Woman, Dance, Resistance

Chandralekha believed that the classical tradition had to be re-applied in contexts with the age-old questions surrounding body, sexuality, devotion, power, resistance, beauty, spirit,fertility, nature and intellect. An exploration of her path-breaking work through Rustom Bharucha’s book

By Aprameya Manthena

I had the opportunity of watching Sharira (2009), the final choreographed work in Chandralekha’s oeuvre, performed in New Delhi, and was deeply captivated. The anticipation of seeing two trained, contained bodies, subduing the flow of energy in the execution of difficult contortions, asanas and martial gestures, while carefully navigating the limits of physical closeness, was indescribable.

It questioned the expectations of an enraptured audience that assumed an explosion of erotic energy on stage, but were confronted with the calm, excruciatingly slow, deeply calibrated movements of the performers’ bodies in sensual undulations. The acoustic landscape provided by the Gundecha brothers, exponents of the Dhrupad, in ativilambit, formed the slow, steady, fluid musical tapestry to the movement on stage, juxtaposing the expansion of breath with a measured, tensile evocation of bodily extension. Enthused, I set out to explore her productions through whatever means available.

As the recent birth anniversary (6^th December, 1928) of Chandralekha, the gifted dancer and choreographer passed us by, it may be fitting to revisit her oeuvre and its reception in the work of Rustom Bharucha entitled “Woman, Dance, Resistance”, who, as a performance studies academic, later came to be closely involved in her performances. The book was published at the turn of the century and while the review may appear belated, this biographical approach may be one of the few ways in which to recover and preserve her work as Chandralekha was ambiguous in her approach to legacy-building, whether institutional or personal, and very few archival recordings of her staged performances or workshop rehearsals exist.

Chandralekha was born in Maharashtra in 1928 and raised in Gujarat by an agnostic father and a highly devout mother in the midst of the Independence movement. She was preparing for an education in law when she decided to drop out and relocate to Chennai to learn Bharatnatyam under Guru Ellappa Pillai inspired by the shaping of Classical dance and performance traditions. Eventually, disillusioned by the patriarchal, nationalistic and static frameworks undergirding classical dance and music, she set out to forge an idiom rooted in body, emotion, sensuality, physicality, instinctive expression and intuition.

Rustom Bharucha’s book on Chandralekha is highly laudatory of her questioning of the purpose of art in relation to life and the solutions she discovers through the examination of dance and movement discussed in extant texts of philosophy.

Tracing a biographical arc with corroborations from her choreographic repertoire, Bharucha argues that Chandralekha was a thinking, reflective, and ever-questioning performer, not content with mere display of technical excellence but who consistently re-envisioned the role of art in challenging social and cultural norms. Through this dialogue, he asserts, many binaries are revealed at play -- logic versus sentimentality, historicity versus fantasy, rationality versus irrationality, the East versus the West, body versus the cosmos, the individual vis-a-vis the contributions (s)he can make to society, and the necessity to question, reformulate and develop contemporaneous art forms that rebel against existing structures of power and patronage.

Chandralekha was not content to simply reject the “classical tradition” that had provided the symmetry of forms, the geometry in space, nor the role of the body as a vessel for divine piety; she believed these had to be analysed and re-applied in contexts that grappled with the age-old questions surrounding body, sexuality, devotion, power, resistance, beauty, spirit, fertility, nature and intellect. 

She rejected the “overt religiosity” in Bharatnatyam performances and its harnessing for nationalistic propaganda. She maintained that bhava (emotion) sought to be expressed through dance, especially relationally, and was incongruent with the contemporary moment. Postures were never meant to be just decorative, serve a mere ornamental purpose, or be a display of virtuosity; they were meant to evoke “circuits of energy” (pg 155) and re-energise the spectators.

