JOIN USIbrahim Ramli is a rare artiste who has always dared to stage whatever he has believed in. Described as one of the finest artistes of his generation, he has taken Asian dance to contemporary dance festivals the world over, writes Hema Vijay.
Hovering in the air was a fervent appreciation of the human body as the ultimate object and instrument of beauty, movement and emotions — and also a sense of gratitude in being born ‘human’ enough to experience such emotions. But of course, there was a sense of perplexity too — about what the movements were all about. We had just then witnessed the free-flowing ‘She Ra’ performed by the legendary dancer-choreographer, founder-director of Malaysia’s Sutra Dance Company, and perhaps the most youthful 60-year-old ever, Ramli Ibrahim. He and his ensemble of light-footed dancers had moved on stage in a stream of unbroken motion, interspersed only by the flow of stillness, when one dancer took the progression of movement from another, mesmerising us with the control they had over their bodies, the faultless synchronisation of their collective movements, their exquisite grace, incredible flexibility, expressive gestures, and an absolute lack of self-consciousness about their own bodies.
Hague-based Korzo Theatre choreographer Kalpana Raghuraman, who created ‘She Ra’ for Sutra, sensed this perplexity. As the curtains came down, she leaped up to the stage and voiced, “If you didn’t understand the choreography, relax; you didn’t miss much.” Contemporary choreography is not so much about understanding, as about experiencing, she went on. She later added, “My idea, when I conceived ‘She Ra’, was to explore the qualities and the energies of superheroes like Arjuna, Durga, Shiva and Kannagi, not their specific stories. And we often miss the fact that superhero qualities include not just testosterone-imbibed ones like courage and fierceness, but also qualities like loyalty, perseverance and vulnerability.” ‘She Ra’ embodies through the dancers’ bodies and movements such qualities, which the viewers experience and exult upon watching the dance and when they relive the experience. ‘She Ra’ was part of Sutra’s recent ‘Transfigurations’ repertoire.
Incidentally, ‘Transfigurations’ also staged a rare quality of a more earthly hero – Ramli Ibrahim himself. The quality that lets Ibrahim desist from hogging the limelight and staying content in passing it around to the others on stage. Well, Ibrahim has earned every bit of his self-assurance. In a career spanning over three decades, he is credited with transforming Malaysian dance ethos with his contemporary-traditional interface, creating a cultural wave in Malaysia with his Sutra Dance Company and the Sutra Dance Foundation, and introducing Odissi dance to Malaysians and bringing it to centrestage as one of the most popular Indian dance traditions in Malaysia. He has also taken Asian dance to contemporary dance festivals the world over.
Asian aesthetics
In a broader sense, ‘Transfigurations’ was about exploring convergences and divergences in the classical and the traditional. And of course, it was staged alongside hypnotising jazzy music, interspersed with silence and subtle resonating rhythms. Sutra’s other big strength is their brilliant lighting designer Sivarajah Natarajan, who synchronised the spot lighting faultlessly with the progression of the choreography, alternating between pools of light, colours and darkness.
“Both Kavitha and I agreed that contemporary dance from Asia should reflect the world we knew and lived in, rather than follow the western sensibilities about contemporariness,” he narrates. ‘Transfigurations’ reflects Asian aesthetics. You see it in the elaborate gestures and the heightened expressions, and in the complex dance repertoire. ‘Transfigurations’ was about exploring and redefining dance and Asian viewpoints with a global perspective. The production examines myths — the archetypes of mythology and how their avatars perpetuate their imprints in our contemporary psyches through various transfigurations.
“With ‘Transfigurations’, I wanted to show that the classical can sometimes be boring, and that contemporariness is not always vulgar,” says Ramli Ibrahim. Bringing ‘Transfigurations’ to Chennai, where classical conservativeness weighs heavily on dance, seems a courageous endeavor; but then Ramli has always dared to stage whatever he believed in, such as taking to Odissi dance at a time when Odissi was in obscurity.
Today, Sutra’s Odissi has a huge following even in Orissa. Sutra keeps alive the Debaprasad parampara, albeit with a Malaysian perspective. “I still teach Bharatnatyam; it is still very much my first love. But there is something about the movement and music about Odissi dance that grips me. Unlike Bharatnatyam which is Apollonian — predictable, symmetrical and disciplined, Odissi is Dionysian — unpredictable; it is a dance of abandonment and not completely symmetrical. Odissi satisfies that part of me,” Ibrahim muses. “My own involvement in dance has been unpredictable; I went to military college, became an engineer, but somehow reverted to dancer. But then, as a child, I was artistic,” he adds.
“It is not unusual for Muslims to be in the arts either. If you talk to Muslim artistes in India or Malaysia, you would find that many of them would talk about leanings towards Hindu or Indian mythology and culture. But it is not about religion, but actually about spirituality. Dancing to Hindu symbolic choreography comes more from a metaphorical level, rather than its literal interpretations,” he says.
Brought up in Kuala Lumpur, and taking a detour into military college and an engineering degree, Ramli eventually mastered Bharatnatyam, Odissi, western classical ballet and contemporary dance. Ramli looks to nature and reality for his inspiration. His maid is one such inspiration, apparently, ‘because she does her work so well that she gives it an aura of love and care.’
The classical & the contemporary
Before ‘Transfigurations’ arrived on the scene, Sutra has staged amazing productions in the past too, such as ‘Spellbound’ (Odissi), ‘Vision of Forever’ (Odissi), ‘Rasa Unmasked’ (Contemporary Modern), ‘Rasa Sutra’ (Odissi) and the ‘River Sutra’. And then there was Sutra’s curious festival ‘Joined in Dance’ (in association with the Chennai-based Natyanjali Trust) that celebrated the vigour and beauty of male dance. Balancing and making the transformation between the male and the female within oneself is crucial for Indian dance, he feels. “That is how the rasa flows out,” he says. Meanwhile, in typical western tradition, he enlists warm-up exercises, yoga, Butoh, etc., to train his and his dancers’ bodies, rather than just going through the dance movements.
Sutra has staged contemporary Indian classical and modern repertoires in the USA, Europe, India, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Oman and Australia. It is curious that this Malaysian dance company has taken more of Indian dance to the world than any Indian dance company. But then, there aren’t many Indian dance companies that explore serious contemporary or traditional dance through group formats, which is fast becoming a prerequisite for serious contemporary dance. While Ibrahim regards Indian classical dance in its solo format to be one of the most difficult of art forms to master, he favours group compositions because of the space this format allows for creativity and complex narratives.