Time for the contemporary

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The tiny window between the slushy monsoon and a slew of festivals, September is a month of exciting contemporary work. This includes The Park’s New Festival, which tours six cities with contemporary performances by music group DNOAX, performer Maya Krishna Rao and the Parijat Desai Dance Company.
Meanwhile, over the weekend, two events take Mumbai beyond performance and into the lives and works of contemporary dancers. Creative Processes at Jnanapravaha, Mumbai, features Astad Deboo in conversation with theatre director Sunil Shanbag and architect-designer Ratan Batliboi on September 9, 2011. A new series, these lectures and conversations aim to look back at the lives of acclaimed artists of the times and explore their ideas of process and the creative choices they make and stand by.
When Deboo returned to India after a long spell of travel in 1977, having seen dance being performed outside the proscenium space, he decided that he should try to perform in spaces where people never thought dance could come alive. Deboo found that he could immediately connect with actors, dancers, architects, writers and directors, whereas the dance community mostly shunned him. Ratan Batliboi, then a student, and Suresh Bhavnani, an architect who is now an academic, were both excited by the possibilities Deboo’s works suggested.
He says, “Satyadev Dubey and Sunil were my sounding boards; Sunil even wrote the dialogues for my performance Mangalore Street. Ratan designed props for many of my pieces, for one never had the financial resources to make large-scale sets. Often the props just used the space, for instance, I once activated the revolving mechanism on the Tata Theatre stage at the NCPA to make it look like I was pushing the stage.”
On September 10, 2011 at Clark House Initiative, Padmini Chettur participates in a day-long exhibition of her work, showcasing selected movement studies from her latest choreography, “beautiful thing 2”. The piece makes nine lines; watching Chettur trace these lines across four-dimensional space is an education in savouring movement at its most visceral. Clark House Initiative’s collaborative practice includes Zasha Colah, Nida Ghouse, Zubin Pastakia and Sumesh Sharma.
“This is not a performance,” Chettur insists adding, “It is a basic movement study without the parameters of performance, like light and sound. The whole project started off when the artists at Clark House Initiative approached me saying they were interested in my process and thought they could have a visual arts discourse with my work. I have given them some past performance material, some writings. This is a new experience for me; I don’t want it to become retrospective for I’d find that very alarming. They enter the work to leave impressions, or not. It comes at a time when I have a certain amount of group work behind me; it is almost a distilled version of much of my other work. One trajectory ends here, so this is a nice way to round up things and think of new beginnings.”