The End and the Beginning

Quote of the day:

“One must keep dreaming.”

- Padma Sri Dr. Sunil Kothari, on making it in the arts

Today was our last morning body conditioning class with Natasha, we all felt its significance. Somehow, the second week of DanceIntense flew by without warning. We started out the day with some very apropos morning Michael Jackson moves as part of our workout:

A discussion group followed the class, and Natasha imparted to us how she herself choreographs a piece (as she did with White Space) as well as the process she follows. We spoke of the next steps and how to continue in “real life” what we began, created and shared with each other in the close-knit ashram environment of DanceIntense. How does one upkeep the level of performance and learning we have all achieved over the last few days?

Physically, maintaining a higher level of physical shape is less grueling than the process of getting into it in the first place, something DI clearly did over the last fortnight. The trick is to keep doing some form of exercise on a daily basis, and not simply thrice a week. One does not need endless hours of activity, just something physical once a day. Once it becomes an ingrained daily habit one takes for granted, then everything else just falls into place.

The wonders of email, youtube and Facebook will definitely play their part in keeping us all connected and close to each other, as they already have proven to do so. Emotionally, it will be hard to be apart from the group, and we are as a result taking as many group photos as possible.

The rest of the day was spent on rehearsals for the sharing show we were to perform that evening in front of friends, family and other local invited artists. We started with Kumi Behen’s contemporary kathak choreography, the Odissi Mangala Charanam, some of the group and duet work from Shobana’s workshops, Roger’s Thread piece, Natasha’s White Space excerpt, and Kumi Behen’s technique piece, all interspersed with some of our solos re-worked under the guidance of Brian Webb, ending with the grand and joyous finale of Santosh-ji’s Chhau piece.

When I take a step back to examine the kind of items we performed at the sharing show, I realize that the nineteen of us have achieved something truly incredible. In a mere day or two, most of us have not only learnt an entirely new style of dance, but we have performed an entire item in that style at a performance level, all of which might normally take a year or two to master. I think it is reasonably safe to take a moment to be proud of ourselves and just how far we have come in such short time.

Post-show, there was the requisite eating and indo-house dance party, of course. In the later evening, we moved back to the dorms and hung about seated in the adjoining hall, unwilling to be parted from each other just yet. Sinthiya blessed us with her gorgeous singing voice, and even Sunil-ji came also to listen and hang out with us.

Later on we moved the festivities into one of our dorms where we engaged in much partying, fun and raucous games, proving once again that dancers can make any place a party. We enjoyed each other’s company well into the wee hours of the morning.

The next morning was checkout time, and we all parted in different directions. Many went to visit Niagara falls, and I personally went to an all-women’s spa and bath-house. Either way, we all headed off to watery parts of some sort.

DanceIntense had come to its inevitable close. It was the end of an amazing time, but the beginning of new and solidly forged friendships that had merely begun, and those I think will stay with us all for a long, long time to come. Ye baath!

Day 12: Capturing momentum

Nureyev once told me, “Till you dance and splash your blood on the floor, only *then* are you a dancer.”

- Sunil Kothari

We tossed each other around today. The wrestler-like Allen Kaeja was teaching us a fun-filled workshop on Contact Improv. We were sure he must have studied the programme book extensively because he magically knew each of our names correctly without anyone ever introducing us.

We started the class with an exploration of improvisational sensorial movement, paying attention to how an articulation of the joint travels through the body, reverberating through it. The contact improv method relies not on power but in capturing the momentum of the other, very similar to martial arts in the way of utilising the energy given and redirecting it to where you want it to go.

At one point Monica and I were quite successful in the partner work. Subhash, being light as a bird was ridiculously easy to lift and toss, and it all felt fun and strong.

In the afternoon Allen talked to us about his work in dance and film. He showed us his amazing film “Asylum of Spoons”. I thought it was fantastic, it was a new way of watching dance and film.

Film, he remarked is uncompromising and  it demands truth. The choices are unlimited, so the choices you make define who you are. Imagine dance presented in a more dynamic shooting style designed to capture the energy of the dance versus the constraints provided by the traditional proscenium. On dance films not to be missed he recommended DV8 and Enter Achilles.

The high point of the evening was an impromptu interview with dance writer Sunil Kothari, himself. A dear, elderly man, he is a veritable walking encyclopedia and treasure trove of information on the history of dance. He was also full of hilarious stories which we were delighted to hear.

