With society as stage

Agent of change

Sangeeta Isvaran uses dance and theatre for social reform. She works with abused children, drug addicts, commercial sex workers and victims of natural disasters in societies around the world by choreographing performances which give them a voice. hema vijay meets the Bharatanatyam dancer, researcher and social worker.

Perhaps the most crucial movements of Sangeeta Isvaran’s dances happen in her grey cells. After all, this thinking dancer has consistently been taking dance to platforms of social reform, psychotherapy, self-awareness and other realms, consciously moving away from the limited spectrum of beauty and drama that classical dance is traditionally associated with.

Sangeeta is a dancer who constantly works with street children, abused children, commercial sex workers, slum dwellers, landmine and tsunami victims and drug addicts, among others. “I like to work for social causes whenever I can,” she says. Well, over the years, the balance has shifted decidedly towards social issues.

Sangeeta happens to be a Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar awardee and was a co-ordinator of UNESCO’s Youth For Peace, which had her meeting and working with young people in Mexico, Brazil and the United States. She has worked with World Vision, Oxfam, Handicap International, Arts network Asia, and many other NGOs, besides performing in traditional sabhas.

Right now, she is busy with her Martram Festival with V R Devika’s Aseema Trust, bringing together people from a cross section of communities to address a wide range of issues like LGBT, concepts in differential ability such as music for the deaf, life at orphanages, responsibilities for a clean community, and education and polarisation in society. Martram is the Indian edition of a four-pronged international event called The Ripple Effect, which works to inspire people through the arts.  

New ground

Sangeeta likes to tread new ground all the time; her ‘Mayakkam Oxymore’ involved dance, painting and contemporary music; ‘Ramayana in South East Asia’ was based on aspects of the Ramayana from Indian, Thai, Cambodian, Indonesian and Burmese styles of classical dance; ‘To Kill or Not to Kill’ considered the ethics of war. She also likes to choreograph pieces on women she has met and whose stories strike her as poignant; such as about the dignity of the helpless sex worker, as in the piece ‘Kathavai Sathadi’ (close the door, girl); about a woman whose three daughters were killed; about women morally questioned just because they are single.

A few years back, in Cambodia, as part of a fellowship programme, Sangeeta had organised a dance workshop where she got prostitutes to use dance to de-stress and express their inner turmoil. It was then that a 12-year-old Cambodian sex worker wrote a poem (in Khmer language) and presented it to Sangeeta. Back in Chennai, Sangeeta got famous lyricist and writer Vairamuthu to pen a poem on the little girl’s feelings. It read “Malarndhum malara malar naan/ Ennai mannil kassakki veesadhey…Vinnai chchuttrum paravai naan/ Ennai virka maaten naan.” (I’m a flower but yet to bloom/ Do not crush and throw me away… I am a bird that flies free in the sky/ I’ll not sell myself). Sangeeta frequently incorporates the padam she composed on this poem in her recitals, to mixed reactions.

Dance also takes a new meaning in the varying circumstances that Sangeeta chooses to explore. For instance, in the Cambodian workshop organised by an NGO there, dance was a way of expression, and a stress buster. “Even the Cambodian society is a restrained, non-expressive one like ours,” Sangeeta muses. Through this workshop, many Cambodian women got together to help each other, and even staged their performances at many places and raised money, which was used for getting a job-securing education. “One woman opted to learn English,” Sangeeta recounts.

In the workshop for landmine victims in Cambodia, dance was a movement that brought in bodily awareness and rebuilt lost confidence in movement and mobility. As for her workshops for children from assorted schools of various strata in Chennai, dance was not even the central element. “Initially, the boys were rolling on the floor, fighting; but we saw change eventually,” she recounts. With the workshop with Desh (an NGO in Chennai that works with people with HIV/AIDS), it was about empowerment through dance.

“Dance is about focus; when you learn steps, mudras or gestures, it becomes an enabling tool to look up and talk. These women being helped by Desh told me they didn’t even dare to look up at the Government fair price shop vendor and ask for their allocated rations, fearing ridicule and abuse. My job is to make them confident,” she surmises.

In the recital that Sangeeta has planned to stage in Chennai’s northern slums, to raise awareness on the ills of defecation on the streets, dance is used in the traditional narrative format, and also as a rallying point for bringing the community together. Here, Sangeeta hopes to get slum dwellers to themselves create, practice and stage the dance. “I can’t build toilets. But I can get them to come together to discuss the issue and consider rights and responsibilities,” she says.

“I don’t know how much of an impact I will be able to create. But I trust and hope that something good will come of it,” Sangeeta says. Sometimes, reality is painful. For instance, the last time Sangeeta went to Cambodia and enquired around, she heard that the little Cambodian girl who wrote those reverberating verses had died.

Global feet 

It all started when, as a five-year-old, Sangeeta started training in Bharatanatyam under Padmabhushan awardee Kalanidhi Narayanan. In her thirties now, she has been learning for over 20 years under a number of gurus that include Savitri Jagannath Rao, C V Chandrasekhar, Bragha Bessell and Priyadarshini Govind. Sangeeta also learnt Kuchipudi, Carnatic music and Kalaripayattu. As a candidate selected from South Asia for the Asia Fellows Programme, Sangeeta had trained in the dance forms of Indonesia, Cambodia, Thailand and Burma, and had documented her observations in 2000. She went on to write about the dance forms of the east, and secured a diploma in Cambodian Classical Dance. Sangeeta also tested her feet in African dance forms, consequent to a performance in France, and even landed in West Africa to learn African dance. 

Now, Sangeeta is comfortable composing choreographies in varied dance forms. The Indonesian form of Ramayana that she presented for Bharat Kalachar was received well in India, as well as in Croatia, France and other European countries. Then there is her choreography ‘Mukh-Mukha-Mukhaa’ (words in Khmer, Sanskrit and Indonesian), commissioned by a French theatre, which is a take on the stupidity of communal violence.
“Be it Indonesian, Thai or Cambodian, or any Asian style for that matter, while movements are different, aesthetics are the same,” she concludes.

Sangeeta wishes that dance is given more importance in education. “Dance is a life skill. If children get some experience in dance, it will help them gain energy and confidence.

Judging from her performances, Sangeeta’s dance career seems to be saying silently: dance is not just a beautiful movement. It can be something that makes people think and reflect.