This, through the sculpting of a movement lexicon deploying centering stances, containment and rhythmic release of bodily energy, and the intuitive knowledge of the visual and spatial realm of the stage, served to make her pieces outstanding in their innovative occupation of the performance arena. Bharucha captures her creative genius through numerous quotes, written work and her pioneering avant garde aesthetic which merged physicality, expressivity, sensuality and spirituality in the range of postures and movement.

She was among the first few practitioners who saw the need to historicise dance traditions and recuperate them from the oblivion of antiquity and ‘divine’ origins that made the act of realizing dance in one’s body an anachronistic exercise. It was necessary, in Chandralekha’s eyes, to situate the body and its relevance in the contemporary moment.

She speaks of the event that triggered a split in her consciousness -- her arangetram (debut performance) was arranged to collect funds for drought relief but used a gestural narrative of jala-krida (water-play) between Krishna and the Gopis instead, which to her mind, created terrible dissonance in rendition.

Bharucha highlights Chandralekha’s use of occult sources to emphasise dance as a “form of divine mathematics, the geometry of God” (65). The creation of mass, volume, density and depth through movements incorporating verticals, horizontals, and diagonals (conducive to play in the visual realm) was important in activating “a ceaseless energy through an inner and outer flow of movement in space, held together by the dancers through particular combinations in time.” (pg 65)

This provides a different perspective from that which we are usually offered i.e. a female dancer is a superfluous addition meant as an adornment, embellished and cornered in aesthetically pleasing presentations. Chandralekha was also pathbreaking in suggesting that spectators are actors and participants in the visualization and process of renewal through dance. She states, “You never make a full movement; It is the eye that has to complete the movement. This creates involvement in seeing, where the spectator becomes a dancer. Seeing should not become passive.” (pg 64)

Bharucha makes in-depth analyses of all her creations beginning with Devadasi, Navagraha, Primal Energy, Angika, Tillana (from Devadasi), Lilavati, Namaskar, Navagraha Kritis, Prana, Yantras, Stree, Sahaja and Sakambhari, apart from her collection of published poems Rainbow on the Roadside: Montages of Madras, and the various posters she had designed during a long career of exploration and experimentation in various artistic media. He quotes reviews, Chandralekha’s ruminations on the crafting, manifestations and end performances while situating his own analytical interpretations of the various productions. Bharucha is particularly inspired when describing the bold and graphic visual presentation of the stage performances and provides mathematical accuracy in the descriptions of angles, lines, deflections and their intended impact on the audience.

He adopts a slightly reverential tone in the description of her life and labour, one would assume aptly so, which in the face of social mores and norms, was exceptional. His sympathies lie entirely with Chandralekha and he is indulgent in regard to her failed experiments, essentialist views on motherhood, notions outlining the “secrets” of female creation, and mystification of the female body.

He praises her act of imbuing religious images with aspects of the esoteric and the integration of concepts of fertility, sexuality and nature into religious insignia (for e.g.: in her piece Naravahana, he trusts that the chosen material was subjected to rigorous questioning and selection by Chandralekha). He is in agreement with her uninhibited exhortation of the renewing powers of dance, without questioning whether homogeneity in reception, assimilation and experience is possible. On several occasions, his critique melds with undisguised appreciation for her intellectual prowess, irrespective of whether the concept is adequately realized in the exploration of the idea and its eventual staging and performance.

One is also made aware of her teaching methods through her student dancers’ responses to her choreographic experiments and how their training under Chandralekha influenced their beliefs on art and life. We are informed that the “relentlessly spare idiom” and starkly minimalistic style is a trademark of her creative approach.

Additionally, the moulding of spatial dynamics -- the tension between the blank and utilized spaces and the “movement in stillness” are all on-stage phenomena to be actualised by her dancers. This opened up the stage, literally, to then fill in pregnant pauses with last-minute improvisations that truly honour the ephemerality of the passing moment.