Some snippets of our conversation with him:

Starting from 1956 or so, when he gave up his chartered accountant job his family went into an uproar…

Balasaraswati was sarcastic, and chewed paan constantly. She was a tall, “pleasantly plump” woman. She was coarse in nature, but the moment she danced, she cast a spell with her famous performance of Krishna Nee Begane which Sunil-ji saw with his own eyes. In that same dance festival, Kumi Behen herself danced on the next night along with Pt. Birju Maharaj. I cannot even imagine the performances he must have seen!

Sunil-ji began to write in the Times of India on appreciation of dance.

On Chandralekha: “I draw from my yoni,” she said provokingly in 1985 to the press. “A fiery woman,” Sunil-ji remembered.

He went on to ask what are the standards of evaluating contemporary work? Publications on these are few, so new metrics are perhaps required?

On what kinds of dance works he likes to see: ones with connections. He gave the example of Natasha’s Bharata Natyam movement and but while wearing a tutu in her piece White Space. Using or showcasing the connections between worlds or cultures in well thought-out way was what he found the most interesting.

Other gems of wisdom he gave was as such:

“Read!” (Young people don’t do it nearly enough).

“Also, marry rich!” (It helps when trying to have a career in dance).

We must have listened to him for an hour or two. He was wonderfully giving of his time and wisdom, and I think it is amazing of him to be constantly making the efforts to see what is happening in the world of dance. I, for one hope to keep running into him at more dance happenings throughout the world for many more years to come.

Day 11: This space, that space

We spent part of the morning learning more of Natasha’s White Space piece, though I took it easy and let my injured foot catch its breath. I had been very mindful of letting it get the rest it required, and was quite delighted and impressed that I could actually participate much more than I had surmised before DI began.

Roger Sinha taught us some of his unique vocabulary which stems from contemporary dance infused with elements of Bharata Natyam. It was interesting to see what someone not trained in indian classical dance would find interesting. As it happens, the style of Bharata Natyam provides a wealth of negative space around the body to play with. A lot of Roger’s duet choreography uses the cartesian structure that Bharata Natyam provides along with a playful contemporary counterpart that explores through touch and invasion of this offering of negative space. We learnt an excerpt of his latest work he did with Natasha called Thread.

Our afternoon guest speaker was Ginette Hamel, who spoke on injury in dance, a very needed seminar as many of us were sporting one injury or another. The seminar was quite interesting, although I found many of her methods more ballet specific than generally applicable.

We did learn an interesting trick, though: massaging just underneath the scapula by rolling over a small ball loosens the nerves up in such a way that it enables you to jump higher. We tried this and it really did seem to work!

That night we celebrated Umesh’s birthday at the closest local bar, Hoops. We were quite the fun and rowdy bunch. We would have taken over the karaoke booth as well, had it not been for an old Italian man and his young counterpart who seemed to be using the venue for practicing their advanced amateur cheesy euro-lounge balads. We left them to their devices and went off to hopefully get a decent night’s sleep.

Day 10: As above, so below

We were all quite eager to what guest speaker Santee Smith of Kaha:wi Dance Theatre, from the Mohawk Turtle Clan would impart to us. None of us had ever really had any exposure to North American aboriginal dance forms and we were very curious to see what we would learn.

It being mid-afternoon, Santee thankfully got us up and moving a little bit as many of us in that post-lunch time were prone to nodding off to sleep given two minutes and a chair to sit in. As long as we were dancing, we were alert and awake.

She taught us that the traditional forms were all based in communal dancing: circular in grouping, and rebounding energy from the Earth through the feet. Gravity plays a big role, meditation is key, and there are rules to directions of movement within the group.

Santee bases much of her movement on her ancestral dance form, but brings it into the contemporary scene in such interesting ways. Simply by placing the dance form on a stage makes it contemporary already. We asked her how the elders of her community felt about such “contemporising”, and it was interesting to note that though there were some dance items that were regarded as sacred which she chose not to perform, most other items and movements were never an issue.

Even more interesting was her clan’s attitude towards tradition vs. contemporary: explorations such as these were encouraged. There were elders appointed in the society whose sole responsibility was to preserve the old ways, so as long as their role was filled, others could explore the new ways as much as they liked.

Santee showed us a video of her own artistic journey and then performed one of her pieces for us in the studio. She was a joy to watch dance, her happiness in sharing herself and her art was contagious. The class ended all too soon for us.

