On Metrics and the State of Being in Classical Dance
Over the past few months, one of my favourite thinking dancers/dancing thinkers, Dr Apoorva Jayaraman has been writing what she describes as a spontaneous series on Instagram. She calls these pieces ‘Make a Little Space for Dance’. In it, she speaks about some of the prominent themes of discussion that currently plague the Indian classical dance ecosystem. Dr Jayaraman also nudges the reader into a different headspace by suggesting that maybe the metrics – the need to judge by measurement – should not be central to our conversations surrounding dance.
When I mulled over what she said, I realised that maybe I had narrowed down the meaning of the word ‘metric’ to an uncomfortably tight vice around me. If you read what she says in the series there are many valuable insights she reveals about being in the state of dance (more on why I chose to phrase it that way ahead). This is a short list of things Apoorva raised that stayed with me:
- The body can access knowledge in a way that the mind alone cannot.
- Classical traditions such as Bharatanatyam are an invitation to experience life from another’s perspective. They encourage embodied empathy.
- Classical traditions are elaborate languages that are fortified with a robust grammar and an intensive technique that exists independently of verbal or musical frameworks.
- In classical dance, the body becomes a language which can hold multiple meanings simultaneously. In the body’s language, contradiction doesn’t demand resolution – it simply asks to be witnessed.
Equilibrium
The more I thought about her words, the more I began to translate them into the idea of equilibrium: a state of no net change, a condition of a body at rest or in uniform motion. In dance, did it make sense to think of the metrics more as a state of being in dance rather than letting numbers govern one’s understanding of it?
In the physical world, a system in any state of imbalance seeks to bring itself to a state of balance, a state where it does not have to expend extra energy to exist.
In a way, does that not mirror the way we humans function? Instinctively, we mimic the state of affairs around us. We latch onto the rhythm of a song playing in our headphones when we walk, we become restless at a crowded airport. We slow down instinctively when we walk in the verdant outdoors.
Doesn’t one’s best dancing happen when one is at equilibrium?
This equilibrium has many access routes. A state of equilibrium includes three key facets of the state of being in dance:
- Being in equilibrium physically
- Being in equilibrium with the contents of the composition that one is communicating
- Being in equilibrium internally (emotionally/psychologically) with oneself
Physical/Bodily Equilibrium
Amongst the many takeaways from Apoorva’s series, I found myself returning to her point about honouring the grammar of dance (and by extension, of the other disciplines under the umbrella of art). What is the grammar, and how does one know that one understands it?
I think it begins with a fairly good understanding of the body, its limits, and an awareness of how it can be used to communicate. Somatically, sound grammar starts in strength. It starts with feeling confident in each movement that you undertake, knowing that you're not going against the bodily wisdom that your physical self has taken years (I'd argue even millennia from the evolutionary perspective) to develop.
My favourite examples have got to be Prithvi Nayak and Bijayini Satpathy doing certain charis excruciatingly slowly. They have trained their bodies to move so slowly that in each microsecond of its trajectory, their body is in equilibrium with its surroundings. What they achieve is a near-perfect reversible process of movement. If you were to pause their video at any given moment in time, it is almost impossible to predict the trajectory of their continuing move. They achieve a state of stillness so completely that in every microsecond of the movement, they are in total stillness at every infinitesimal point in their motion. What does that do to the faster series of movements they perform? The thorough training in slowness gives them absolute control, confidence, and clarity. Because the grammar is flawless, the communication of the piece is pristine.
They practise these exercises with the intention of gaining clarity in their movement, much as we did years ago, when, as children, we wrote multiple pages in a cursive writing practice book to refine our penmanship. The good grammar lies in the grind; not in the glamorous.
