A Personal Perspective On My First Few Weeks.

Today started kinda rough with the news that Arthur Mitchell has died. In less than a year, others with profound impact on my dancing career have passed away, including Elizabeth Walton LeBlanc, Donald McKayle and of course Paul Taylor. These names may not specifically have meaning for everyone, but they are inextricably connected to the life I lead today directly and indirectly, and I want to honor the opportunities and knowledge their lives provided to me and countless other dancers and lovers of this field. This post is not going to be an elegy, instead it is going to be about looking at the “everyday” of my time here.
NOTE: to those of you who subscribe to get my blog without visiting the blogsite, it appears that when I upload the occasional video that it is completely omitted from the email version of my posts.

Common trees and architecture are becoming “landmarks” as my mind maps how I travel around Mumbai.

In my first few days on the ground here in Mumbai, I took the opportunity to watch a “college” dance competition at which advanced dancers from Danceworx were performing an exhibition act as a sponsoring organization. And then a children’s cancer charity performance headlined by Sumeet Nagdev Dance Arts. Both of these institutions are where I am currently teaching modern and ballet classes throughout my time in Mumbai.  

The “college” dance competition in India refers to what would be “high school” in the USA; a holdover from the British colonial life, providing another connection to my own teenage years in Jamaica where I attended Campion College. However, in Jamaica, I remember a cultural affinity for dance as a part of a theatrical experience that may have had slightly more emphasis on language, music and acting than on movement. With my limited experience in India, there is a more diversified interest in the performing arts for their individual strengths, and dance carries a cultural following that does not seem to have the vilified perspective of dance in the USA. So I am finding that there is a pretty balanced participation of males and females taking classes and interested in performing dance here. The college dance “teams” did not appear to have strong dance-training backgrounds, and all of the choreography seemed strongly influenced by watching music videos.

I was interested to hear the comments of the three judges whose separate backgrounds (as best as I could make out) were in classical Indian dance, Bollywood, and contemporary Indian dance. My takeaway on the bottom line of their comments were as follows.

Classical Indian dance judge – If the choreographers/teachers wanted to “quote” or “use” classical Indian dance, then they need to really train in the discipline or avoid using it. The USA is notorious for its “appropriation” of traditional world dance forms, but most of their audiences have little to no knowledge of the original forms thought that is starting to change. Still, I think there can be a balance of respecting and breaking from tradition, says the “modern” dance teacher in me.

Bollywood dance judge – When choosing a dramatic perspective or storyline for choreography, there needs to be more research into what has already been, and is being, done (dramaturgical research); so that presentations provide more perspective on the human experience. In this particular instance, most of the teams depicted girls/women overcoming violence being directed against them, usually by boys/men. The difficulty in using the same inspiration is that the effectiveness of the choreography can overshadow the performances of the dancers when one piece gets its message across better than the others.

Contemporary Indian dance judge – As young people interested in using dance as a means of expression, they should try to seek opportunities to expand and solidify their technical abilities by going to dance specific academies in a style that appeals to them if possible. On this point, I don’t know how easily young students as a whole can seek out such opportunities, but maybe this was as much a comment to the teachers to try and bring in more experienced technical teachers for their students.

For me, it seemed like the choreography “de rigueur” was mostly unison phrases done in formation with a very frontal focus, with little concern about transitions as a part of the choreography. I kind of put this down to the fact that when watching videos, directors cut from one formation to another and use video editing to cover a lack of transitional choreography that is necessary in a live performance setting. Additionally, I was uncomfortable with how the multiple music choices used was employed in the context of creating a short work. Most everything was commercially recorded tracks that were edited, to my ear, without concern for musical phrasing or any sense of “musical transition” beyond varying silences.

These two observations have driven some of my pedagogical choices in starting my teaching tenure here. To address the former point, I have the great privilege of being able to teach excerpts of Paul Taylor’s choreographic mastery of moving groups of people around a stage in surprising and dynamic ways. On the latter point, I have opted to hire a live musician to accompany my modern classes where rhythm and phrasing can be quickly adapted to the needs of the students. Almost all dance classes where I am teaching are taught to recorded music, It is both a stylistic and practical consideration that when teaching ballet, I choose to use ballet specific recorded music. For me, the classical ballet traditions of movement and aesthetic form are rooted in their connection to the phrasing and rhythmic forms found in European classical music. So it makes sense to offer the students here the chance to shape their movement with a stylistically appropriate musical approach. Later on, I might introduce more contemporary music choices to see if the dancers respond differently using their ballet technique.

