Filling the Available Time.

When my friend Jeff astutely noted that I might be “cognitively” exhausted from my sojourns here in India, I began to think about how I felt at the end of any time limited period of work. If there was a three week performance run, or a six week tour, or an eight week staging project, the last week always felt the hardest to me. It is as though my body and mind knew just how much energy and focus was required, given that I knew when the end was going to be.

Saturday 26th January 2019 was a national holiday, Republic Day.

I have often credited professionals in the performing industry with understanding deadlines. When the curtain goes up on a performance, there can be no more delays or excuses. And I have often been caught off guard when encountering professionals in other industries that don’t respect deadlines. I also recognize that completing a project by a certain date or time inevitably is more stressful the closer to the end one gets. For myself, there are always things that I cannot do too long in advance, and as a result, I rely on experience to plan out all the things that need doing towards the end.

An old favorite pic of me assisting Eleanor D'Antuono to rehearse the "Pas Deux de Voile" from La Bayadere.

This week I was asked to teach classical ballet variations at the end of a few of my ballet classes, and I realized that I had not thought about ballet variations in their entirety in years, and I needed time to retrieve them from the deepest recesses of my brain, the choreographic versions that I once danced. I feel fortunate that if I have the music, I can generally piece together how my body used to respond to specific choreographic sequences. Admittedly, I may occasionally reverse a few steps, and online videos are a big help in identifying what versions are familiar to me. However, I do clearly know when the choreography that I used to perform is not what I see on videos, and I want to teach the version in which I had been coached. Seemingly a lifetime ago that coaching provided me with an understanding of the intent and aesthetic, a physical coordination and a musical phrasing which I can still visualize, even if my body can no longer do it.

While I was actively dancing, I prided myself on a bizarrely good recall for choreography and spatial patterning. Ironically, as good as my recall was, revivals of dances inevitably led to arguments between cast members over specifics, and I generally gave my version of what I remembered and then did what everyone else wanted. So now when I see an old video, I can often identify the year of the taping based on the version I was dancing with which cast. I ultimately don’t think of individual steps as the most important part of choreography, rather I prefer to focus on the creative intent behind the movement and the expected quality of execution.

My observations here in India have also highlighted a certain benefit of having had my career from which I can draw class material. On the whole, it seems that teachers of all street, contemporary, and jazz forms are expected to make up new routines at least once per “batch” (term of classes). As I jump between teaching ballet and modern pretty regularly at multiple venues, I have turned to excerpting much of the great choreography I have had the privilege to dance. There is little that I can make up to illustrate or challenge technique or intent in a class setting, which has not been better served by some phrase extracted from the lexicon of great choreographers of whose work I have embodied at some point.

Beauty might be just inside.

With age has come a certain self-assuredness in my status as an educator and coach, while the “dancer mentality” within me still feels inadequate. A really great thing about the interactive nature of teaching is that if I am really present with addressing the students and their needs in the moment, then there is not much time to consider a right-way or a wrong-way. And since I am working with choreography that either I have done, or I have seen done, I know it is possible to achieve the end that I am asking. It is astonishing to realize just how much empirical evidence I have been collecting over the decades when I consider the teaching, staging and coaching I have done around the world. Not every instance may have been as successful as I might have hoped, but I try to believe that I always did my best, whether working with children, teens, pre-professionals or some of the elite in the dance world.

Different things keep me humble. No two environments or population of individuals give the same results, yet there is a certain standard that I may have in my head that I am hoping to achieve. I must believe in the level of competence and artistry that I expect; it is how I help dancers to find in themselves good execution and artistic understanding. At the same time, very rarely do changes happen quickly. After almost five months here, it is great to receive the positive feedback of my efforts both in the clarity of execution and intent by the dancers and the verbal confirmation. However, observing progress seems to uncover how much potential remains unlocked in the dancers, and I want to leave them with the tools to continue aspiring to be their best. Have I ultimately been able to go beyond “feeding” them a meal to them being able to work out how to “fish” for themselves?

