The problem

THERE used to be an advertisement on television in the 1980s, which showed a young wife using Bharatanatyam movements and hand gestures to distract her husband from reading the newspaper, and then convince him with dance steps to buy a washing machine, at a time when they weren’t in common usage. This advertisement is worth deconstructing for the way it neatly encapsulates many of the assumptions and unspoken facts about dance.

That an educated, middle class young married woman would have received dance training was in itself a complete reversal of a previous generation’s practices. Just consider the turmoil – from being the purview of women identified with prostitutes, it had become, over a period of about fifty years, almost a ‘required’ accomplishment among South Indian brides. Yet, no matter how good she might be, the young wife would never be classified a dancer; no advertiser, for example, would depict a young woman dancing on stage and then buying herself a washing machine. First, while most parents or husbands would approve of dance as a fine hobby, they would likely put their collective feet down if their daughters or wives wanted to make it a career. Then, to show someone as earning a living from dancing was considered too unrealistic, even for the world of advertising where newborn babies are shown as knowing how to use iPads. The actress in the role of the wife, for example, though well trained in Bharatanatyam, would find it more lucrative to act than to dance for a living.

But dancing in order to manipulate a man, to get him to spend money on you, is a usage of dance that a woman from times past would have easily recognized, having done precisely that in the courts of kings and the living rooms of rich landowners. At one time rajas bestowed whole villages on the dancing women they favoured. But dance was only one part of their social, ritual, and sexual movement repertoire. Now, only the artistic role of the dancer survives; the same forces that brought bodily autonomy and personhood to women who danced also led to the obliteration of other sources of patronage that were once so entangled with it. Why dance, when the moral code within which the dance form was created perpetuates oppressive and patriarchal ideals? Can an art form escape the historical and social meanings that have been imposed on it?

The question, ‘why dance?’ already presumes a category called ‘dance’ that we agree on, at least in its broad outlines. It is only on the basis of that understanding that we can posit a ‘why’ for the actions that we assume to be dance. But the conception we have of dance has changed so radically in the last two hundred years that the same question posed to a woman who danced in the 1800s might elicit bemusement, since it implies an element of choice. This idea, that art is a noble pursuit and not the duty of specific castes for the entertainment and titillation of certain other, usually higher, castes is a very modern one. Nor is this a uniquely Indian predicament. The ballet dancers that Degas painted were not exercising expressive choices; they were doing arduous physical work but so badly paid that wages needed to be supplemented by selling sexual favours.

The obstacles on the path of today’s dancers are many, beginning with their own bodies – no dance form performed on the stage comes easily and naturally. One uses joints and bones and muscle in ways they were not meant to be used – in fact that’s almost a definition of dance. Second, artists of any kind are rarely paid adequately for their work, but the dancer labours under a unique set of constraints: she makes a sustained physical effort of a highly specialized kind, but at the end of the performance, nothing remains. Dance cannot be hung on the wall, or appreciate in value, be reproduced a million times and the copies sold, or survive the vicissitudes of taste to find a more appreciative audience in some enlightened future. The performing life of a dancer is short – the body ages and people invariably say, behind one’s back, ‘she should have quit years ago.’ Audiences are relatively small – no equivalent to rock stars or movie stars exist in dance. Clearly dance doesn’t seem to be an art form with which to change the world.

Since the rewards from society are so meagre, there must be something within dance itself that makes people pursue it. What is that quality that has kept human beings dancing for as long as there have been humans? Those of us who chose dance as a profession may have done so without necessarily thinking it through, almost by accident. Just as there are 237 reasons why women have sex, according to a book of that title, a dancer’s reasons may be personal and idiosyncratic, yet lead to a deeper understanding of why we are compelled to move and be moved.

The question could be posed another way; why dance, of all things? Why look at dance? What can an examination of dance show us about society, culture, emotion and beauty that can’t be revealed in other ways? From the small bronze figurine of the Mohenjodaro ‘dancing girl’ to the sculpted karanas on temple walls, from the images of dancers used to highlight India in advertising campaigns, to the ubiquitous ‘item number’ in Bollywood films, dance, despite or perhaps because of its ephemerality, carries with it the impetus to preserve it in some way, to pin it down with words, even though feelings and experience are not always best captured in words. This issue of Seminar explores both the terrain and the tension inherent in moving bodies and their representation.

GITANJALI KOLANAD