Day 9: Mastering the Subtle

Quotes of the day:

“Kathak is an illusion”

- Anjali Patil, Kathak dancer

“Dance is infinite, the more you learn the more there is to learn.”

- P.B. Smt. Kumudini Lakhia

tat.. tat.. tigadha diga diga tigadha diga diga tat.. tat..
thai-ya.. thai-ya kran
tat tat tigadha digadiga tigadha digadiga tat-tat-thai
tigadha digadiga tigadha digadiga tat-tat-thai
tigadha digadiga tigadha digadiga tat-tat-THAI!

Tukdas or tukras were the order of the day, that is to say sets of pure aesthetic dance compositions that pick up speed and are set to bols or rhythmic syllables. These included the placing of the hands and arms through space, turns, the kathak gaze,  and those daunting spins which I was finally able to do, and that without getting dizzy!

For years, up until this week, I had relegated kathak to a style of dance I was simply not built for, full of moves I would never really be able to master. One session with Kumi Behen and her excellent pedagogy and suddenly a whole new world opened up to me. Move with the wrist, not with the hand; look with the nose, not with the eyes. Somehow, following simple instructions like these creates a different kind of intimacy with the dancing body. Kumi Behen had likened this to a baby who lifts its arm discovering it for the first time. Abhinaya, or the essence of expressive dance is the look on the mother’s face as she watches her baby in this intimate discovery. It seems to me that the mastery of Kathak lies in the mastery of the Subtle.

Day 8: The Potency of Space

Quotes of the day:

The Kathak student: “How do I avoid getting dizzy?”

The Kathak master: “Don’t get dizzy!”

- Padma Bhushan Srimati Kumudini Lakhia addressing my worries regarding the Kathak spins

We started our morning with Natasha Bakht’s body conditioning workout, which is a mixture of yoga, pilates and kallaripayattu exercises. She works us hard, and at the end of every class, we learn a section of her repertoire from her latest piece White Space (I saw it last year, it’s my favourite work of hers thus far).

We had our first workshop of two in Bharata Natyam with Menaka Thakkar. She spoke of the notion of learning different classical styles and yet being able to not let one form “infect” the others. After a certain point once you have achieved a maturity of movement in one style, you won’t lose it by learning others. She has been a dance master for a few decades now, here in Toronto, and her aramandi remains fantastic.

The afternoon brought on a real treat. The eminent Kathak master Kumudini Lakhia was to teach us Kathak for the rest of the week. At nearly 80 years old, she is a force to be reckoned with. Spry, strong, and as quick with her wit as she is with her footwork she is an amazing teacher.

She spent time teaching us the essential basics and subtleties of Kathak over and over again until it was drilled into our bodies. Lift only with the wrist not the hand or the shoulder; look at the hand with the nose and not the eyes; and all manners of how to hold oneself for Kathak before the dancing even begins. She gave us such fantastic insight into the art form she has mastered, and we simply devoured everything she gave to us.

Kumi-behen (as she is also called) is hilarious and quite a jokester in class:

“Don’t look down, your feet aren’t going to run away!”

“Ohoh! Everyone is getting their arms confused, good thing you only have two!”

She spoke to us of the potency of space. You work within an immediate surrounding of space; if you want to explore more, you  must move to a new space, but one must not ignore all the immediate space around an arm, a neck, or a foot. In space there is potency, and infinite potential.

She drew parallels with Kathak and the Vaishnavite following, as opposed to the Shaivite philosophy with other forms such as Bharata Natyam. You see it in the temple styles, the Shaivite ones of the south being geometrical and linear, whereas the Vaishnavite ones being more curvy, and lyrical as is Kathak.

At the end of class, we all crowded around her chair where she sat, her feet not quite touching the ground as she told us stories of her life adventures and occasional Obama jokes. Every now and then, one realizes during moments such as these that one is in the presence of a particular kind of greatness. We all felt it, I think.

The afternoon brought in a guest, Sylvie Bouchard who came to speak to us about the Outside Eye/Dramaturge (the former term is more used in dance, I think, and the latter for theatre) and on how to give and receive comments.

Here are her guidelines for an outside eye to formulate their questions and comments:

• what is not clear?
• when do you feel out of the piece?
• when do you feel let down (i.e. expectations)?
• when do you feel confused?
• what touches you?
• when do you feel in the piece?
• who do you think the dancers are to each other (in a group piece)?
• is there a journey? When does it carry through and when not?
• what images, if any do you receive from the piece?

