Can You Tell Where You Are In The Dark?

This was a performance shot of me as "Baron Samedi" by fellow dancer Orion Duckstein, at Jacob's Pillow back in 2007. I'm not sure who the ghost in the background is.

This week was Halloween in the USA and el Dia de los Muertos in Mexico, and Facebook posts were my only clue. The first was when the Taylor Company posted an old shot of me as “Baron Samedi” from the last two Taylor dances in which I originated a role. Fittingly, I will start this post with an anecdote about my mis-adventures in Delhi. I have mentioned that I am staying in a residential development in Gurgaon which is south of Delhi. Well I recently found out that the gates into the development are locked at midnight, and once I traverse the five minute walk along unpaved, unlit roads, I still have to call the building supervisor, Pradip, to be let in. Fortunately, he lives in the building, and seems reasonably good natured about dealing with my late arrivals. Last Saturday around 11:00pm, I used Uber to get back to Gurgaon from Delhi, which takes about 45 minutes without traffic. That night the car’s engine shut down just as we entered a highway, and it would not restart (speaking from recent personal experience, I think he may have run out of gas). So the adventure began when I had to navigate my way to an off ramp on foot and get to somewhere that another car could come and pick me up. Often the drivers will call when they pick up your request for a ride, to check on where you are headed, in case they don’t want to go there. I’m not sure if Uber’s system doesn’t tell them to where the fare is headed, or if they don’t trust the GPS. But either way, about half the drivers don’t speak much English, and it is very disconcerting to be standing by a dark highway off ramp nearing midnight in a strange city trying to communicate on a cell phone to someone you can’t understand that is supposed to be picking you up. If I trust the GPS on the Uber app, then the driver’s car was barely a minute away, but after hanging up over the futility of trying to communicate, I would wait another 15 minutes for the driver to start moving and come pick me up. I got back to Gurgaon a little after midnight, and discovered that the gates to the development were locked. So I gingerly picked my way around the gates and headed down the dark maze of roads with very few street lamps. That night I almost jumped out of my skin when I caught glimpse of some weird creature trot-hopping its way out of the shadows at me. Delhi is overrun by dogs, and there is a three legged tan dog about the size and coloring of a small golden labrador that lives on the road near to where I am staying. Thankfully, he is pretty friendly, but I was worried that Rolling Calf had followed me to India.

In Jamaica, if you walk country roads at night there was always a chance of being chased by Rolling Calf, a three-legged calf like animal with rolling red eyes trailing a chain around its neck. I remember being told by my uncle that his helper got to work early one morning with her dress on inside-out and back-to-front because she saw a Rolling Calf on her way into town. I think that by wearing clothes in a peculiar fashion, it was supposed to confuse the demon, but I could never figure out how she had the coordination to change her dress around as she was running out of fright. Legend has it that Rolling Calves are the spirits of butchers that were evil and untruthful in life.

After negotiating the car breakdown and getting back “home” after everything had been locked up tight, I was less nervous on Sunday night, when the exact same sequence of events took place. At least the second time around, my friend Amith was with me when the car broke down. We were not in the middle of a highway, and Amith could speak with the drivers who did not want to go all the way to Gurgaon when trying to book a “rescue” car. After dropping Amith off, I still felt a little like I was wandering into Arkham Prison (a Batman comic reference) alone, but at least it was familiar!

I feel a little as though I am meeting history in the making. This is not quite as grand as it may sound. I am not professing to be joining hands with some grand unknown future. But it has been fascinating to discover both personal and professional connections in some kind of obtuse cosmic symmetry. Within a certain lineage of contemporary dance here in India there are very direct connections to the early days of modern dance in America. I am not verifying my thoughts here with extensive research, but I am keeping a professional log of my time and meetings here in India for my Fulbright-Nehru reports at the end of my fellowship. Each time I start to write this blog and mention the names of historical people, I keep thinking that this would be incredibly boring for those of you who have little to no interest in dance beyond its capacity to challenge human ability and creativity. So hopefully it will suffice to talk about the people I meet.

