Walking on the Shady Side of the Street.

I have no idea if the “Sunny Side of the Street” was a metaphor for an optimistic outlook on life prior to the 1930’s song that was covered well into the 1940’s by great singers/musicians like Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong, to name a few. There is a lyric that explains “I used to walk in the shade with my blues on parade…”, but as a child I was puzzled why walking in the hot sun was preferable to the cooling shade of lush greenery, especially when there was a cooling ocean breeze that might have made its way into the heart of a big city like Kingston. Mumbai continues to transport me back to my childhood, and crossing to the shady side of the street on my daily commute to/from studios or out on errands has become reflex for me. It is actually a reflection that I am less distracted by the anticipation of why I am headed to my destination than being aware of my surroundings in the moment.

Look up! Palm trees in beach park in Dadar

As I have mentioned before, in my neighborhood there is a preference for walking in the street rather than on the sidewalks for a variety of reasons. Fortunately some of the streets I walk are narrow enough to have tree cover well over the roadway. An additional danger to walking on the sidewalks is that the drainage conduits run directly below the sidewalks, and there are usually access points covered by concrete blocks in various states of decay. Not paying attention or not seeing a gaping hole in the dark could be disastrous. Once again, it seems to make sense to just walk in the streets where such dangers are less frequently encountered.

Vegetable carts are a routine morning sight, and concrete "foot traps" on the sidewalks I traverse each day.

This leads me to an interesting self-described Indian cultural manifestation, juggaar (or jugaad), which roughly translates to “figuring out and manifesting the easiest solution with the least amount of effort.” It has also been described to me as “Indian engineering.” For some, this ability takes great intelligence and facile adaptability. However, when training dancers for whom the “end” is higher extensions, quicker footwork, more turns, etc., the easiest “means” are rarely justified or even helpful. For most physical disciplines there are no “shortcuts” to building strength, alignment, speed, balance, and amplitude. Additionally, dance in all its forms, for me, is still about “the how”, the quality of movement and transitions between shapes and ideas and through space.

Learning to dance requires an inordinate amount of repetition, and my new task in class is to keep the dancers aware of their “form” and “anatomical engagement” as they are becoming more familiar with the different kinds of physical vocabulary I have brought to them in both ballet and modern dance. This is similar to what a trainer might do for you in your workout at home or in a gym. “Juggaar” has manifest itself in a facile approximation of steps and movement in class, which means the dancers then cannot apply the techniques being taught in the early parts of class when attempting to execute more complex “skills” or choreographic sequences. So I have jokingly said that I want a sign outside my classes that says “NO JUGGAAR!”

Navdhara dancers rehearsing Paul Taylor's Cloven Kingdom.

The past couple of weeks found me teaching and then rehearsing a minimum of three hours a day, six days a week, with the dancers of Navdhara India Dance Theatre to teach them Paul Taylor’s “Cloven Kingdom”. It has been an extremely challenging process for them, and for me, as I had to recreate my notes for teaching the dance since I did not anticipate such a project before I left the USA. The pressure to teach them a twenty-five minute dance in two weeks was necessitated by the fact that they are performing this week and then have a four week break. I will have time to rehearse and refine the dance when they return in January, but it made sense to get the whole thing into their brains and bodies before they went on break. Interestingly, “juggaar” is extremely helpful to learn things quickly, but a lot of critical technical and dramatic detail does get missed. Still, both I and they should be proud of what has been accomplished as they are the first Indian dance company to actually learn an internationally recognized dance by Paul Taylor.

Next week I am scheduled to give a lecture-presentation at Dosti House which is a part of the US Consulate General’s compound in the Bandra Kurla Complex (commonly referred to as BKC) area of Mumbai. I need to get working on editing and adapting the presentation I made in Delhi at Triveni Kala Sangam, and which afforded me a couple of news articles to be published here in India and online. The more comprehensive article can be read at Asian Age, Monday 10 Dec 2018 - Richard Chen See 

In addition to the lecture and my usual teaching for The Danceworx, next week I am teaching workshops every evening Monday through Saturday from 7:00 – 9:00pm for Sumeet Nagdev Dance Arts in Dadar. My personal “carrot” to get through all that I have to do is that after my workshop on the 22^nd December I get to fly home to NYC for a short Christmas break. I’ll be winging my way back to India on New Year’s Day 2019, but this break reminds me that there is so much that happens in the world about which we as individuals cannot always be aware. I am grateful to continually find myself involved with dance beyond the USA, and I am also bewildered by the thought that I have been afforded the opportunities to share of my relatively obscure career, about which I am certain that no one in India was aware. How strange to imagine that less than a year ago, I was not known to 99% of the people that I have met and worked with since arriving in India. And the list of new associates continues to grow.

Life as a freelance professional does also require that I keep up with my networking and negotiations for potential future work. Adding to my workload in the past couple of weeks, has been keeping up with international correspondence, in the USA and Europe for possibilities in 2019 – 2021. Not all networking will necessarily result in work for me, and I am thrilled if it provides opportunities for others. But the continued interaction with past associates is a reassurance that there are traces of connections from my past.

Participating in the performing arts is by its nature an ephemeral series of intensely personal interactions. Whether you are in a conservatory, part of a company, cast in a show or responsible for setting work on different companies, for most of us, the people with whom we share our most vulnerable selves in the service of creating Art, will not be in our lives for long. The dancers here in India are similar to dancers the world over for their obsessive dedication to exploring their art spending a prodigious amount of their lives in the studios of their work. And even though I will be the one leaving in a few months, by necessity to best serve the dancers, we must build our relationships through trust and vulnerability. As a teacher and coach, I am not their friend, but I believe in being accessible, and for me that means caring about who the dancers are as individuals so that I can address their needs. And all of this comes with the knowledge that nothing lasts forever. So I treat the now as though it is forever, and in the future I will wonder what traces are left of my time here.