As an outside eye, one must stay open and trust one’s instinct, and the same goes for the dancer or choreographer. You, as the choreographer must stay true to your vision, and an outside eye’s feedback may or may not represent changes you would necessarily bring about, but they can at the very least help you clarify what you do and don’t want in a piece. You must honour what feels right for you.

Day 7: A Day Off

Today we all went in different directions: some went to the Caribana festival, others visiting various monuments around Toronto and posing for pictures in Chhau positions. I myself met up with a series of different Toronto friends, going directly from one meal to the next as I did. Fortunately, the weather held up and it was a gorgeous day.

Day 6: Funding and Textures

Quote of the day:

A society strong in the performing arts, is a healthy society.

- Metcalf Foundation representative

Today was our last day with Shobana-ji, and I think we’re already going through anticipated withdrawal symptoms with Santosh-ji, whatever will we do without our morning Chhau classes?? We performed our Chhau sequence in form of some of the organizers and Santosh-ji himself. With Shobana, we worked on adding textures to our existing sequences. What would movements look like if we applied the textures of “rubber” and “biscuit” to them? Very, very cool.

We had a seminar afternoon dealing with funding, and how specifically to get it for dance. Apparently, there are quite a few grants to apply to both at the group and individual level, more than we think, it seems. They mentioned giarts.org which has a lot of listings for North America as well as the Chronicle of Philanthropy which has a weekly listing of available grants and funding organisations.

They gave us tips on applying for funding, especially with regards to video:

• do it bright and clear and in a well-lit studio, not as ants at the back of a dark theatre
• honesty from the heart is the most engaging
• show it to your peers
• press the fast-forward button of your video and see if it’s still engaging – that’s what they do!

That evening, we were treated to a fantastic show featuring many of our master teachers and other invited guests: Ramli Ibrahim (Odissi), Andrea Nann (Contemporary), Brian Webb (Contemporary), Nova Bhattacharya (Contemporary), Sudeshna Maulik (Kathak), Karen and her daughter Mika Kaeja (adorable!), Allan and Karen Kaeja (Contemporary and Contact dance) and Santosh Nair (Chhau). What a treat for the eyes.

Later on that night, after some nonsense with certain bouncers not accepting certain international IDs, we hit the clubscene en masse and showed Woodbridge, Toronto just how it’s done right. Naturally, we took over a significant part of the dance floor and claimed a couple of speakers to boot. I’m sure it was the first time the likes of Club Luxy ever saw Chhau moves expertly meshed with the bump and grind of house and techno music.

Day 5: Merce in Retrograde

Working from vocabulary, we create sequences, from which we may string sequences together into full meaningful phrases. This last step and not the sequences themselves is called choreography.

We continued working on our choreographic phrases with Shobana-ji today, delving into how to make abhinaya something more contemporary. We took a phrase of a story told through expressive dance and did the following to it:

1. removed all facial expression
2. removed movements that repeated
3. removed all pauses in the sequence
4. and then reversed or retrograded the second half of the phrase partway through.

What a remarkably different result!

In sad news, we learnt today of the passing away of Merce Cunningham last Sunday.

Denise Fujiwara began our afternoon in a vastly interesting way, with a workshop in Butoh. We learnt to move in ways most dance forms do not have. It was interesting to note that Butoh disregards what “looks nice” and values things like the presence of the performer, the inner life of the self, the obliteration of self, inventiveness and transformation. We had an illuminating time, deconstructing our inner selves and engaging more wholly in our own existing dance practices. It gave us a whole new way of looking at or feeling our own performances.

Day 4: Dancer-Warriors and their Lighting

It seems we never tire of starting our mornings with Chhau. Today, we actually practiced some sequences with music, which adds even more energy to our dancing. We were all perfect little warriors (see the video from day 1) dancing to the beat of the Chhau dhol. We could do this all day long, except we’d never get around to learning anything else. Santosh-ji is a fantastic teacher, he makes us work hard, but the entire class never ceases to be fun.

Today we started choreography with Shobana Jeyasingh. Last time I had a bad back injury and was unable to participate, so I have been ecstatic to get a second chance to work with her. She took us through her choreographic process and which began with a single point of inspiration: two pages from a book called Londonstani (which I am told is a must-read). From this short read, we chose five seeds, in this case, 5 different words that jumped out to us about the story. We then got into groups and began creating movement vocabulary depicting each of those 5 words. With the constraints of these 5 seeds, the first step is in generating movement, and then choreography only begins when you start to make decisions about what to keep, what to throw out and what to change.