This varies greatly from the Kalakshetra institutional model which depended on the transmission of and training in the classical mudras (gestures), adavus (postures) etc. through an economy of expression and respect for line, angles and traditional expressive economy. The section titled “Dancers on Chandralekha” reveals that the dance students were encouraged to look at concepts undergirding choreography and subjectivise the content and form to intuitively respond, interpret and perform its final expression. One of the dancers’, Tripura, discussed the scope for re-invention and bodily exploration in Angika apart from the importance of the international workshops Chandralekha organized for the troupe.

Bharucha suggests that Chandralekha’s performances managed to effectively communicate her political and interpretive stand on dance and that the spectators absorbed the intended effect. One is not entirely sure that the audience came away better enlightened with the need to survey dance grammar and the elementary positions that Chandralekha sought to reinvigorate, including the desire to situate the body in a dynamic, highly responsive relationship with other bodies in space. He makes mention of several performance reviews of Angika that displayed rapturous appreciation; however, the communication of said critical insights to the audience may not be as safely assumed.

He uses an extremely charged vocabulary of performance critique and analysis for Chandralekha’s work, and in many places, his descriptions conjure up apt visualisations of the performance. This is extremely important for a person reading dance, as movements and positions in space have to be concretely imagined. In that sense, Bharucha’s elaborate verbal illustrations of physical movements are almost poetic in their rendering of the philosophy guiding the attendant abstraction of forms.

The book is also interspersed with photographs from workshops, rehearsals and stage performances, posters, dance diagrams and impressive portraits of the dancer herself. Bharucha contributes to the glorifying of the “artist” in Chandralekha by endorsing her Bohemian outlook, collaborations, design sensibility, movement vocabulary, and integration of multiple art forms including Kalaripayattu (martial art), yoga, Chhau (dance), graphic design, poetry, music, and filmmaking in her work alongside her prolific writing.   

Through vignettes of her life, he provides a compelling account of her views on women’s freedom, her decades of campaigning and activism, the necessity for women to re-inscribe their bodies, desires and lives into being, questioning patriarchal models of power and institutions that seek to control women’s movement and freedom through art as a channel for intervention. She posits rasa as “a quest to synthesize, remain whole and sensitive” (pg 129) and dance as a “drive toward synthesis, never a celebration of fragmentation.” (65)

It is implied then, that in a deeply fragmented world, bodily integration is the solution to creatively heal fractured identities by emphasising the energy irradiating from the concentric circles of individual body, community and the cosmos. This striking solution to a whole range of socio-political conundrums is naïve in its formulation, but highly evocative in its expression-

Chandralekha opines that the recovery of the “spine” is the foremost tool to energise space and embody strength. Her rhetoric depends on the reclamation of the body, especially female, that has been vilified to the extent that its functions and validity have been rendered nugatory. Bharucha nods in assent to the proposition that contextualized performances utilising “the unexplored wealth of... form” (133) could create “whole” bodies.

However, the constant reference to the “inner” sanctum, to the unexplored “secrets” of the body, to the trope of male and female interconnected energies (that suggests an essentialisation derived from Tantric texts and the practice of Sakta cults) does not grapple with current theoretical trends that question the deemed fictive position of an ahistorical ‘woman’, bereft of the complexity of intersectional positionality. Her imaginative renditions, however, aim to provide a corporeal solution to the negation and loss of power of the female body in contemporary society.

Resultantly, the book focuses on the struggles and the triumphs of an extremely articulate and meticulous scholar of Indic texts who did not hesitate to challenge existing aesthetic and socio-cultural norms through the amalgamation of various physical, sensual and expressive forms present in the Indian martial, visual and performance traditions. Through her experiments and compositions, she developed a formidable interpretive schema reconfiguring “classical” dance traditions, performance traditions, visual art traditions and occult and religious scholarship into contemporary movement utterances.

For this contribution, she will continue to remain groundbreaking as well as controversial.

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Aprameya Manthena is a lawyer and cultural studies scholar interested in the intersections between multiple disciplines.

Picture Credits:

MOAD (Madras Offices for Architects and Designers)

Benny Kuriakose and Associates, Architectural Designers/