A 40-hour Week in a 72-hour schedule.

I’m flying back to New York City for a quick holiday break, which also means that I have passed the halfway mark of my Fulbright-Nehru grant in India. And it feels as though I’ve encountered a trend where the closer I get to departing from the city I have been working in, the busier I seem to get. For the past six days, I have started working at 9:00am and finished my last class at 9:00pm. Admittedly, apart from last Tuesday, I had a few hours to relax in the afternoon. However, I also had to travel between venues every day, and sometimes that constituted between forty-five minutes and an hour and a half in a car.

It’s become a pretty solid reality that I need at least an hour between when I wake up and when I can make it out the door to head to work, and I have been using the fifteen minute walk to Starbucks as a meditative exercise to stay focused on each part of my day as it comes. This helps me avoid feeling psychologically overwhelmed at the length and breadth of activities my day might hold. And at night, my greatest relief is when I actually get into the car I ordered, and can hopefully “zone out” until I am dropped back at my apartment complex. As I have mentioned before, I mostly use Uber to get around Mumbai, and waiting for the car to arrive is a mixed bag of emotions. Since the Uber app has a GPS map of where the car may be coming from, it can be frustrating to see the car not move for ten minutes when the ETA is saying five minutes. If the driver calls, I often worry that we won’t understand each other, either because of our mutually confounding accents, or because I don’t speak Hindi. But I have discovered that even Indians regularly hand their phones to strangers in an attempt to figure out why an Uber driver might be calling. Mostly the calls I get are to say that the driver does not want to go all the way up to Andheri where I am living, and then I have to start the process all over again. And my next most common anxiety is when the GPS connection gets dropped and I couldn’t tell whether or not the driver was headed in the right direction to take me home. However, by this time, I actually recognize most of the routes that lead back to my place in Andheri.

Packing for a seven day trip home was a little strange. I have a few gifts that fill the majority of the space in my luggage and I wanted to take stuff home that I was not really using in India. But there is really very little that I needed to pack since I am going home to where I know I have or can get everything I need. So I was looking at my extra watches, reading glasses and clothes still laid out where I could find them, after packing my backpack and a hand luggage sized case (which I would check, since having less pieces to forget or lug around airports seems prudent). Going to India I had a non-stop flight from NYC to Mumbai, but I am routed through London for my excursion home with a long layover in Heathrow Airport. Hopefully I will finish this post there. After teaching a full day, I made my way to the airport for a 2:15am flight and should sleep as much as I can on this ten plus hour leg of my sojourn.

Teaching dance in India under my Fulbright grant has been a fascinating lesson in networking and diplomacy within the dance field there. I have had great conversations with people both from the field and outside of the field, about the enigmatic fascination of the youth in India with dance that they find online and on television. And it touches, for me, on similarities to late nineteenth century “Orientalism” where ballet choreographers, dancers and visual artists used access to Indian and Asian cultures and dances as both inspiration, decoration and abstraction for their own form. However, I think that aesthetically as a global culture we have become more sensitive to the “appropriation” of dance forms that have a long history prior to the fascination of an age that only sees the “surface” of an Art. Almost all artists have a “why” for what they do, even when they can’t articulate it. And I find that in India, the desire to learn what they categorize as “Western” dance forms like Modern, Contemporary, Ballet, Jazz and Tap is based primarily on the snippets of video available to them. Yet they habitually create evening length works rather than experiment with shorter pieces that might demand less of their audience, who might be less “passionate” about dance in general. I perceive that there is a desire to provide dancers the chance to be competitive on an international level with dancers that have extensive training in ballet, jazz and contemporary forms, however, it is interesting to observe that much of approach is that “training” is separate from “dancing”. And for me all dancing is the “application” of training. I want a young (or beginning) dancer to be applying new skills and techniques within their training as they learn. I don’t particularly believe in technique as an end in and of itself.

In the years to come, I hope to see more of an Indian identity emerge out of their contemporary dance scene, and there are hints, in my limited exposure over three months in only two cities, to that happening. We compare the world to what we know, and I remember reading Rex Nettleford (co-founder of the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica) writing about Jamaica finding its own voice in dance by knowing who we are as a people. I would like to offer that thought to every young Indian dancer I encounter, along with the passionate choreographers and educators that are driving the field forward in India.

Teacher resources in the above mentioned forms are the most difficult to come by in India, and I think part of it is economic. For many teachers that might be interested in going to India from Europe or North America, the dance industry would be hard pressed to afford them an equivalent pay scale to what they might be able to earn where they are. And beyond economics is the lack of access to the very thing that I know stimulates me to investigate and grow within my own teaching, seeing live performances in the dance forms that inspire and sustained me to be a teacher within this field. There are also the challenges of living in an economically “developing” country with a culture that may be so different from one’s experience as to send some “running” back to the familiar. It is ironic to me that for the minor acknowledgment of being Jamaican in my performing career (and it makes sense as I don’t “look” Jamaican, I just “move” like one! J), that it is my Jamaican-ness that may have most contributed to my comfort in India during this time.

Heathrow Airport. As I was getting ready for the plane to land in London, I decided to flip through the British Airways magazine and what should I discover, “In search of 21^st – century Kingston”. The writer, Alexia Arthurs is a Jamaican-American, and I would just point you to the whole article if I could find it online. But no luck at the moment. So I will highlight quotes that struck me in common with my thoughts from above about Indian-ness in dance.

(O’Neil Lawrence, the curator at the National Gallery of Jamaica on Kingston Harbor) is paraphrased as having “the perspective that since more Jamaicans live outside of the island than on it, the diasporic experience is inherent to who we (Jamaicans) are as a people.”

In her interview with Andrew Jackson, a visual artist, about how he thought his “artwork and national identity intersect.” (Jackson) “explains how, growing up in the 1990s, he absorbed American, British, and Asian culture in books, and initially found those foreign experiences to be aspirational.” “But after a while I (Jackson) started to critically engage in my own culture because there was a kind of wholesale divorce, especially at the art school I was attending,” he says. “People didn’t know anything about [the folklore of] Anansi, or [the poet] Miss Lou. I am now able to critically engage in my culture. It’s become a part of my language.”

Last Tuesday I gave a presentation at the USA Consulate General about my life as a dancer in the USA, using footage of me dancing historic landmark works like versions of “Nutcracker” and “Coppelia”, “The Green Table” by Kurt Jooss, “Cakewalk” by Ruthanna Boris, and then original works by Brenda Way of ODC/Dance, and of course Paul Taylor. The idea was to give a context to how these works and these choreographers reflected and adapted the landscape of concert dance in America. But in presenting myself as an interpreter, or originator in some cases, I wanted to place who I am as a person into context as well. So I started out with quoting Miss Lou and comparing some Chinese-American works I had danced to tales of Anansi. By virtue of knowing who I am, I could create roles and investigate movement from a more instinctive, rather than calculated perspective.

I still have a few minutes here at Heathrow to try and post this online. So I’ll just also make a quick comment that by being in India, where Christmas is not the commercial enterprise that it is in the USA, it is really nice to realize that I am arriving back home without feeling as though I have been a misanthropic Grinch by ignoring holiday marketing. At the same time, airports definitely encourage you to shop when there is nothing to do but wait. So I am glad I have taken the time to write this blog instead. I hope that anyone reading this is able to enjoy the close of 2018 in their favorite way.