Shantala: A Synthesis of Cultures
Body – rhythm – space – time – culture
Dancing! Why do we like moving so much and why do we feel like being moved?
The fundamental urge for humans, as indeed all living beings, to move and express their inner spirit is probably as old as life itself. What we all know is that every time we hear a familiar rhythm or see a passionate dancer, we find that our senses awaken. Whatever each of us is capable of doing, whether through the elation of a handstand or the frustration of two left feet, the inner urge to express through the body is irrepressible.
This urge, of course, finds expression in very different ways across the world. In Argentina, couples dance in a tight embrace in a Tango while folk performers in India keep a respectable physical distance. We often find this difference in cultural expression through movement fascinating and novel. We can all jump and jive at familiar cultural events, but are also simultaneously affected by the jump and jive of a new culture and people. All of a sudden - it’s ‘different’!
While this is a universal experience, there is a special breed of dancers and choreographers who commit their lives experimenting, sharing and questioning the amalgamation of diverse expressions through the body. One such dancer is Shantala Shivaligappa.
The East
Shantala is based in Paris, where sold-out performances at Theatre de la Ville and other prestigious venues have established her as one of the most exciting new talents on the global dance scene. Only 32 years old, she has already collaborated with some of the biggest names in the performing arts – notably the master-director Peter Brook and the legendary German director/choreographer Pina Bausch. But, like so many great artists, this journey of discovery and experimentation is enabled and empowered by a firm and deep rooting in classical tradition.
Shantala’s story begins as a tale of two Indian dance forms: Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi. I remember meeting her some years ago in Madras (now Chennai) the cultural capital of South India and the home of the art-form Bharatanatyam – possibly the most widely known of all the Indian forms. For those of us who learn and perform Bharatanatyam, Chennai is considered the Mecca of traditional dance of India. It is an alluring city, steeped in the myths and stories of the region, where 1000-year-old temples jostle for space with the ultra-modern business parks and bustling streets of the modern metropolis. Back in the 1920s, Madras had been the center (Sarah I – it was the UK English spelling before) of the great movement for the revival of classical dance, and Bharatanatyam itself was rescued from near-extinction.
It was into this culturally pregnant atmosphere, then, that Shantala came as an outsider from France to present her solo works. As part of the ‘traditional’ crowd in the city at the time (I was a practicing Bharatanatyam performer), I remember that the sheer beauty of her movement, her effortless jumps and sensitive expressions struck us all immediately. Remarkably – given that the venue was the Kalakshetra auditorium, the spiritual home of Bharatanatyam – she chose to present a different, lesser known, form called Kuchipudi. A younger sibling of Bharatanatyam, Kuchipudi is more of a folk-influenced, village form (The form is named after the village where it originated – Kuchipudi) It has only recently entered the mainstream of classical arts in India through the perseverance of a few who brought it out of the rural context.
Photo by Vincent Jeannot
Here was a young dancer from France presenting a ‘village’ form in the heart of the Classical community, on perhaps its most venerable stage. Not intimidated, this performer continued to dance through the evening. Her sheer respect for the dance and love of movement shone through – and she, more than perhaps anyone else, has helped establish Kuchipudi as an exciting dance to experience: a new and vernal style had been given expression in the capital of tradition!
Shantala’s romance with Kuchipudi began with instruction in the older form, Bharatanatyam, taking lessons from her mother, Savitry Nair, an Indian dancer and teacher living in Paris. Savitry had studied at the venerable Kalakshetra Academy in Chennai (the same venue, you will recall, where years later I would see her daughter’s remarkable performance). But Shantala’s mother’s journey has, itself, been no less remarkable. After her graduation from Kalakshetra, she was invited to spend time in Mudra, the dance academy of the great ballet choreographer Maurice Bejart. In Brussels, she was able to research more deeply into both Indian and Western (ballet) forms. The reverberations of her mother’s powerful cross-cultural encounter undoubtedly continue to reverberate with the daughter as Shantala further develops her aesthetic, creating a big tent to embrace multiple modes of cultural expression.
Parallel Journey
Béjart – Bartabas - Bausch – Brook
As Shantala’s abilities as a cross-cultural performer began to attract attention, the leading choreographers and directors in Europe began to beat a path to her door. They were eager to present the multicultural dialogue of their own works through the emerging voice of a remarkable young artist.
Her mother’s work at Maurice Béjart’s school of dance, Rudra Béjart, aided Shantala’s first contemporary works. As early as 1989, in her early teens, she was featured in Béjart’s multicultural production “1789…et nous.” Spending years with her mother in Béjart’s school opened the young Shantala’s eyes to multiple movement languages influenced by various cultures.
In fact, Kuchipudi entered her life as a small project. When Shantala was fifteen, her mother, Savitry, sent her to India to learn a variation in Kuchipudi for a performance at The Place in London. It was the liveliness of the form that instantly won her heart. “I loved the jumping and quick footwork it had,” she told me recently, in a telephone interview for this piece. “It’s a more dynamic form than Bharatanatyam.”
Through Shantala, this dynamic Kuchipudi, tightly meshed in its strict cultural grammar and rules for performance exchanged juices with ballet, Spanish dancing, and martial arts. Different forms of music collided in parallel. For Shantala this was the beginning of a new exploration of space, time and rhythm.
To appreciate her aesthetic, it should be noted that Indian dance works within a contained external space while constantly expanding the internal space. It is in the very philosophy of the art, connected traditionally with its ritualistic practices, that the dancer’s journey is viewed as a meditative progression, unlocking of the internal doors to enlightenment through artistic expression. Each movement and motion has a meaning or symbol attached to it.
