Four female dancers are revealed out of darkness. They jump, turning in midair and land in a deep lunge. The spectacular movement is from the kalaripayat, the South Indian martial art form, a detail, that while it adds nothing to an audience's appreciation, makes sensible something of its contradictory nature. What the jump conveys, despite being light, airborne and graceful, is sinuous earthbound power, as befits a fighting technique. Modern dance and ballet, for all the leaps and turns they do have, have nothing in repertoire of steps quite like this.
Just as no spoken language uses all the possible sounds that the tongue is capable of making, so it is with dance languages. Immersed in our own language, we live with the illusion that the sounds we make are the relevant sounds, until we hear or attempt to learn another language and have that myth shattered. No matter what language we speak, we make use of a limited phonetic range. The analogy holds with dance: all dance techniques train the body to do amazing things, but different amazing things. Although it is not necessary to speak two languages to tell a good story, and speaking two languages can't make a bad story better, a genius like Nabokov suggests that something wonderful can arise from having several languages at one's command. A level of play with words, resonances, and richness in his novels and stories seems to come directly from his trilingualism. Other languages bring with them new possibilities, new identities, and new themes.
There is no good word for what happens when a dancer becomes conversant with a new technique, becoming bodily 'bilingual'. Every artist I've spoken to hates the word 'fusion' as a description of what they do when they expand their vocabulary of artistic forms. Fusion suggests something like Esperanto, conceived in a test-tube and still-born. The organic growth of all languages, all music, all art, are 'fusions' anyway, where the elements have fused so successfully that no single element stands out to be picked apart.
Yet, multiculturalism and globalization bring the possibility of expansion of the range immediately, without the refinement provided by time. Techniques and body movements from all over the world are brought into proximity and rub up against each other in cities like Toronto. The artistic hunger, to learn, to collaborate, to open up is natural and inevitable. Flamenco and Kathak. Modern dance and Bharatha Natyam. Ballet and Kathakali. The natural assumption seems to be that this access to diversity enhances expression, while the resulting experiments have shown that in fact this is not the case. The new forms can distract from the original pedagogy so that the training in a particular canon becomes weakened. That may be why the mainstream eschews fusion. There is not much fusion going on in Madras, since the bharatha natyam dancers are so good, they don't need to add jazz or modern or flamenco to mask inadequacies in their performances.
When I see Indian dance in the contexts where it is the late addition to a mainstream form, it is reduced to 'Indian dance', in the same way that the term 'Aboriginal' obscures and swallows up distinctive cultures such as Sioux, Cree, Ojibway. The conflation of many different dance traditions into one monolithic 'Indian dance' is usually represented in the West by bharatha natyam.
The nomenclature of dance in the West, ballet, modern, etc, when it meets the Eastern desire to lay claim to the past simply falls apart. Bharatha natyam, a dance form with a history that can be traced back about four hundred years, was re-invented about sixty years ago to include a ready-made two thousand year pseudo-history meant to be swallowed by an Indian middle class eager to forget the humiliations of British rule, but it is just as eagerly swallowed by the Westerner fascinated by the ancient East. In Canada, bharatha natyam has taken on a life of its own as the proper finishing art form for young ladies of the Indian Diaspora. Parents sending their daughters to
bharata natyam classes in Toronto do not aspire to raise dancers - rather, they are signaling that despite having lived so long in the West, their daughter hasn't forgotten her roots, has not become too Westernized to scare away prospective bridegrooms. That is why, no matter how talented the girls are (and they are almost inevitably girls) there are only mediocre performances. The Indian dance schools funded by the arts councils here are catering to that community. The greater society within which they function is incapable of recognizing the difference between a good performance and a mediocre one, or is too politically correct to say so when they do. So far, Indian dance nurtured in Canada has not even produced the profound failure of a great experiment.
Having seen so many performances in Toronto where dance vocabularies are combined to create one ham-handed effect, bits of this or that Eastern or Western dance technique inserted like a cliché into some other Western or Eastern dance performance, I was beginning to think that no other possibility existed.
What a relief, then to see 'Confluence'. Brandy Leary's performance shows that it is possible to do something that does not resort to clichés, to blend seamlessly, effortlessly and harmoniously many vocabularies to tell a coherent story full of resonances. I, a woman in my fifties born in India and immersed in the practice and performance of Indian dance forms over thirty year career can recognize the etymologies, and they speak to me in the most visceral way. But 'Confluence' appeals equally to an audience with no awareness of the forms she is using, where they come from or how they speak.
Dancers on their heads, their red-painted feet articulating their shape, their range of movement, their ability to carve space into elemental shapes. Arms and fingers speak the language of signs. There are moments full of emotion, and seeing emotion always makes us, the audience, feel emotion.
Dancers are thrown and swing, stamp and run and fight with sticks, stand on their heads, cry and kiss.
They use the extensive range of movement that Leary has mastered and internalized: Mayurbhanj and Seraikella Chhau from Orissa, a masked dance form where the face is masked and the hands are held in one stylized pose, forcing the expressiveness into other parts of the body, the legs and torso. This seems to be the 'mother tongue' that Leary most fully commands, that has become entirely second nature to her, subsumed in what she wants to express. Kalaripayat movements stand out from this basic language, but perhaps only to someone who knows because though movements are discrete, they are never arbitrary and therefore serve their purpose in the overall design. The aerial work is another language, another space, and Leary uses the air as a valid and equal dimension for action.
The performance seems to be about gods and goddesses setting the world in motion, creating its 4 dimensions, time moving forward but always looking back, the arrangement of forms, circles, triangles, squares, and suggestion of spirals, creating breath, words, waves. These are Indian divinities, with a passive sustaining male energy at the centre of swirling force fields of female energy.
Once the gods set the world in motion there are human dramas, the play of children, the ache and passion between men and women, the fights, with the pack, the army, the staccato of stick on stick in waves of force and resistance. But there are also more tender groupings, muses, sisters. The female bodies are strong but not androgynous.
Humans fight and gods watch, or souls watch, waiting to be born into the same condition. The work in the air is suggestive of something different each time it is used.
The performance has the overall structure of Indian theatre - as if the beginning is one of many possible beginnings, and as if any part of it could be expanded to encompass the whole. This gives a hint as to the reason why Leary's piece is successful in a field of so many duds. Her command of the movement vocabularies she uses is not a surface completeness. She understands and uses the Indian approach to emotion and aesthetics as well as to the body. An Indian critic could discuss this performance in terms of 'rasa', for example, and make perfect sense.
As the piece continues, with its cosmic themes and its spiraling interconnected stories, it seems impossible that there could be a natural and fitting ending, but there is. As the lights fade on the suspended exultant spinning bodies, I am exultant too, and breathless.
Not one dance critic made sure, by reviewing it, that this wonderful performance was afforded a voice in the ongoing conversation in the dance community in Toronto. This is the problem of arts in Canada. A performance like "Confluence" could happen nowhere else in the world, but those who have the responsibility to nurture the uniquely Canadian can't seem to recognize the qualities of what they see.
Toronto, 2009
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