It was both amazing to see what people came up with and also to see that as much as the sequences changed drastically, the thread of the storyline and the feeling those two pages gave us still remained strong in all the works.

The afternoon brought with it a Lighting for Dance seminar with Arun Srinivas, which was extremely helpful. Most of us had little idea about lighting design for performances as well as its importance during the creative process of a dance piece. I find that myself, personally have thus far overlooked the importance of proper lighting design, a pity, since it’s something that can make or break a performance. Well, now we know for sure: it’s an art.

We learnt all about using contrasting lighting colours on costumes, or at least a duller version of the same colour, and creating moods and shapes with light. We also learnt the neat tricks of washing white stagewear with a teabag to cut some of the blinding whiteness out and using fluctuations in light intensity on overlapping gobos to cheat and achieve motion in light. Neat.

Yet again, the food has improved a bit more, especially since the Brits found that piece of moldy bread the other morning. In the last DanceIntense I had ridiculous silly dreams of going caffeine-free for the whole residency, a notion which lasted probably one whole day. Now of course, I have learnt my lesson and have been practically dousing myself in strong tea at every meal. I’ll worry about normalizing my dosage when I get back.

Ten of us, wanting to polish the Odissi piece for the sharing show on the 7th headed to the studio after dinner to practice under Ramli-ji’s guidance. Because of course dancing all day long is not enough, we needed to continue into the night as well. Thankfully, for the performance we will be able to depend on Atri’s remarkable memory retention and Malini’s Odissi expertise to help us through this!

After practice we had about 25 minutes to hit the library and get our internet fix, as we were still sorting out our accounts for getting online in our dorm building. A sullen bearded grad student type at the help desk seemed rather nonplussed to be interrupted from his Nietzschean reading in order to grant a gaggle of sweaty, noisy dancers access to bare minutes of internet time, but he did. The control key on my keyboard refused to work, but I had enough time to finally expound in my Facebook status as to how much fun we were all having.

Day 3: Artistic Statements

Quote of the day:

If you want to hear heavy breathing, just go to a contemporary dance show these days.

- Brian Webb

Today was Nova Bhattacharya’s practical “how to write and talk about oneself in dance” seminar followed by her awesome choreography class. In the seminar, she outlined 4 simple rules in order to be prepared to answer anything artistic about yourself, which can really be applied to all sorts of other realms, if you ask me:

1. Don’t apologize, say things without artifice
2. Be honest, to thine own self be true
3. Use examples to describe what you do, not necessarily from the world of dance
4. Don’t underestimate people’s intelligence, but don’t overestimate people’s knowledge

We talked about one’s Artistic Statement and how once this is figured out, you begin have an idea about who you are as an artist and more importantly, how to express that to people. An artistic statement defines who you are now, outlines your current process and allows the engager into your world. This of course will change over time as you change, but it is important to define and redefine this as you progress. Your artistic statement is a result in words of you living your life, really.

Nova also gave us a set of questions to ask ourselves which will in turn aid us in presenting ourselves in both informal and formal settings:

• How do you define yourself as an artist?
• What is your take on the social, cultural and political world around you?
• What excites you as a person? What are your passions? Your drives?
• What do you question about the world?
• What draws you to this form of expression as an interpreter and/or choreographer?
• What are you trying to say, as a choreographer and/or interpreter?
• As a choreographer, what process do you use to say what you want to say?
• Who is your targeted audience?
• As an interpreter, what process do you go through to realize the intent and context of a choreographer’s vision?
• As an artist, where do you fit in?
• What are your medium-to-long-term goals?
• What is your trajectory, what has been your path through dance?

So quite a few important questions to think about, but necessary ones, nonetheless.

Nova’s choreography class was great fun. We did different exercises in taking turns being choreographers for small sequences. For the second exercise, a few of us were given a prop to work with as visual imagery to create a starting point for a piece. Here is a little sequence I created when Nova handed me a book of poetry and paintings. Instead of using the content in the book, I liked the feel of the book itself in my hand, and I was inspired to create this:

Today’s food improved yet again, suspiciously. We knew our complaints had had an impact, but we were sure it had to be an entirely different cook providing this new food. Feeding 19 hard-working dancers is a ridiculously easy feat, since they are too ravenous to be picky, so you can only imagine just how bad the food was in the beginning.