Sheela Raj, me and Bharat Sharma at our first meeting in the cafe of Triveni Kala Sangam

This week, my new acquaintances have included the current artistic director/choreographer for Bhoomika Dance Company, Bharat Sharma, who studied at Jacob’s Pillow back in 1979 and later spent a year in New York City training at the studios of Merce Cunningham and Alwin Nikolais and performed solo for the American Dance Festival. Similarly, Bharat introduced me to Sheela Raj, who was born in India of an Indian father and Irish mother, and grew up in Delhi but pursued her performing dance career in New York and London during the 1960’s and 1970’s in the early companies of Twyla Tharp and Robert Cohan before settling in France and ultimately moving back to India. Needless to say we have found many distant connections through my own associations with all of the above. It has been nice to send quick notes back to friends in the USA and Jamaica that I am just now meeting with people they first met many decades ago. Again, I apologize for talking about people whose names only a few of you will recognize, but suffice it to say that the myriad names, associations and histories I am discovering on this sojourn would fill a couple encyclopedic volumes of a better researcher than me.

Dance is like most fields, where the more people you know, the easier it is to find out what is going on. And every so often, you just have to introduce yourself to strangers and hope that a connection will lead to something else. It has taken a concerted effort on my part to venture out to meet with different people and to encounter as much of the dance and Arts scene as I can after I have finished my daily teaching. The India International Centre’s Festival of the Arts 2018 is focused on North East India with offerings from all the Arts both ancient and modern. The same weekend was another North East Festival to which I did not have the energy to attend, as I also chose to attend The 3^rd All-India Children’s Ballet Competition “Mosaic of Dance”, in which three students I know from Mumbai were competing. The most impressive thing to see was the number of children learning ballet and contemporary dance who came to participate. Unfortunately, there was a fair amount of evidence that a lot of the training available to these young dancers is not sound and could be dangerous for their future physical well-being. Still, a few dancers demonstrated great potential and good coaching. I was most impressed with those teachers who provided or adapted choreography to highlight the strengths of the dancers who ranged in age from 6 – 25 years old. Happily, I can report that the three students and their teachers whom I know from Mumbai all won in their categories!

The 3^rd All-India Children’s Ballet Competition “Mosaic of Dance” and the three dancers from Mumbai at dinner after they competed.

However, before the competition sojourn, I had breakfast with Sheela Raj who invited me to see a dance program she has been running at the Nai Disha Educational and Cultural Society School in Kishangarh Village, one of the poorer areas of Delhi. Sheela waited until we were walking through the slums to check if I had yet encountered such contrast, as we had met in a very affluent gated community earlier in the day. Oddly, the sights and reality of poverty abutting wealth and privilege is such a part of the societal fabric here that I have not found myself emotionally moved beyond compassion and empathetic recollections from my own past. There were poor ghettos in Kingston, Jamaica where I grew up that had less infrastructure than Kishangarh Village, where I would occasionally visit friends or pass by regularly. As a teenager on my own, during my second year in England, I used to “squat” in a “condemned building in Blackpool for a few months, until I found a landlord that would rent to a minor. This may be a surprising revelation for a few readers that knew me in those years, but I was a very determined child. I had been brought up to believe that if I wanted to follow my own choices in life, then it was solely my responsibility to survive. Thankfully, my masochistic tendencies of stubborn independence eventually subsided enough for me to build better friendships and accept the best of intentions from others.

A dancer, Ankit, trained in Mayurbhanj Chhau teaching the Nai Disha kids at their school in Kishangarh Village.

On a six month Fulbright, reality necessitates that I maintain a perspective on what I have to offer and can possibly achieve in that amount of time. On a five week stint in Delhi, there is even less chance that I will know what traces of difference my presence might leave behind. Still, at the invitation of various local dance professionals, I am scheduled for a few presentations and workshops beyond my Danceworx responsibilities, before I leave Delhi at the end of next week. And everyone seems convinced that whatever I might be able to provide will be impactful. So I’m not feeling any pressure… well maybe a little.

"Terra Fest" at Triveni Kala Sangam

With Sharon Lowen during "Exploring the North East Festival" at the India International Centre.

