Dancing into New Tomorrows

Recently, I attended the dance performance of a young niece, the kind of debut performance termed an arangetram. It was a delicately crafted performance, flawless and beautiful. Mostly devotional in content, as most such performances are, but brought to life by the sparkle of youthful dancers who take their craft seriously, and by parents and a wider community who take pride in their achievements.The dance style was Bharatanatyam, the dance form that Padma Venkatraman placed at the heart of her beautiful YA novel about ability, yearning and hope, A Time to Dance.Bharatanatyam itself is a kind of phoenix art form revived from its temple dancer origins and made respectable by the formidable and vastly talented Rukmini Devi Arundale. As to why the art form previously known as "sadir" was dying out, that's a more complicated story, related in part to colonialism and the imposition of Victorian morals on a society the colonizers failed to understand; in part to the collapse of a sacred tradition and to twentieth-century embarrassment about its devolution.[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD3RhhdaVTw]Viveka Chauhan's eloquent film explores this history but it also shows how an ancient form not only can be owned and shaped and changed by successive generations but must be. Art must always remain a commentary on life and its changing times, raising questions about who we are and why we behave as we do.Witness this bending of Bharatanatyam to a more recent history--in part a history of Rukmini Devi's own time:

This past November, Bay Area artists Rupy Tut and Nadhi Thekkek produced a mixed media bharatanatyam performance entitled Broken Seeds (Still Grow). Presented at The Flight Deck in Oakland, CA, Broken Seeds featured live spoken word and music, along with projections of Tut’s calligraphy and miniature paintings as a backdrop to Thekkek’s choreography. The dynamic performance captured the violent and complex history of Partition—the splitting of India into the independent nations of India and Pakistan at the close of the British Empire—and connected the questions around displacement and discrimination that characterized that event with the South Asian immigrant experience in America. (Excerpt courtesy of SAADA).

There you go. Another dance through time and history. Another way to think about it all.To the amazing young dancers who gave us so much joy that evening, I hope you continue to dance. But I also hope you raise questions through your dance that are important to your generation and to the country in which you live. I hope you change the form to suit the new decades through which your life will take you, decades beyond my reach but not beyond my imagining.