That evening, we did an extra session with Brian, as people worked further on their own solos and tweaking them. Shyamala had a piece with text, and Brian urged her to try it again, contrasting the angry-ness of her footwork with a monotonous voice. It ended up creating a heightened horror factor, a surreality, and an interesting tension of contrast.

That night I tried valiantly to get to bed early, but borrowing an acronym from Annalize, I was suffering from FMS syndrome (‘Fraid of Missin’ Somethin’), so it was a late night yet again!

Day 2: Apollo and Dionysius

The morning brought Chhau (can’t get enough of it!) and then more exploratory work in choreography with Brian. We reworked our own solos from the showcase night, making changes in choreographic punctuation and space and seeing what effects such changes had on each piece. We discussed reserving certain parts of the space for certain parts of the our pieces, safe spaces and their invasions and making radical decisions as doing a pure abhinaya piece (expressive and storytelling dance) with the back completely to the audience and seeing what emerged. Vastly interesting.

Today, however I would say was definitely a day of pure Odissi joy. Impressively, we somehow managed to learn an entire performance piece, a Mangala Charanam in the Odissi style and were passably able to run it from beginning to end. Not bad at all for a style of dance that was brand new to most of us! Our second session with Ramli-ji was all contemporary.

We delved into the principles of Apollonian versus Dionysian, Order as opposed to chaos and whether one kind can truly exist without the other. Do we not need one to express or showcase the other?

We continued with exploring the rasas (or the 9 different emotions), and we took turns in groups tackling the challenge  of how to express a rasa in differing ways and not be literal about it. Can Bharata Natyam or Odissi express abhinaya through forms other than mime? And if it does, is it a bad thing, really? Can it be contemporized? All good questions we all asked with our bodies and minds. The answers were interesting.

Dinner was Indian food, and there was an improvement, we found. It was still bland but a big jar of hot mango pickle helped a goodly amount with adding flavour. We all traipsed back to the residence, asked the security guy for directions to the nearest bar for whenever we got a chance and hung out in the lobby giving each other conga line massages and trying and failing yet again to get to bed at an early hour.

Day 1: Chhau and Space

The boot camp of DanceIntense begins! I arrived with a pre-existing foot injury from a combat-theatre show in June, and I planned to make sure I took it easy as needed. Not the most ideal thing for a foot injury, to be sure, but I intended to be as careful as I could.

The morning brought with it early breakfast and what was now becoming an addiction for us, our Chhau session with Santosh-ji. What an interesting art form, I find it works the entire body in a way that I haven’t really encountered in other art forms.  It is a form that is meditative and martial, and lyrical and forceful all at the same time. There are generally three ways to practice one movement: in the Kalibhanga (slow, languid, lyrical), Hatiardhara (male, forceful), and Kalikata (the neutral medium) styles. Here is a very nice description of all three types:

The first, “Hatiardhara”, meaning holding of an arm for marital and masculine characters, “Kalibhanga”, meaning the pliant end of a spring for more delicate lyrical and non-martial characters especially females and “Kalikata”, meaning to cut off the tender spring with a weapon is a judicious mixture of the other two for both male and female characters.

(source from here)

Check out a practice video of a short sequence we did:

We learnt that Chhau was “fun and pain together!” although I think the fun masked the pain quite well, I would say. One of the best parts of the class, of course was that we started off with partner massages before our daily 90 minute dose of Chhau.

Thoroughly refreshed and awake, we recessed for fifteen minutes and began our class with contemporary dancer and artistic producer of the Canada Dance Festival Brian Webb. We began with a qi-gong (chi-kong) session and moved onto exercises in discovering space. We tried interesting exercises in moving collectively through space. How do we view space? Why do we move through space? What does a movement mean in space and how does the nature of the message it conveys change when you change the space? It was interesting to deconstruct our existing notions of space, and how it is used, especially in the classical forms.

We engaged in discussions about how DanceIntense was intended to be a “safe environment”, or a laboratory where we could give ourselves permission to explore and to bend or break any traditional rules, if only to see what would happen. This, of course is where interesting and unexpected things start to occur in art.

