March 21, 2013

Beyond tradition: The practice of sadhana in Odissi dance  (Part 4 of 5)

By Nandini Sikand, Lafayette College

Photo by V. Paul Virtucio

Sorting through the labels: Classical, traditional or contemporary?

Rekha Tandon, a dancer and choreographer who divides her time between her dance studio in Bhubaneswar and a monastery in Wales, explains that sadhana is a personal exploration that builds on the traditions of the dance form. She talks about the physicality of her work that connects yoga to Odissi:

One intuits a certain way of moving and certain way of feeling your body when you do any form of classical Indian dance. Because you’re doing it in the parameters of a spiritual tradition, and you’re addressing deities, or you’re working with bhakti literature or whatever, you get inducted into that way of thinking through the practice.

Much of Tandon’s work involves deconstructing these learned practices and understanding how they work on one’s individual body. Tandon is of the view that ‘unlearning’ the form has allowed her to understand it on a deeper level. So if sadhana is such an intrinsic part of the dancer’s practice, why is it not discussed more in scholarship on bodily practice? Is it taken for granted? Or is it discussed differently in ‘secular’ contexts? Similar to the overlap discussed earlier between the fixity of the term ‘tradition’, with its western connotation of fixity, and parampara, with its Indian connotation of fluidity, the western term ‘classical’ is a preferred way to signal this rigorous training and sadhana. Describing it as a ‘classical’ form signals that there is a certain pathway or established route to achieve proficiency that typically involves study with a reputed guru and many years of training. This gives it an important currency in Indian and non-Indian contexts. The fight for ‘classical’ status was a hardwon battle for Odissi, and dance forms that were termed ‘classical’ were more likely to receive patronage and funds from governmental and cultural institutions. Modelled after western ballet, classical dance in India has come to mean institutionalized practices, rather than dance simply for enjoyment, such as folk forms or, worse yet, Bollywood.

But what is less obvious is that the term ‘classical’ is a way to mark the rigour and seriousness of the training required by the dance form. However, by employing the term ‘classical’ instead of sadhana to describe this rigorous training, the sacred is left out of the description. Rekha Tandon on her company website states:

At its core, all ‘classical’ dance in India shared common fundamental principles with other Indian art traditions. The primary objective was learning to still the mind through skill in the practice of art, and value in any artistic work rested in its ability to imprint the viewer with an experience of this inner tranquility. Odissi is ‘classical’ in that it bears allegiance to this tradition. (Dance Routes website 2010)

Rekha Tandon talks about classicism in terms of a mind–body connection that is associated with sadhana, relating it to the rigorous training of the body, describing more of a bodily ethic than just a dance form. She also hints at the sacred in her description of ‘inner tranquility’. However, the use of classical is privileged over that of sadhana. Similarly, dancer and activist Ananya Chatterjea, based in Minnesota, and artistic director of Ananya Dance Theater, describes her practice in a similar way:

Classicism is relevant to me as a pedagogy and an aesthetic of work. I think it means detail. You want to do social justice work and your dancing is bad? Forget it. Don’t even try it. If you can’t move your audience, don’t dance. What I’ve learnt from classicism is incredible humility. (2004)

By self-identifying as ‘classical’, Chatterjea acknowledges the significance of her rigorous classical training, which points to the strength of her sadhana. In addition, the notion of humility is intrinsic to the notion of sadhana, or in her words, ‘a whole body attitude’ where the practice and the repetition move the dancer towards humility. And no matter how innovative her choreography or how much of a departure from the margam, Chatterjea uses the currency of ‘classical’ as a way to describe her work. Interestingly enough, neither dancer uses sadhana to describe this bodily ethic and practice, but rather cast it in terms of ‘classicism’.

Furthermore, dancers are often forced to choose between the categories of ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary’. I believe this is not a recent phenomenon, but has been reinforced by the exigencies of performing in India and abroad with limited resources. In practice, the work of these dancers is much more diverse than their label belies. For example, funders, dance festivals and grant-making organizations in the West have very clear guidelines. If one is presenting ‘new and innovative’ work then one has access to a particular kind of funding and opportunities, versus others that fit into categories of ‘traditional’ (or ‘ethnic’ or ‘folk’). In order to compete for funding, dancers must clearly announce their mission statements and agendas on their websites, and in their grant proposals. Ananya Chatterjea tries to position her work strategically:

(I)n every grant application, I try to say ‘No. I’m not an ethnic dancer. I do contemporary dance’. I always add in a line there even though you’re not supposed to: ‘Contemporary dance entirely based on South Asian tradition’. (2004)

This doublespeak is one that many dancers face. Self-definition becomes a crucial part of how dancers are perceived, and performers have to be very careful in how they position themselves and what they perform. Consequently, many dancers use a combination of ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary’ as a way of describing their work; others use ‘traditional’, ‘traditional and contemporary’, ‘classical with a contemporary twist’ and ‘neo-classical’. As Odissi becomes an increasingly globalized form, and visible in ‘secular’ spaces, self-identification on websites and social media is carefully negotiated, even though on the surface these labels may appear to be only choreographic ones.

