Classic and contemporary

Innovation

Dance remains a moving moment in time and space. But aesthetic elements aside, one of the misconceived illusions that remain in perpetuation is that the classical and contemporary forms of dance are at loggerheads with each other. And that dance, which is not strictly traditional, has to be western. This is much like we continue to stick with phrases like ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’, even though everyone is well aware that it is the earth that is doing all the rising and setting.  

Over a dance career that goes back to a couple of decades, Padmini Chettur has been destroying such traditional illusions. In the process, of course, she has caused many a fanatically traditional Bharatanatyam dancer to frown. But then, as she says, “I have nothing against traditional Bharatanatyam; it is just that, it is not for me.”  

Chettur’s choreographies have been staged at dance festivals in Brussels, Holland, Salzburg, Paris and Lisbon, to name a few places. She was also an artist in residence in England and Netherlands. The fact that she has won critical acclaim at various international festivals helps, but not too much. The truth is, contemporary dance in India is yet to get the burst of free thinking energy that has blown into the spheres of the other creative arts, like painting or music. “I find it sad that there isn’t even much curiosity about contemporary classical dance,” Chettur says. 

Remixing exquisite and tricky time-tested postures, mudras and aramandis (elements of Bharatanatyam) to create new tales doesn’t excite this dancer. For her, dance is as physical as it is intellectual, as scientific as it is artistic, and as new in form as it is in thought.

Chettur likes to create new forms of movements all together. She often starts out on a specific body part, such as, say, the left arm-right foot, and proceeds to design a measured and flowing movement pivoted on this body area, eventually weaving it together with the other movements pivoted on other areas that she creates.

It is a conscious and measured creation, as opposed to dancers who say that the movement just came upon them. “It is a way of giving a new way of seeing, which you are normally not able to see when done in speed, like the slow motion replays of sports actions which help us appreciate the beauty of the movement better,” she muses. Chettur’s dance is not free style dance either, wherein the dancer just moves about spontaneously on stage. 

Conceptual

All of Chettur’s dance movements are pre-determined, clearly charted out, down to the finest details like the length of the pace and the angle of the gait. The movements are measured, graceful, and tensely anchored to spatial limits. Chettur’s movements are also a thrust against limits, a disciplined exploration of space and movement. No move gets repeated in her consequent choreographies. Obviously, repetition is not the spice of dance for her. Nor is she the kind of dancer who likes to go solo. She likes to choreograph her dance as group performances, the solo format so clichéd with classical dances like Kathakali or Bharatanatyam, leaving her with a sense of loneliness. 

Her choreographies have no story, and no lyrics; they are about concepts. The costumes are minimalistic. Lighting is a crucial element, and Chettur works with top notch international lighting designers like Jan Maertens. Chettur takes her time to put together her productions. Sometimes, it can take all of two years. “It takes time to do research on the body and come up with a fresh set of movements, give it a logical structure,” she says.

Padmini Chettur’s Beautiful Thing 2, staged in Chennai recently, used time as a strategy, juxtaposing it with the drama of presence. As the promos put it, the choreography prescribed nine ‘lines’ in space, with the physicality of the body becoming abstracted over time. “In normal timed motion, we don’t see these movements,” elaborates Chettur.  
Change in interest

Like many girls in Chennai, Chettur began training in traditional Bharatanatyam quite early, and held her arangetram (first solo stage performance) as a 12-year-old. “I enjoyed the practice, but not the performances; I found it a boring and lonely proposition. All the parameters were known. There was no element of surprise,” she recalls. And as it turned out, the interest waned and she went to Rajasthan to do a Master’s in chemistry from no less a serious academic institution than the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani. When she came back to Chennai, it was 1991, and Chettur found herself face to face with an offer to be part of India’s most famous danseuse Chandralekha’s dance company. She accepted. “The break from dance did me a world of good. When I came back to dance, it was a conscious choice,” Chettur voices.

The early training in Bharatanatyam helped, though — in developing the discipline of precision dancing. Precise positioning in time and space are crucial to Chettur’s dances too.

Chettur went on to work with Chandralekha for nearly a decade till 2001, and was part of Chandralekha’s major productions like Lilavati, Prana, Angika, Sri, Bhinna Pravaha, Yantra, Mahakaal and Sharira. Alongside, something radically new was taking shape in her movements and she came out with her first solo work, Wings and Masks, followed by epochal choreographies like Brown, the duet Unsung, Fragility (with an ensemble of four), Solo, Paperdoll, and others. In Fragility, her first major work, she questions normality and even the much touted merits of perfection. Her answer to critics then had been, “Why should we do only what is deemed normal?” Each of these choreographies had something new in terms of movement, thought and technique. “I would get bored otherwise,” she says. In Pushed, which she created in South Korea in 2006, the narrative is non-linear and revolves around the seven basic emotions of Korean philosophy — anger, pain, pleasure, happiness, sadness, love and lust. More than breaking free of traditional confines of the classical format, this dance choreographer’s greatest contribution is perhaps in delineating the female dancer from the confines of beauty, perfection and human relationships. 

This still graceful and slim 40-year-old dancer now lives in Chennai, and runs her own dance company, Padmini Chettur Dance Company, where her dancers are regarded as colleagues, rather than students, unlike the guru-shishya norm prevalent here. She says, “Though Chennai is supposed to be a dance hub, I have been finding it very difficult to find dancers for my productions.” But then, her form of dance is not what many would deem a safe career choice. Being both radical and disciplined, Chettur’s dance is a tough, but beautiful proposition. Perhaps, more than plodding through further lengthy descriptions, watching Chettur’s choreographies might be more illuminating. Considering that she stages her choreographies more often abroad than in India, this might be difficult to achieve, but you can catch a few of her dances on YouTube.