In a snippet from his work, Pichet Klunchun and Myself, Jerome Bel says, “They take a paid ticket without knowing what they will see,” even as his remark is greeted by a spell of audience laughter reminiscent of nineties talk shows. Jerome, who is working with Pichet, an eminent choreographer is met with a response by the latter. “Ah,” replies Pichet Klunchun, the air of great realisation enveloping his utterance, as he goes on to wonder why audiences must want to watch Bel – because they don’t know what happened inside.
Bel is one of the biggest stars of avant-garde French choreography, while Klunchun, from Thailand, is a Khon dancer, performing a style based on the Ramayana. Placing Klunchun alongside the landscape of Thai cultural tourism, where gleaming brass nails are as much a reference to tradition as an articulation of the ‘exotic’, the uncertainty of the contemporary seems adequately vocalised.
Bel comes to India as one of three French choreographers at DanSe Dialogues, an Indo-French contemporary dance festival. Presented by the Embassy of France and the Institut Français in association with local organisations, the festival spans three cities — Delhi, Chennai and Bengaluru. It aims to strengthen the artistic cooperation between the two countries in the field of contemporary dance and create interest in alternative dance practices.
DanSe Dialogues will also involve master classes, curated video screenings of dance films — VideodanSe by the Centre Pompidou and encounters with French choreographers. All events except the master classes are free of cost, and hence hope to attract diverse audiences. Local contemporary dancers and dance companies in each of the three cities are part of the festival.
The Delhi leg began on November 2 with a performance of Pichet Klunchun and Myself. The Indian choreographers from Delhi include Aditi Mangaldas, Anusha Lall, Navtej Johar and Mandeep Raikhy. Inspired by the notion of lived experience of architecture in Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, Mandeep Raikhy’s Inhabited Geometry also delves into his experience as a young dancer who went to the UK to study dance and who had, for himself, to rethink what a home is. Raikhy defines the idea of a home through his choreography, investigating the idea of what he terms ‘site’ and makes ‘an attempt to create a new vocabulary emerging out of experiments with Bharatanatyam’.
Choreographed by Dominique Boivin, Transports Exceptionnels by Compagnie Beau Geste, performed by a man dancing with a huge yellow-orange excavator, finds resonance in the fraught, constantly metamorphosing urban spaces in which it is performed. In videos on the internet, Transports Exceptionnels is staged against the backdrop of iconic architecture; for instance, the Sydney Opera House. It is sweet irony to picture the piece alongside, say, a chaotic Bangalore Metro construction site. The dancer allows himself to be swept away by the excavator’s arm; he cradles its crook and sits in its bucket; sometimes, he hangs precariously as the arm makes dizzy rotations in the air. At yet another moment, he stands on it, at the very edge, arms outstretched Titanic-style as the machine’s arm gracefully carries him into the air.
French choreographer and hip-hop dancer Brahim Bouchelaghem performs Zahrbat, the third contemporary work travelling to India. Zahrbat (he who cannot stand still) is a tribute to his deceased father, an Algerian immigrant and a lover of poker. The show aims to reflect ‘the opening of hip-hop to an artistic sensitivity steeped in personal stories’. It also deals with French society and the memory of immigration.
DanSe Dialogues opens at Sir Mutha Venkatasubbarao Auditorium in Chennai on November 5 with Padmini Chettur’s solo beautiful thing 2, an exploration of the body as an object in space.
One cannot help but admire Preethi Athreya’s pretty feet as she expostulates on loss in Sweet Sorrow. In the first part of her piece, they move in eerie synchrony, normalising her movement as she dispassionately executes a series of mudras to dance to ‘The man I love’. Athreya performs at Rukmini Arangham, Kalakshetra, on November 11. Also on the same day is Sujata Goel’s Dancing Girl.
Bangalore, which is home to a host of contemporary dance companies, will see performances by Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts, Nritarutya and Natya STEM Dance Kampni, apart from the three French choreographers, from November 8 to 12, 2011. Nritarutya showcases two pieces, Mars and Chittara, from a larger choreographic pool called Prayog-3. “Mars by Sathya B.G. looks at man and his levels of imagination, asking questions about life; Chittara, which I have choreographed, is a portrait of an artist in his/ her private space where the experience does not lie in the outcome. It is technically challenging, very choreographic in its execution, but the rasa experienced by the audience is vismaya; wonder,” says Madhuri Upadhya, commenting on the experience of the improvisational in her carefully structured piece. .
Meanwhile, in Attakkalari’s production, Mei Dhwani — Echoes of the Body, bodies cascade off each other and make inflections in space against the backdrop of a landscape where everyday metal objects like pots constitute a cruelly glinting universe that spurs movement and also limits it.