March 7, 2013

Beyond tradition: The practice of sadhana in Odissi dance  (Part 3 of 5)

By Nandini Sikand, Lafayette College

Photo by V. Paul Virtucio

Techniques of the body

Marcel Mauss in his now classic essay ‘Les techniques du corps’/‘Techniques of the body’ (1934) wrote of the ‘self-developable’ body in. For Mauss ‘prestigious imitation’ or education plays a crucial role in the development of our bodily techniques that are socially and institutionally prescribed (1934: 101). The person with authority performs the action that is then imitated by the student. This analysis by Mauss corresponds loosely to the way sadhana works. As dancers, we build on these faculties of the biological, the social and the psychological. However, with sadhana, there is no separation of mind and body, or a separation into social, biological and psychological as Mauss indicates. Sadhana is a technique that intertwines these faculties, and allows us to learn by guided repetition, or repetition with awareness. It is a technique grounded in our social realities that eventually become part of our body memory. Mauss is aware of the limitations of these categories to explain the importance of the sacred within one’s bodily training, and concludes his essay with a recommendation:

I believe precisely that at the bottom of all our mystical states there are body techniques which we have not studied, but were studied in China and India, even in very remote periods. This socio-psycho biological study should be made. I think that there are necessarily biological means of ‘entering into communion with God’. (1934: 122)

Mauss is keenly aware that a deeper study of this mind–body connection, prevalent in certain bodily techniques outside western movement practices, could lead to a fruitful understanding. Mauss in his analysis was trying to understand the relationship of bodily techniques with the divine, one that sadhana includes: an embodied practice that allows for an expression of the sacred as an inextricable part of the dancers’ experience. I do not mean to suggest that this entwining of a dance practice with the divine is uniquely Indian. American modern dancer and choreographer Martha Graham has written about dance in a way that is closely aligned with the notion of sadhana,

I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes in some area an athlete of God. (1988: 66)

It is clear that for Graham, too, the idea of practice is paramount and by honing our practice we access a realm beyond the human. It is necessary to explain this ‘communion with God’ or the presence of the sacred further in the Indian context, and I do so through the notion of rasa, especially since Indian aesthetic traditions hinge on it. Most Sanskrit terms are polysemic, and rasa too translates as ‘flavour’ or ‘essence’, and also as ‘mood’ or ‘feeling’. Richard Schechner has pointed out that rasa is similar to the notion of prasad/an offering to the gods, and performance is often viewed as an offering. Rasa happens in the partaking of this offering, a gesture of mutuality between performer and rasika/spectator (or the one experiencing the rasa). Rasa then is not only experiential but also relational because it is dependent on this interaction between performer and rasika, emphasizing the multivalent nature of this experience and concept. The rasika/the connoisseur is one who is able to appreciate and understand the performers’ intention and is a crucial part of the performance (Schechner 1985: 138–39).

So how does one ‘learn’ to express rasa in performance? This is where the notion of sadhana comes in, the repetition of a guided performed activity via which a performer is able to achieve rasa. The idea of rasa is not dependent on a Cartesian split between mind and body or on a duality of performer and rasika. Rather it is an experiential pleasure or ananda, an experience akin to spiritual ecstasy. To illustrate how rasa can be achieved, dance critic Leela Venkataraman described an abhinaya dance item performed by a male dancer in California, Kuruyadu Nandana, in which Radha asks her lover Krishna to help her dress after an erotic encounter:

Here he is as Radha who is totally naked and says, ‘Give me back my clothes’. He just took my breath away. He was so good. I lost all sense of his height, the fact that he was male, and doing this role. It was beyond gender, and beyond anything else.

Such is the power of rasa, to be able to transcend the body and convey the essence of such an erotic scene. In sum, a successful performance is one where the performer and rasika experience rasa, and eventual ananda or pleasure. However, the experience of rasa cannot be guaranteed; it is happenstance and/or bestowed. The dancer can only hope to achieve rasa through his or her continued sadhana, and the blessings of his or her guru, but it is not always a guaranteed outcome.