I had a fascinating chat with a former Fulbrighter to India, Sharon Lowen, who grew up in Detroit and eventually moved to India and has settled in Delhi. She writes and teaches Odissi dance while having studied other Indian dance forms. But beyond her illuminating knowledge of Indian dance history for me, we discussed the challenges of not being considered native to a country and its dance forms, but finding an identity within the Art form. For me, I have been feeling decidedly “odd” about being a Fulbright “scholar” as an exponent of American Modern Dance and contemporary ballet, while I still identify so strongly as Jamaican. I have always been “other” when it comes to how I am perceived as a dance professional. Away from the island, no one initially identifies me as Jamaican, and ballet got me out of the Caribbean. Having the facility of my Afro-Caribbean dance exposures as a child helped me “fake” my way through jazz, modern, and European character dance classes (I was never very good at faking tap or clogging). My performing career was always successful in niches like the “modern” ballet dancer, the “technical” modern dancer, the performer with “gravitas.” Ironically, as a racial minority in the USA, I have never been openly identified for being racially Chinese or ethnically Jamaican. This is not a complaint, it is an observation of what I learned to exploit within my own gifts to create a lifelong career within the industry. And maybe it is my observational skillset that I used to adapt my own dancing which is my greatest asset as a teacher and coach in not just dancing, but various physical activities.

At the same time, it has been fascinating to address how much all the things I experience outside of the studio classrooms are informing my teaching and observations of the dancers I am encountering. I have been reticent to write in too much detail about dance “shop-talk”, but I have found some pretty clear distinctions in the aesthetic cultures of academies and productions that are not dealing with the Classical Indian dance forms. Some are clearly pursuing a contemporary voice based in their Indian roots, others have a distinctive Bollywood style which is currently an economic necessity for a more lucrative success, and then there is this other growing faction that aspires to a completely “western” dance ideal of ballet and contemporary aesthetics for which their primary reference are videos. On this last point, I have been playing with getting the students to improvise to western classical music and then shape their form to match a more traditional classical ballet aesthetic. For most of them, conceptualizing classical ballet in their own bodies, is like imagining what standing in a snowstorm would be like for children that live on tropical islands. There is a wealth of sculptural representation in Indian Art, but nothing that really emulates the elongated sweeping lines of ballet, and I am often struck by how there is a kind of “Indian-ness” in the shapes and movement dynamics to which the dancers relate. This is a very superficial generalization, many dance students here have gorgeous articulation in their torsos and hands, not commonly found in western dance forms, and at the same time, these articulations are so culturally ingrained that most don’t really have a conscious ability to transfer such specificity to other styles of movement.

Architecture. Household art. Gallery art.

Speaking of seeing contemporary Indian dance, I was treated to a studio rehearsal of some very engaging work by Bharat Sharma’s dancers. And I went to see an “invitation only” preview showing of a work-in-progress called “Antariksha Sanchar” which is a collaboration between electronic composer/DJ’s, musicians, digital art/game developers and a Bharatanatyam guru. I will leave it up to you to imagine what this might be in reality, and I will let you know when I see the full evening show in Mumbai later in November. It is also worth mentioning that I got to see a 1988 dance film called “Sangai: The Dancing Deer of Manipur”, a dance drama with minimal camera effects that won the Outstanding Film of the Year by the British Film Institute for the director, Aribam Sayam Sharma.

If you look carefully, you can see me in sitting house right at the Antariksha Sanchar preview showing (photo from Antariksha Sanchar website). DVD cover art for Sangai.

Delhi is a very big city with a very large dance community to which I have been introduced in only the most cursory of ways, given my limited time. I am impressed with the dedication and passion of those who pursue dance here. However, in choosing to focus on my teaching and research, I have felt quite isolated in my endeavors as I have traversed many different parts of the city and met with so many different people and no real time to follow up with everyone in a significant manner. My sightseeing has been minimal, and I am contemplating if I will actually attempt to play “tourist” again before I leave Delhi. On account of work and the upcoming Divali festival week (which seems to play as extensive a role for families here, as Thanksgiving does in the USA), I won’t actually do my return pilgrimage to the Taj Mahal. But there are some impressive sounding structures and compounds locally that I might try to visit.

This is stating the obvious, but getting older is challenging in and of itself. I need more light to read at night, and most text is too small for me to read even with my glasses on. When I have an injury, it takes days longer to heal than I used to tolerate. Maybe my point of view is colored by the fact that I have a chest cold, and just finding the energy to put this post together has taken me a few days. When I think about places in the world I have been, I remember all the friends whom I will never have the chance to see again, because they have passed away. And making new friends in “far off lands” can feel a little bittersweet, with the thought that one day I will be the “remembrance” for others.