What isn't a good example of reliable strength then? To this, my mind said ‘over-the-top demonstrations of physicality, speed, and agility’. The sculptors of the forms have said this repeatedly. And this isn't applicable just to dance. There is a story that a music director of a Marathi musical drama (called a Sangeet Naatak) had once slapped an actor-singer for stretching a taan longer than was aesthetically necessary in an attempt to impress the audience. In Kathak, too, the renowned doyen, Maneesha Sathe's analogy of ginti being like pickle on the plate backs up this principle.
Next, do you know how you progress through the composition? At what moments you feel most fatigued? At what moments do you tend to lose the thread of your narrative? Where is it more prudent to conserve energy?
A reliable way of cross-checking whether you're coherent as a dancer is to ask two kinds of people to watch you perform. One, preferably your guru or the choreographer of the composition, because they know exactly how the composition should progress, and two, someone who has never seen you perform before, because they bring you fresh a pair of eyes that can help you see the pitfalls that only fresh eyes can catch.
When is a piece of writing perfect? It is near-perfect when one can't take away even a punctuation mark from it without affecting its readability and/or comprehension. Similarly, a choreography is ready when changing anything of it will diminish its impact in one or the other way. Editing choreography is important and needs to be done by prioritising it as a device to tell stories and emote first, rather than viewing it primarily as a means of highlighting physical prowess.
Physical equilibrium paves the way to establish the next variant of equilibrium: that of oneness with the content that one is presenting.
Equilibrium With the Composition
If you think back to some of the best performances you have witnessed, you will find that almost all of them were guided by the steady hand of equilibrium. The artist is in seamless unison with what they are presenting. The sense of oneness with the idea is a simple invitation to focus on a few basic things.
For starters, do we know the contents of what we are presenting? If it is a traditional composition, do we know what the lyrics are? Do we know what individual words mean?
There is such power to well thought-out and beautifully executed dance. As an example, I'm tempted to use the Javali Samayamide Ra Ra and the doyen, Priyadarsini Govind's rendition of this piece. A choreography of Guru Kalanidhi Narayanan, this Kshetrayya piece tells the story of a woman who is married to one man, but is in a dalliance with another.
Priyadarsini does each line in four or five different accents (through the effective execution of what are called sancharis or transitory states of being in abhinaya). She highlights the different flavours that could be used to colour the same words of a line. These are multiple ways of portraying each line from the lyric written by the poet. She brings these lines to life with her ideas and gestures extremely effectively. She cajoles the hesitant lover into her house in one moment, while in another, she lovingly pleads him to come in.
Mrs Govind is probably the finest example of what an artist completely in unison with her piece can create. This rendition is a sterling example of how well she understands the matter she handles. The subtle nuances she portrays with incredible lightness, each smile, every flick of the eyebrow, the way her hand gestures tell a story – all of it blends together in a narrative that captures the delicacy and the hilarity of this layered human story. The ease that is such a hallmark of her performance is born from deep thinking and drawing out the character of each of the individual sancharis.
Internal Equilibrium
Striving for equilibrium in dance also means being in equilibrium with yourself at a given point in time. A choreography you performed five years ago is going to appear very different compared with the same choreography that you will perform today. This means being aware of how your understanding of the piece has changed over the years in the way a book reread years later may be understood differently; and also being aware of changes in the way you move and interact with the rhythm and the music of the piece.
As dance makers, there is another internal equilibrium we should be thinking deeply about. I am referring to a state of internal balance in the original compositions. Are the several subcomponents of the composition in equilibrium amongst themselves? Does it make sense to have a pronounced jati in one part of the composition, and no jatis elsewhere? When does one introduce a swara in a piece, and when an alaap? Is the distribution of the words appropriate across a line? Does the literary content balance out the musical and rhythmic content? Do the subcomponents contribute meaningfully when woven as a braid and is their net effect uplifting?
If each of us were to introspect about how we could align most of these aspects of our dance to a state of self-consistent and self-correcting equilibrium, we might just unfold a happier, healthier, and more peaceful state of being in dance. I live in the hope that I can get a little closer to that evasive equilibrium someday, and I wish you more equilibrium, too.
