovers and that has rubbed on to her creativity, she does not deviate from the physicality of the form and yet creates something that relates with the audience. Still the narration existed. But in contrast when we see a work of Chandralekha where the narrative content is not there, it is more like a thought explored. It is in a way giving universality to the art as one is open to read their own meaning and not restricted to that of what the choreographer feels. At the same time it is also very personal and individualistic that it can also make an audience feel lost. When you look into the form it is no longer Bharatanatyam nor claimed to be. So in trying to explore the content in an abstract manner she had to move herself away from the physicality of the form. These views are in no way trying to say one is better than the other but just trying to explore how the narrative content and form in a Classical dance moves. In Indian classical dance with Bharatanatyam in mind the form seems to have evolved along with the narrative content so closely that it is a little difficult to perceive them separately.