The counterpoint in Western dance (non liturgical) is the absolute abandon of the human soul through pure motion in physical space. While Indian dance forms demand groundedness, many Western forms demand the release from the earth. Bridging both worlds, Shantala was able to find her own freedom to release both her internal and external spaces to move. Her jumps have the aesthetic code of classical Indian while projecting an energy derived from her Western influence. As she continues her journey as a soloist, her body is becoming more aware of two narratives, an internal one filled with codes from Kuchipudi and an external one providing an intense sensation of abstract space.
But how does all this work when you need to perform with a horse on stage?
Bartabas and his circus-theatre’s project with horses was the next learning curve. Zingaro (meaning ‘gypsy’ in Spanish) is a theatre founded by Bartabas in the 1980s in France to bring raw talent from around the world to interact or merely ‘act’ with horses, thus tracing the cultural inputs from civilizations over time through the relationship of man and horse. Their production of Chimere featured Shantala as a young Indian dancer surrounded by lamps in a reflective pool where she was met by a horse. Thus she begins the magical story traveling with the musical gypsies from Rajasthan, India (where the original gypsies are thought to come from) and acrobats from around the world. Her travels took her (like the story) to different cultures and histories and then finally to the BAM New Wave festival in New York in 1996.
Pina Bausch, the legendary German choreographer from Wuppertal (and founder of the Wuppertal Tanz Theatre), invited Shantala as a guest artist in 1999 for “O Dido“ This was the beginning of a long-term relationship, as Shantala continues to perform with Bausch’s company, most recently in “Bamboo Blues.” When working with Bausch, Shantala deconstructs the codes of her Indian dance to include Western forms.
Photo by Vincent Jeannot
In a recent conversation, Shantala shared with me three areas in which she feels working with Bausch has enhanced her understanding of the presentation of movement.
1. TIMING - a certain distinct way of timing movements and combinations of steps compared with Kuchipudi, which is set to precise metrical rhythms 2. DYNAMICS - the play of energy within the flow of movements 3. SYMMETRY / ASYMMETRY. The geometry of Indian dance has a strong basis in symmetry. Simply put, whatever you dance on one side you repeat on the other creating a ‘classical’ balance. In contemporary movement styles, this is not the case – symmetry is not generally considered an end in itself.
As Shantala explains “I think these [three] elements have a distinct flavor in Indian dance, and a very different one in contemporary dance. I think the way I dance Kuchipudi is a blend of both.”
So, when all is said and done, does she see herself as a Kuchipudi dancer or a contemporary dancer? Like all artists, she resists any efforts to put her in a box. “I am a dancer, trained in Kuchipudi technique and experimenting and playing with dance and movement!” she replies.
Of course, Indian dance is not just pure movement. Many practitioners see it as a heavily narrative theatrical form (some even refuse to call it ‘dance’ at all). Meanwhile, the modern history of performing arts in the West has tended to create distinct zones for ‘theatre’ and ‘dance’, each only inviting the other into its space when required. Some of the greatest names of recent decades - Robert Wilson, Anne Bogart, Peter Brook, Eugeno Barba, Ariane Mnouchkine for example – have resisted this. These and others inspired by them have been relentless in their investigation of theatre rituals from both the East and West. Their work explores human expression through the body and voice from diverse cultures.
Indeed, Shantala’s most distinguished collaboration in the field of pure theatre has been with Peter Brook himself, perhaps the most respected theatre director at work today. Brook cast Shantala as a young Miranda in his 1990 production of The Tempest. “It was like a star falling on my head when I was called,” says Shantala. Brook’s approach contrasted markedly with Bausch. “Brook had an individual approach to each actor” she says. Throughout the morning they would train in body and voice techniques, followed by text-related work in the afternoon and frequent silent improvisations. A decade later, the partnership was reignited when Shantala re-joined Brook’s company to play Ophelia opposite Adrian Lester’s highly-acclaimed Hamlet.
Merging worlds
So what next? A natural collaboration for Shantala might be to work with an artist of her own generation. Akram Khan perhaps? I ask her if she would like to work with the sensational Bangladeshi-British choreographer, whose style is rooted in the North Indian classical tradition, Kathak. I suggest Khan’s style might make an interesting complement to her own. But Shantala is non-committal on this point. “Maybe,” she laughs.
Shantala’s journey remains true to the classical Indian form she enjoys most, Kuchipudi. Later this summer, she will present “Gamaka,” her first full-length Kuchipudi solo in the US. But, in parallel, she continues to keep her contemporary experiences active, seeking experienced choreographers to challenge her dancing by creating contemporary works on her. For Namasya she has worked with a range of choreographers – and she will tour this production, her first full-length contemporary solo show, later in 2008.
And so Shantala continues to divide her time performing Kuchipudi and contemporary dance and theatre…but it is clear from our conversation that her love for Kuchipudi remains in the forefront of her mind, fresh and alive. She tells me that she feels her body language has remained more Indian than Western, having had no formal training in any Western dance style. However, she adds “the influences from various body languages and artists have allowed me to experience the pure expression of movement.” In other words, cross-training in various art forms has allowed her to access cultures from the inside, rather than as an external spectator. Her remarkable experiences and talent enable her to appreciate all forms of movement, each for the individual story it tells. In turn she can engage with each art form as a performer - bringing to each production the energy of the new.
Preeti Vasudevan is a choreographer, performer and dance educator based in New York. She is the founder of Thresh, a performing arts collaborative (www.threshdance.org) and has recently launched Dancing for the Gods (www.dancingforthegods.org) an interactive educational website dedicated to Bharatanatyam.