First we saw a body part, an arm perhaps, bent into a triangle, and the rest was darkness. The lights went out. The performer moved, and another body part was lit up. As the performance moved from obscurity into brightness, Sujata Goel continued to move in the same pattern, changing from pose to pose until the spotlight covered the entire stage as if opening up the possibilities of what this dancing body was and could be.
Dancing Girl was presented in Bangkok at the nine-day event "Our Roots Right Now: the Research Forum and Festival of Thai/ASEAN Contemporary Theatre", organised by Chulalongkorn University's Faculty of Arts. "Our Roots Right Now", which ended last week, featured performances by established and emerging artists and companies from the region, workshops conducted by visiting artists as well as academic forums and roundtable discussions.
The name of the festival may have made some assume that it was going to be an exotica extravaganza, but while it embraced a diverse range of cultural performances, it also had cast a critical eye on issues of cultural performance, identity and exoticism.
Goel is a dancer who divides her time between India and the US. While at the festival, she also conducted a workshop on creating contemporary dance work that addresses and challenges exotica. Her solo piece, Dancing Girl, had its premiere in 2011 at the Alliance Francaise in Madras, India. Here, she talks to us about how Bharatanayam has become a memory, Indian contemporary dance and defying stereotypes and ethnic commodification.
When and why did you get into dance?
I got into dance when I was about four years old. I actually spent half my life in the US and I began within the Indian community there. It was a way to expose myself to culture, and my parents put me in dance classes. So it started with traditional Indian dance.
Tell us about your foray into contemporary dance.
I trained in South Indian Bharatanatyam classical dance for about 20 years. And by that time I had moved to India. I came to a point where I just felt a strong disconnect between the kind of life I was living and the traditional practice that I was upholding. And as an artist, I felt I had too many questions about identity, about creating new forms of expressions, about critiquing existing forms of thinking or ways of seeing dance. And I felt I didn't have room intellectually or practically to pursue that in the classical dance world because it was too conservative. So I started searching for contemporary and modern forms of movements or dance in India. And that was when I met a contemporary choreographer [Padmini Chettur] whom I worked with for many years before I started making my own work.
What did you find in the new form of dance?
I found that there was a possibility to look at Indian dance in a way that was not only within this construct of being traditional or authentic or exotic. The kind of work that I was doing with this choreographer, it was very much about coming back to the body in a very personal and subjective way _ working a lot with improvisation, with slow motion, exploring and researching different ways of moving, looking at space and time, and just experimenting.
While you were going through that process, did you think that you wanted to leave the classical training behind?
It was a decision that I had to make because it became two different worlds. So for about a year or two, I was doing both separately, but I started to feel very split, and my politics were much more within the contemporary realm. So I did make a decision to stop training regularly with the Bharatanatyam and just commit politically and physically as a dancer to contemporary dance.
How do you deal with these two worlds?
I've trained in a lot of different forms as a dancer. So at this point, the traditional form just became a reference. It became one grammar that I have inside my body. Yes, I gained a lot of knowledge from it. That's really the foundation of my understanding of time and space, but now it retains itself within me as a memory _ a deep training of the body that's always there. But I don't necessarily need or want to work with the literal form of it any longer.
How would you define Indian contemporary dance?
I think that the contemporary dance movement in India is still new. The idea of forming a solid contemporary dance community and context is still finding its structure. Economically, in the country, there's only so much money that's going to go into contemporary dance. I definitely think that there is a movement of contemporary dance happening in India which has its own aesthetic, and it's starting to gain a stronger and stronger voice.
Do you have a problem with the way contemporary dance is being defined in India?
I think that's a loaded subject right now, but I think in India, one of the problems that I see is that the contemporary world seems to retain this very aspirational perspective and attitude towards dance in relation to the West, and I find it really boring to be thinking like that. Still, you see a lot of fusion happening, which in terms of just looking at dance from a research perspective, I also find the intellectual process ends after five minutes. So you can make a Martha Graham movement and put a mudra [symbolic hand/finger gesture] at the end, but that's saying absolutely nothing. But Asia, to a large extent, has to deal with this problem of ethnicity as a commodity all the time. And of course, it's very self-conscious, cynical and critical of that in its own way, but when you are dealing with that kind of lens and label as an artist, I think you have stay self-conscious of that. And I don't see enough of that awareness happening in the kind of work that's coming out of India. People are too comfortable with being an ethnic commodity. I think there has to be some kind of critique, which I don't see enough of.
As you travel, work and study around the world, do you find that people expect you to be the 'Indian dancer'?
To a certain degree. As you start to dialogue outside of the local context or the local audience as a traditional dancer, the only way you can be seen is exotic and ancient and traditional. There's no other frame of reference. It's a package. The traditional dance industry in India still exports that product, but even when I went into contemporary dance, even though I had expected it to be more progressive in a way, I still found expectations placed on me, maybe in a little less obvious way, but that was the underlying message: We will understand you if you stay in a certain frame which is recognisable to us. Or as a contemporary performer, you don't have to perform the classical dance, but then you need to do work which is recognisable to us about India.
What questions of identity do you explore in 'Dancing Girl'?
For me, this piece is my final response to these politics. It's my comment on all these identity issues _ the problem of identity, East, West. I was at a point in my career where I wanted to make a solo, where I was really trying to establish a movement language based on a lot of research I've been doing over the years. But on another level, I wanted to comment on the politics of exotica and identity. So the work plays with a lot of signifiers, stereotypes of the Indian classical dancer, the dancing doll. It's also very much about the loneliness and sense of alienation one has as a dancer. As a dancer, you're constantly struggling with the concept of self-image, the subject-object nature of the medium. So the piece is very much about trying to go beyond this mirror representation of the self.
What do you define as 'roots'? Do you think about it as an artist?
I think about it in relation to the fact that it's projected onto me a lot. I think these ideas of roots and tradition and authenticity are a very modernist black-and-white paradigm of looking at art, which is tradition versus modernity or roots versus the present. I don't think I'm necessarily preoccupied with that. But I do have to say that having lived and worked in the West but also very significantly outside the West, there's a very different reality and flux happening in the Asian context. The way that tradition and modernity have merged or are merging in the times we live in is taking a very different kind of route than in the West. In that sense, I feel connected to that modernity, and maybe that's a sense of root.