A couple days ago the weather in Mumbai was surprisingly cool and clear. Every so often a steady breeze off the ocean clears out the pollution that typically hangs as a brown haze in the air, and walking outside was invigorating rather than oppressive. I tried to take a picture, but you just had to be here. The ocean breeze off of the Arabian Sea also provides moisture that layers the smells of the city, like thermoclimes in the ocean when you swim through a warm band of water. Suddenly the scent of ripe guavas and freshly peeled pineapple are gloriously wafted to nose level and not mingled with the fetid odors held closer to the ground.

With only a month left here on the ground in India, I have been acutely aware of how single-minded I have been about working. There are no regrets about not being more of a “tourist”, and it has been nice to have a few more social interactions outside of studios, institutions, and my field. We are not only our work, and it is often hard to connect with others as a person when one’s role as a teacher is, by its very nature, a position of power. In India there is a long held tradition of the Guru (Teacher) – Shisyha (Disciple) model of pedagogy. For me, the use of the word “disciple” versus “student” is a clear indicator of the way a culture might perceive a “teacher”, and modern dance in the USA seems to have evolved, in part, under a similar model where we even teach techniques named after individuals like Graham, Horton, and Dunham. Ballet in Europe also has its roots in techniques named after their original “gurus” like Bournonville, Cecchetti and Vaganova. And all of the above have distinctive differences, though today, I believe in a pedagogical approach that aspires to teach dancers (practitioners) to be the citizens of the dance world with a certain fluency and understanding rooted in whatever primary discipline and style to which they have first been exposed.

It's been a social blessing to have my former student Petra here in Mumbai working at the same time for five months, in the job that was supposed to bring me to India.

Admittedly, my teaching does differ when I am working with neophyte dancers with no background, and then I make clear distinctions between what I think of as style and mechanics within technique, whether I am teaching modern or ballet. For India, modern dance and European based classical ballet are still aesthetic and technical forms in a relative infancy. This is not to say that there have not been amazing and longstanding pioneers in/from/to India with these forms, but I suspect the “tipping” point was reached in recent decades where families and youth have become aware and interested in learning about these theatrical dance forms beyond the entertainment experience. Albeit possibly a byproduct of the music-video and reality-dance-competition age, where “celebrity” personalities espouse their backgrounds in classical ballet and modern dance leading them to their elite prowess.

The digital era has also facilitated negotiations and opportunities that I don’t know would have been possible in the pre-digital age. I have set up spending a week teaching “modern” dance in Goa as a guest artist in the Goa Dance Residency at the invitation of its founder/organizer, Nathaniel Parchment. I’ve actually never met Nathaniel in person as he is based in the UK, and due to the vicissitudes of inter-national visa bureaucracies, he will not be in Goa when I am there. Negotiations, coordination, content development for my other future projects, as well as ongoing work in New York, have all continued digitally while I have been here in India. In the past, my phone bill alone would have likely cost more than I could earn, when I realize I have coordinated substitute teachers for my classes in New York in February, developed content and performers for my participation in the Dance Prix de New York in March, finalized arrangements for travel and stay in Germany in May, and more.

On my way to work... where possible, I try to use routes that offer a usable side-"walk". :-)

On a final note this week, I am grateful that as a child, I was pretty obsessive about keeping up with daily bookkeeping of my personal accounts. The carryover was that I learned to not always dread the seeming monotony of daily training or perpetual chores like laundry. Before I leave India, I will need to complete my final reports for my Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, which should include a dated schedule of all my workshops and presentations. Upon my return to the US, I will need to have my expense reports completed for my taxes. So as the child compulsively doing my daily bookkeeping, who was lovingly mocked by his cousins, I am now thankful that I have kept up with recording my daily expenses, saved an ongoing calendar of activities/appointments, and now have this blog as an outline of what I was doing each week.