After lunch (dismal, still) we had a visit from Carmen Romero, a Toronto based Flamenco dancer, who came to talk to us about her dance form and also to get us to learn a few moves, which of course got us all excited, naturally. She had us doing some basic steps and the palmas in no time. She gave us a fiery demo of Flamenco and also introduced us to the “secret” political world of a flamenco show on stage. There are rules by which to dance or sing or play guitar, the dancer gives signals to the guitar so that he may know when to wind down or wind up in certain parts, but the singer controls everything. They say that if a singer doesn’t like you, she can sing you off the stage, if she sings a certain part of a song, you are forced by the rules of music and dance to wrap up and leave! Who knew of the powerplay on stage?!

The next session that day brought the earthy and graceful classical dance form of Odissi taught by Ramli Ibrahim of Sutra Dance Theatre in Malaysia. I have always wanted to learn Odissi, which movement-wise is so completely different from Bharata Natyam or Kathak. Where Bharata Natyam with its clean lines is sharp, Apollonian and Cartesian, Odissi is languid, sinewy and extremely feminine and powerful in the manner of movement. Ramli-ji being a man, it was vastly interesting to learn these very feminine movements.

Quote of the day: as we learnt the Odissi walk, which is is the opposite of the Bharata Natyam walk; “I’m sure Eve never offered the apple to Adam while walking in a Bharata Natyam way!” he quipped in class.

DanceIntense Begins…

How beautiful the human body looks when it is asked to dance.

- Vishwakiran, DI2009 participant.

I arrived at Toronto’s union station with an unusually packed suitcase in tow – how on earth was two weeks of dance garb so incredibly heavy? I was ready to start an intense fortnight of a dance residency programme known as DanceIntense. Having been to the first one in Birmingham, UK three years ago, I was looking forward to what I knew was going to be a mind-blowing time of creativity, friendship, hard work and global artistic networking.

In the station I met up with Shyamala, a dancer friend from L.A. who was also waiting to be shuttled to York University where our training would take place. How fitting, since the two of us were at the first DI event and we both met up at the airport together in a similar fashion.

Once checked in at the Pond Road Residence at the Keele campus of York University, we started meeting more and more of the other participants as they arrived. The night was spent on an unfortunately foam filled plastic mattress, though in a cosy room to which I quickly introduced my personal touches. After all, it would be my home for the next two weeks.

I slept well, nonetheless and headed out to breakfast to meet everyone else for breakfast. We were 19 in all, the ages ranging from 20 to 34, and hailing from all corners of the world: various parts of Canada, USA, UK, Singapore and India, and each of us trained in Indian classical art forms.

We headed to the studios for our first 9am class in the martial arts dance form of Chhau, which I personally was particularly looking forward to. This was taught to us by the impossibly fluid-moving Santosh Nair of Sadhya (warning, Flash site).

Throughout the day we each had a set tech rehearsal time for the short performance of our own dance work we would give that very evening. Santosh-ji offered to give us all a pre-show warm-up (hello, partner massages!!), which unfortunately only the contemporary dancers could attend, since our costumes were minimialist, unlike anyone who was performing classical pieces and started getting ready two hours prior.

The evening’s show showcased each artist’s unique talent, many of whom performed their own creations (I myself premiered a brand new piece of my own). There was such incredible variety ranging from edgy contemporary works to classical Kathak, Bharata Natyam and Odissi performances, from jaw-dropping hip-hop to classical dance with spoken text, to a martial-modern duet and a cheeky Tamil classical-folk number at the end which had the audience laughing and clapping loudly. (Unofficial photos here, capturing sadly, only a few of the many artists).

As it had been done in each of the DI programs before, it was an amazing way to get to know each other, through the expression and sharing at our artistic best. I think meeting someone through dance gives a depth of insight into a person one might otherwise not see. As a result, starting off with a show served as a perfect catalyst for the deep bonding that would necessarily take place in the days to come, a sort of “crash course” of getting to know someone. It must have been so interesting for the master teachers that were present to be introduced to our bodies in this fashion and to gain ideas on how to work with us.

Post-show, there was an enticing buffet of fingerfood and a meet-and-greet session in the lobby, followed by a disappointingly perfunctory “dinner” of bland wraps and salad. Still riding on adrenaline, the group of us managed to make up for this with ice-breaking, rowdy post-dinner games as Big Booty, 21, and a game I can only name as zip-zap-boing-REFLECTOR!, courtesy of the UK  gang. We went to bed, tired, happy and excited for the coming days.