I discuss briefly the example of Nrityagram (literally, dance village), an international Odissi dance company that is based in Hessarghata, near the city of Bangalore, to illustrate the notion of sadhana as a lived practice. Nrityagram has toured the world extensively and to a large extent has transformed how Odissi has been performed and received, especially in a global arena. Nrityagram has successfully managed to negotiate the practice of this dance with a twenty-first-century presence, press and publicity. Protima Gauri Bedi, an Odissi dancer, founded the institution in 1990. After Bedi died in 1998, the role of the guru was transferred to Nrityagram, the institution she founded. Their website states:

The lifestyle that we follow is based on the age-old Gurukul tradition. As per this ancient method, the students look after and care for their Guru by growing fruit and vegetables on the land, cooking, cleaning, and earning through dance recitals. At Nrityagram, the institution fulfills the role of the Guru – as protector and as someone who makes available knowledge and experience. Trainees will learn under the tutelage of several Gurus, however, their duties towards Nrityagram are of prime importance. (www.nrityagram.org 2010)

This conception of the ‘institution as guru’ allows the dancers of Nrityagram to maintain a fluidity of tradition and yet reinvent themselves. This notion of ‘living the art form’ at Nrityagram is the embodiment of sadhana where the lines between life on and offstage are blurred. Even without the presence of a single, overarching vision, the practice of sadhana remains critical to their success, and what appears to have changed over time is the relationship of the dancer to his or her guru. Some learn Odissi within the guru–shishya framework, and others approach their training in a more peripatetic manner. As Odissi dance emerges as a commodity in a global economy, dancers are moving away from the guru–shishya framework and towards a more individually suited quest for training. Nrityagram uses the dance village model to ensure rigorous training, but also allows them the freedom to experiment with gurus and dance styles outside Odissi.

February 21, 2013

Beyond tradition: The practice of sadhana in Odissi dance  (Part 2 of 5)

By Nandini Sikand, Lafayette College

“Moreechika: Season of Mirage” Photo by V. Paul Virtucio

Dynamic tradition: The nature metaphor

How does one begin the discussion of ‘tradition’ as a possible analytical category without the risk of essentialism? In interviews, various dancers discussed what tradition meant to them. Aruna Mohanty, an Odissi dancer based in Bhubaneswar, said:

It [Odissi] is traditional. Like the flow of water, streams come from different directions and merge with the main stream. That keep[s] the water fresh and the flow will go on. But the boundary should not be eliminated [or] there won’t be any difference between Bollywood dance and Odissi.

Mohanty’s view of tradition is expressed as a flowing stream with several new ones adding to the mix, accommodating the flow of new ideas as it builds on older traditions. Despite this analogy of free-flowing movement, she stresses the importance of maintaining borders. Her analogy with water can be misleading since free-flowing streams do not necessarily respect boundaries. As much as this idea of a dynamic tradition exists, there is the simultaneous need for its fixity to be maintained, so that Odissi can be distinguished from more commercial forms of dance, especially those threatened by Bollywood. For Kolkata-based dancer-choreographer Sharmila Biswas, tradition is also a naturalized and dynamic concept, in her case akin to one’s mother, a presence to which one can always return for reassurance and guidance.

(B)ut tradition is not something, which can make me immobile. It’s like a mother, a good mother. I don’t know where I would be without the traditions […] they are also there to guide me, they are also there for me to check back, cross check and all that.

For these dancers, this conflation of tradition with nature serves two purposes. First, the construction of tradition becomes highly naturalized, making it less an object of enquiry, but one that is taken for granted. Such a model of explanation legitimizes change and/or innovation that might otherwise be a target for criticism. Second, it allows for a categorization of Odissi dance that is fluid, one with myriad and continuous possibilities for both its practice and interpretation. By using metaphors of fluidity and movement to describe tradition, the engagement with it also becomes a dialectical process. Part of this can be explained by a notion of a ‘living’ tradition that comes from the Sanskrit term parampara, which is a loose translation of the English word tradition. But parampara, unlike tradition, is closer in meaning to the fluid metaphors described above. Parampara means ‘a series’ or ‘succession’ and is often used in the context of a continuation and builds on previous knowledge and/or entities. Madhavi Mudgal, a dancer based in Delhi, elaborates on this critical difference between parampara and tradition:

Our tradition is always moving, otherwise it would have died if it were static and stagnant. The word, parampara means something flowing, which has prabaha, which moves on, taking the inputs of each generation of artists. It’s not static.

