Looking Behind the Reflection.

It has been a strangely hard week, and I am not entirely sure I know why. There have not been particular obstacles in my way, and I have been able to accomplish all that I need to do each day. So why have I felt overwhelmed and un-motivated to get up some days? I have come to accept that my life has its ups and downs. It has always been easier for me to manage my mood when I have a job to do, and I know that others are relying on me to fulfill my part of the work. It is also equally exhausting for me to be in a consistently positive frame of mind as it is to be in a consistently negative frame of mind. So I choose to view these periods of emotional doldrums as necessary “regenerative” periods, where it is hard to “feel” too much.

Common conversation and interview questions are, “what is your favorite… ?” or “what do you like about… ?” At times like these, I have to be careful not to be too honest. Usually I opt to explain that I don’t often value experiences as comparatives, but rather as unique things onto themselves, and that on any given day, my “favorite” or “preference” will differ depending on the circumstances. Even as I write this, I realize I am being way too concerned with truth in diplomacy, and yet it is who I am.

My sense of time is a little skewed at the moment, and I don’t have the energy to try and sort out what happened when this week. So I’m just going to write about things in the order of how I am using events to organize my thoughts for this blog.

For a variety of reasons, the reality is settling in that I am nearing the end of my time in India, and I am still asking myself, “What have I been able to contribute, and to what purpose?” The next question for me is inevitably, “Do the answers to my first questions really matter?” After all, I am here, I have been busy, I have actively tried to make the most of opportunities, and I believe I have done the best I could. The dance and performing arts fields are by their very nature “in the moment”, and so being able to say that I have been present, committed and accounted for seems both the least and the best that I could do. It has taken constant reflection on my own training, self-discipline, gifts of talent, and hard won experience to believe in myself as the right person to be here in this moment. Trying to find different ways to address, communicate and elicit self-realized progress in students has been a constant puzzle for me here in India. And small clues and cues have come to light as I try to observe how my day to day living in India might be good analogies or imagery for Indian dancers.

I still dread crossing many streets in Mumbai, but they are a reality and watching pedestrians weaving through traffic towards me is not a reassurance that I won’t be the next roadkill. This reality has become one of my favorite analogies for highlighting when dancers demonstrate a lack of spatial and visual awareness in a studio setting. And when I notice the dynamic curves of the all-pervasive and inimitable Ganesh sitting on dashboards and by gate posts, I am reminded that the visual aesthetic vernacular does not readily emphasize the elongated lines and extended arcs of the more austere and minimalist Euro-centric dance forms in which I am versed. I have been here long enough that unless I am deliberately “looking” I might “not” see the video-game-like absurdity of crossing the street, and might miss the unique beauty of the myriad representations of Ganesh.

This past week also brought news of a once good friend having lost his fight with pancreatic cancer. Christopher Morrison and I were young dancers together in Jamaica before I moved to the USA. After dancing for the National Dance Theatre Company in Jamaica, Chris went on to dance for Garth Fagan Dance Theatre in Rochester, New York. And it had been great to feel a certain kinship as friends and dancers from a tiny West Indian island with ongoing careers in dance. It was sad to lose a friend, but more startling to me was to realize that I have been away from home long enough to have not had any inkling that he had been sick in recent months. Chris’s death also made me think of how similar the sentiments might be between the diaspora of Jamaican dancers and Indian dancers around the world away from the country of their birth and early training. In some ways, my presence here as one of a growing number of foreign visitors teaching non-Indian dance forms is contributing to the future diaspora of Indian dancers in various companies and productions around the world, and in honor of Chris, I remember the ambivalence of needing to leave my home country to pursue an uncertain future, in a field that I was not sure I would ever be able to join as a professional.

Dance and Fulbright-Nehru mixing in Mumbai. It's a bit much to introduce everyone, but from left to right across both pictures:
Sasha, Richard, Petra, Michelle, Sumeet, Yuko, Michelle, Yuko, Yudit, Petra, Rochelle, Richard, Megan.

My former student, Petra, who has been here in Mumbai teaching dance for Shiamak Davar is coming to the end of her five month sojourn, in about ten days. So she arranged a friendly gathering of the many people she has met in her apartment complex and through my Fulbright and dance connections. I think she was quickly dubbed an honorary Fulbrighter in Mumbai after I brought her with me to one of my first gatherings with other Fubrighters resident here for all or part of their projects. Sharing a parallel time in Mumbai with Petra has been a humbling reminder of the how different an experience can be for two people. And it is such a relief when I see how much she has taken advantage of her time in India, for better or worse. She took on the job to which I had originally responded that put India on my radar as a Fulbright project. So I feel pretty responsible for the fact that she has been here, good and bad. In many ways, Petra has been as adventurous as I once was, when I had been younger than she is, in a foreign “world”. It will be interesting to hear how we reflect on our time in India when we meet again back in the USA later this year.

Yesterday I conducted a workshop at the Future School of Performing Arts in the Bandra Kurla Complex area of Mumbai, that was open for anyone in the “dance community” to attend, and based on the turnout and enthusiasm of the participants, all of whom were completely new to me, I have offered to run a follow up workshop before I leave in February. As mentioned before, I have found the dance community here in Mumbai to be fairly segregated by the academies and companies as “open” community classes are not an ongoing reality, so even when I teach “open” classes for different academies/institutions, they are attended mostly by students already exposed to dance at those specific academies. So my best option to reach a broader section of dancers has been to try and teach workshops at different institutions.

When I was dancing for companies like Paul Taylor, and would teach master classes as a part of local outreach while touring, it was easy to select content by introducing principles and movement from whatever dances we were performing. However, with no performance or opportunity to show the full context of why my approaches to dance have practical, real world application, I have needed to think of these “community” workshops as an end unto itself. In India, I have discovered that my approach to movement can be as new and different for many dancers as the first time I was introduced to the rudimentary concepts of Hindi as a language versus my knowledge of English was different for me.  So I have been attentive to teaching from a very personal perspective of what worked for me in my own training background; highlighting how I adapt my approach based on what I perceive helps the dancers in the session to gain a somatic and an intellectual understanding of the movement I am teaching.

On a different topic… I was checking my email this morning, Sunday, and received a fraudulent charge notice on an old bank account. I was initially worried that it was regarding the credit card I have been using the most here, because it does not charge me an international exchange fee. Thankfully, the fraud and issues are with an account that does not affect my last couple of months here. But I did end up spending an hour on the phone with the fraud and accounts departments to get everything cleared up. Happily along with the unrelenting nature of fraud in digital banking and commerce are online call services like Skype where I did not end up spending more money than the fraud charges in question on international phone calls.

Unhappily the digital age and cell phones have left me subject to receiving spam and telemarketing calls that come in to my US phone at all hours (mostly between 1:00 - 3:00 AM) because the callers don’t know or care that I am in India. I don’t actually answer international calls on my cell if the number is not already in my phone book and can be identified. This is partially because my US mobile service carrier charges me for each international call I receive if I pick it up. All of this makes a lot of sense when I realize that most Indians use WhatsApp for texting and calling more than they use regular mobile cell service.

So freedoms come with costs. Good things come with bad things. The exotic is a matter of what is familiar. Glaciers, a frozen tundra, a sandy desert stretching to the horizon are all things that would be exotic to me. Yet there are people who live in these kinds of environments for whom the tropical beaches and congested urban jungles are the exotic. It is hard to explain how “familiar” life in India has felt to me, yet it does not elicit in me a yearning for my bygone childhood in Jamaica. I just have no conflicting desires of going to see the “sights” versus going to work, either or both are fine with me.