Thanks to Paul Taylor and William J. Fulbright.

My first entry on this blog was June 30^th, 2018. Today I have decided this will be the last entry on this particular collection of reflections and remembrances. I started out wondering how, or if, my perceptions on anything might be different after six months on my own in India. After reading through all that I have written and documented, I don’t have any clear answer. But I would like to “wrap up” with some last thoughts and a “thank you” to everyone that has taken time to read even one post, much less the whole epic.

Spending half an orbit of the earth around the sun on the opposite side of the globe from my “home” is a sobering reminder that “life goes on” no matter where I might be located. Living in the moment as best as I know how, has been my response to the deaths of friends and mentors. The loss I feel in my life from friends who have died in the past year compels me to give them a few words here. It is not like we necessarily lived close by, or even that we had ongoing communications, the loss I feel is the “possibility” of seeing or hearing from them ever again in my lifetime. I have no idea of their state of mind when they died, and for those with whom I was in consistent contact, the inevitable would not wait for me to be available in person. Amongst these deaths was Paul Taylor, who passed away the very night I was in the air flying to India, and prior to my final return to New York City, the culminating memorial performance in his honor took place.

It is hard to deny that my position in the dance world is due in great part to my time dancing for Paul and my subsequent association to him post-performing. And by Paul’s dis-interest in developing a codified technique for training his dancers, I have been able to freely draw on my varied background prior to joining Taylor’s family in order to best serve a class or audience. In making presentations about who I am to audiences in India, I could directly connect choreographic works and venues in which I have performed to one perspective of ballet and modern dance in the USA during the twentieth century. All of which has helped me place my career into a context I had not previously considered. Still, dance and life is an experience of the “present”. It is what we do and feel today that seems ultimately the most important to what we might do tomorrow. While knowing and taking responsibility for our past can both help us build on what has come before and hopefully learn from past failures.

In responding to both heartfelt appeals and curiosity from students, dancers, teachers and peers in India, my honest answers were often illustrated with anecdotes of my personal journey through life. I have had less than proud moments in my life from which I have not necessarily deciphered a teachable lesson, but they have given me enough empathy for the joys and hardships of others to pause before offering a response or choosing to actively listen. Whatever the case, I feel quite confident that my ethno-cultural background, cross-disciplined dance career and education served me ideally to make the most of my Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship. It is hard to tell where this might lead in the future, if anywhere at all. And still, I could not have been more grateful for the opportunities I was able to create with the backing of my grant, especially as the very concept of spending part of a year teaching dance in India started with an inquiry from an institution with whom I did not end up working.

The future effects of any event is hard to know, but there is a cyclical nature to life that seems improbable when thinking of the people we may or may not have encountered in our lives. While in India, I was contacted by an individual who remembered me specifically from my performing and teaching in India with the Taylor Company in 1997. I work for the daughter of someone with whom I danced in California back in 1982. In Germany a few years ago, I reconnected with a high school friend from Jamaica whom I last saw in 1977. I can only hope that I live long enough to reminisce fondly with some kind soul I encountered for the first time in India in 2019.

Highlights of things I touched on learning while in India circle mostly around the importance of seeing two sides of history. In the USA, I learned a lot about how both ballet and modern dance evolved in “The New World” during the late 19^th and early 20^th century, through dancing works brought to life under Sergei Diaghilev, and decades of time spent at Jacob’s Pillow and the American Dance Festival. The influences of “Orientalism” in the Arts was aided by ship and later air travel that had evolved beyond explorers and commercial trade through the “World’s Fairs” and pioneers like Anna Pavlova, who became a world-wide super-star. Pavlova’s fame attracted the likes of Uday Shankar (who also crossed paths with Kurt Jooss and Rudolf Laban in the 1930’s) and Rukmini Devi Arundale (who founded Kalakshetra in 1936) to seek her company and in turn offer her access to the “exoticism” of Indian dance and culture. These connections also took place with Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn who founded Jacob’s Pillow in 1933, traveled on their own to India to study native dances. In the USA there are limited mentions of the pioneering artists, dancers and musicians who brought their Arts out of India, and returned to become arguable founders of “contemporary Indian dance” and “contemporary classical Indian dance”, today. In addition to the above mentioned, I will add two others, whom I addressed back in October, 2018, Veena Dhanamal and her granddaughter, Tanjore Balasaraswati. In India, amongst the dancers I was teaching, even though they all had an interest in modern dance and ballet, there was little recognition of names like Diaghilev, Pavlova, St. Denis, Shawn. Conversely, I would be surprised to discover if many young dancers in the USA have heard of the above mentioned Indians.

I did have the privilege of meeting both familial and artistic descendants of the above mentioned luminaries in India, amongst a few others whose stories and perspectives only add to the kaleidoscopic facets of an emerging Indian voice in dance beyond its borders in the 21^st century. A few other names from my younger life were revived with a different clarity while I was in India. In the late 1970’s, the teachings and writings of Jiddu Krishnamurti was popular with a few of my coaches. Less than a handful of my acquaintances in India were aware of Krishnamurti, but most had at least heard the names of Rabrindranth Tagore (a famous Indian polymath of poetry, music and painting), and Ramanujan (an early-20^th century mathematical “savant” who was one of the youngest Fellows of the Royal Society in Britain). Tagore played a small role in my readings in the 1980’s prompted by my introduction to Krishnamurti, and in India, I discovered Tagore’s poetry in some of the songs underlying contemporary classical Indian dances. Ramanujan’s name first came up for me in a long forgotten conversation with a math professor at UC Berkeley whom was a classmate in an American Sign Language class which we were both taking. Then in India, I encountered Ramanujan being used as the principal avatar in the development of the first Indian digital role playing game (RPG) to be based on Indian mythology and cultural perspective. Ramanujan was the subject of the movie, “The Man Who Knew Infinity”, but in the RPG his dreams and radical theories depict him as an Indian Leonardo da Vinci.

In today’s world of travelers that can check off “bucket-list” destinations in a matter of weeks, it is easy to imagine that a first impression is all that is needed to know a country and its culture. And even after six months, I was acutely aware of the personal adjustments that I did not make, based on the knowledge of an end date. At the same time, any sense of accomplishment would not be based on having mounted a specific production, writing a book, seeing a specific group of students graduate, or any such landmark event. Instead, I will be looking back at this time as a process of moving forward in my life while renewing a connection to most of what has put me where I am today. 

Photos courtesy of Purnendra Meshran