Parampara builds on the notion of a living, flowing continuity that explains these natural metaphors that suggest dynamism and movement. Further, since most of these dancers are bilingual (Hindi and English), trilingual (Hindi, English and Oriya) or speak as many as four languages (Hindi, English, Oriya and Bengali), their practice as dancers often necessitates that they address the discursive implications of tradition and parampara in their different spoken languages. Consequently, these dancers engage with both terms, in India and the West, even though the word parampara connotes movement and flow whereas ‘tradition’ in western cultural terms is defined as ‘the handing-down of patterns of behavior, practices, and beliefs that are valued by a culture’. Acknowledging this slippage of translation, Dipesh Chakrabarty in ‘Provincializing Europe’ describes a problematic of ‘rough translation’. These were often derived from colonialist literature and replicated colonialist approximations, and to ‘challenge that model of “rough translation” is to pay critical and unrelenting attention to the very process of translation’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 17). Perhaps these ‘rough translations’ are such that tradition remains an inadequate and ‘rough translation’ for the word parampara. As these dancers move between the discursive worlds of India and the West – and between the languages of English and Oriya (or Hindi or Bengali) – they address the power and consequences of both languages in how they position and perform their work. These varied notions of tradition or parampara are perpetuated by highly naturalized metaphors of nature, allowing them the freedom to interpret the traditions of Odissi both strategically and innovatively.

The practice of sadhana

How does one analyse a ritual practice entwined with the sacred, now performed on a global stage, in the language of the social sciences? Chakrabarty makes the argument that in order to write secular histories one often ignores the sacred (2000: 72). For a dance like Odissi that is both secular and sacred, especially in its current form, the scholar/translator/dancer faces a challenge of translation. I argue that the lines that are supposed to separate the ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ are actually blurrier than Chakrabarty posits, and that though boundaries do exist, the cordoning off happens through everyday, unmarked movement practices, that are part of a daily practice as well as a performance practice. Consequently, if we are to understand the secular and sacred, it is crucial that we pay attention to the daily practice and the performance, recognizing that the secular and the sacred are not easily demarcated, but can be contained in the same spatial setting. To illustrate, the simple act of taking off our shoes before we enter a rehearsal or performance space can be viewed as an everyday demarcation between secular and sacred space. The bhumi pranam, the first movement phrase a student of Indian dance will learn, is described as asking permission from the Earth before dancing, and is a simple squat and bow to the ground, completed by placing dust of the floor on one’s forehead or placing the crown of one’s head on the floor. If the dancer practices alone, the bhumi pranam marks the beginning and the end of practice even if the guru is not present. The bhumi pranam during performance is incorporated into the first invocatory dance of the margam, the Mangalacharan. And if the performance departs from the traditional margam, then often performers will do it onstage before the performance or backstage in the green room. This bhumi pranam is an acknowledgement of the sacred, but is folded into an unmarked practice through a gestural and spatial demarcation that transforms the space from an unmarked, secular space into a sacred, performance space.

As another way to understand a bodily practice that is not completely ‘secular’, I employ the use of the term sadhana/daily practice. Sadhana is a combination of discipline and practice ideally done with the guidance of a guru. It is a practice characterized by intention, and is based on the idea that through repetition and awareness there is a movement towards perfection. Sadhana is not unique to dance, and is also used by practitioners of yoga, music and other performing arts. In yoga, the lived life of a yogi/yoga practitioner is not separate from the practice: the lines between the practice of yoga and one’s daily life are blurred. Similarly in dance, even if one is not rehearsing or practicing or performing, sadhana informs how you conduct yourself both on-and offstage. Sadhana then becomes a means to develop this aptitude of bodily discipline through repetition and awareness. During my fieldwork, much of the anxiety that I heard about around the practice and performance of Odissi concerned a lack of sadhana. Kumkum Mohanty, a dancer based in Bhubaneswar, talks passionately about the importance of sadhana:

Sadhana is most essential factor for an artist. How many people do sadhana? They are scared of sadhana. This capsule age, everybody wants to get the maximum without having the minimum level. I must say that invisible power supports somebody. I must do 7 hours, 8 hours practice. Practice without supervision has no meaning. I feel if I’m doing well now it is because of my guru’s supervision for 40 years. I tell you, each cell of my blood, it’s full of instruction.

For Mohanty, sadhana alone cannot ensure the success of a dancer. But sadhana coupled with the guidance of the guru and divine blessings is necessary for a dancer to achieve a level of success.