This is not the most dynamic shot of my class at Danceworx, but I'm not good at taking pics while I teach. I'll try to do better as time goes on. :-)

The other studio at which I am teaching is Sumeet Nagdev Dance Theatre and they posted a clip of me teaching on their Facebook page.

I understand better now what locals mean when they say that if I don’t like crowds it is better to stay indoors during the large festivals at this time of year. I was not near a particularly festive area during Janmashtami (a Hindu celebration) when crowds gather to watch teams building human pyramids to reach a piñata-like figure of Krishna, and apart from the heavier traffic, I did not venture to see a street event. I did visit Petra in Bandra during the Bandra Festival (a Roman Catholic based celebration of Mary the Mother of Christ) where she lives on one of the streets that was taken over by the fair which is not unlike the summer street fairs in NYC, only more festive, and then multiple venues with Ferris wheels and carnival rides are also active. The crowds did get to be a bit much for me in Bandra and I was relieved to sit for an overly long Uber car ride back to Andheri.

By the way, I know Uber’s reputation may not be the best in the USA, but in India it appears to serve its drivers and the local economy pretty well. And for the most part, Uber has served my needs well enough in getting around Mumbai. There is an Indian (I think) based competitor called Ola, which I have setup but have not yet used, as I can’t pay Ola with a US based credit card if I don’t have the appropriate cash. It isn’t that the rides are expensive for me, I just don’t always have small enough denominations in cash and change, and in a growing economy of cashless commerce the drivers don’t always have change to give in hard currency. I will also say that since I can afford to take car services, I feel like I my expenditures is a small way of supporting the local economy and workers. I feel the same way when I have had the chance to visit Jamaica as a tourist, and their economy relies on keeping income from tourism robust.

During the current Ganesh Chaturthi (also a Hindu based celebration), I have once again been forewarned that traffic and crowds will be particularly bad, especially in the evenings. Different people will celebrate Ganesh Chaturthi (aka Ganpati) for up to eleven days, and now I know what creates the traffic. A variety of musicians, most especially drummers (and the occasional giant bell), and revelers will parade through the streets following a model of Ganesha enshrined on anything from a donkey-cart to the back of a flatbed truck accompanied by any variety of offerings. These celebratory crowds slow traffic to their pace and draw larger followings if their music is good or their “Ganpati” particularly elaborate. 

My understanding is that tradition dictates these models of Ganesha be eventually destroyed (it seems that originally models were made of clay and would dissolve in water, but now they are made from plastic and other non-organic materials) by dispersion in a body of water like the ocean, lake or river, adding to the pollution which India is struggling to reduce. So the local governments have been attempting to regulate the numbers and materials used in building Ganpati idols, and thus the crowds are also somewhat diminished. But during the evenings and on the weekends when people are not working is when these street celebrations tend to take place well into the night. I have been able to watch, and certainly heard, a good number of Ganpati celebrations pass by my apartment building.

One of my kindly local friends has indulged my curiosity to visit one of the many Ganpati that have been enshrined in makeshift structures that blockade whole lanes on the street. I didn’t have the courage to just wander in on my own.

There are times when I give in and accept that I'm just like any other tourist!

The communal nature of the festivals I’ve encountered in my short time here is indicative to me of the importance of both “blood” and “cultural” family being at the heart of many Indian perspectives. Very soon, I may well have more to say about my discoveries of attitudes towards dance as a cultural “binding” agent. My minimal online research has found that many of these celebratory festivals last in the range of ten days and people seem to fit their gatherings around their work hours. This is very different than my experience in the USA where such community events generally don’t last much beyond a weekend, if that long. I am not discounting that such these kinds of celebrations don’t exist within the ethnic communities in the USA, but they are not generally given the open acceptance on a secular basis, as I have found in India.

As a second generation child of immigrants from China to the West Indies, I have some inkling of just how much a sense of community can be comforting for travelers away from familiar surroundings and customs. And it makes a lot of sense that small ex-patriot communities develop out of a desire for the familiar. However, as a performer in a profession where I had to leave family and culture behind from a very young age, I may more easily accept the sense of isolation when settling in new surroundings as a process to be acknowledged for its ephemeral nature. The human psyche has an amazing capacity to find things in the “everyday” that begin to “normalize” our lives in any given situation.

I admit that at first, not knowing how to plan for my next day because everything was new to me, felt decidedly overwhelming. So focusing on the small things that gives me comfort, like getting my morning coffee, or crossing the street at the same pace as locals while vehicles swerved past me, or becoming engrossed in the students I’m teaching; these were my panacea to the disorientation of a foreign stay beyond a few weeks of business or vacation.