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The Indian choreographer PADMINI CHETTUR about her country, her culture, and her work. A talk with Daniel Aschwanden and Helmut Ploebst.
corpus: How did you proceed the (body-)language that you came up with in your recent pieces—a very reduced language that seems to be a language of non-time, non-location, and almost ornamental?
Chettur: The process has been evolutionary: My starting point after initial training in Bharatanatyam was the work with Chandralekha. If you see that work you understand already her involvement with the idea of deconstructing Bharatanatyam as a form, and of removing a lot of the decorative quality which Bharatanatyam has. To call it ornamental is not enough—it goes far beyond that. It's an extreme sort of ornamentation; not just of the dancers themselves but in the way the body is used. I worked with Chandralekha for ten years. Of course that was a big influence. And I think the initial idea of reduction started when I was already with her group.
corpus: What was the initial moment to start your own work?
Chettur: Once out of Chandralekha's group, I found distance through the fact that I didn't and still don't need to address issues of identity via the work. Chandraleka's work still remains quite iconographic in its imagery. It isn't a preoccupation to me to think: What does this form appear to be or where does it appear to come from? Her work is still very context bound whereas mine is not so much anymore.
It has been a process of several years of asking questions about the body
and trying to find a way for dancers to be involved.
In all of the work that I was doing with her there was a very clear focus on aesthetic and geometry of form. And I always felt there was no possibility of emotion in her work as a dancer. This was when I was 21. To have emotion, to express emotion was very important to me then. I felt that I was becoming a kind of statue, making all these perfect images. In the traditional dance, because it is very narrative, you have one aspect of the dance which tells the story and another aspect which—purely formal—is the abstract-one. The two are divided. When I started the early work separately from Chandralekha, I wanted to create a form where one actually marries the two. That was the early and naïve idea. The role of the dancers' mind had to be more important. This was in 1994.
For me it has been a process of several years of asking questions about the body and trying to find a way for dancers to be involved in the process of dance much more holistically because my experience of working with Chandralekha left me feeling slightly dehumanized. Though she was talking about the deobjectification of the body, nevertheless I felt that my body was objectified in that work. So when I started to work with dancers it has been and still is a very important question: How do the dancers come into the work and what do they take for themselves? That question has to be much more about their body in life and not so much about their body in dance. Through this kind of particular questioning and questions of health and injury and the need to be careful, the work has been evolving over the last ten years.
corpus: What importance does virtuosity have in your work—if any?
Chettur: I don't define my work as virtuosic. When we come out of a traditional thinking whether it's classical ballet or Bharatanatyam or even European modern dance we always associate virtuosity with a certain speed or a certain ability to learn tricks which has to do with gimmicks and I don't work with that at all. But on the other hand, there is a certain skill that the dancers I work with acquire over years and this is another kind of virtuosity I think. Now I have to accept that also because I see how difficult the work is for the dancers if they newly join my group. But it's not a virtuosity that has to do with being a flashy dancer. It has more to do with how they do the few things they do.
corpus: Talking about the skills—how would you describe them?
Chettur: I think it's a skill to be able to move in very slow time and to not stop that flow of time.
corpus: And there is also information from Yoga techniques?
Chettur: A lot of information. With Chandralekha we worked a lot with Yoga. And I think the idea to move energy inside the body is, of course, in Yoga. Not only in the static body, it's also in the moving body, and then what you do are transitions. There's a whole work to do with receiving energy from the ground. That's also happening in Yoga.
corpus: And aside from Yoga, are there other elements?
Chettur: It's difficult for me to answer this question of "elements" because I've never worked like this. I'm not somebody who has done workshops and classes to receive information. I'm rather someone who works a lot in isolation in the studio really trying to very scientifically understand the body's potential in movement. And a lot of times I think perhaps I would have received the information much quicker if I had gone the other route which is to look around and take it from other sources—but I was never attracted to this.
It's not just Bollywood that I'm reacting against, it's also
most of what one sees in contemporary dance-Pop Culture etc.
And in India you barely find access to other training; we can either do traditional dance or we can do Yoga and that's it! So you really have to go to the west to look for things. In my early twenties, I spent a lot of time in Europe but then I thought it's not my thing. "What has to grow there has to really grow there" was the kind of thinking that I learned from Chandra—and then people there can access it much better. It has more value—it's slower for sure—but I think there is a certain value to what you then learn.
corpus: The way you are using slow motion, maybe that's odd to say, appears as a total anti-statement to the Bollywood entertainment industry. The permanence of slowing down the movement, the work with reduction, with the non-spectacular, focusing, concentration...
Chettur: But it's not just Bollywood that I'm reacting against, its also most of what one sees in contemporary dance-Pop Culture etc... the references are many. And beyond that, it's a real opposition to the way of gender stereotyping in India especially, to the way women's issues are so much vulgarized and not taken seriously. As a matter of fact, I only work with women dancers. I'm not overtly an activist but I am a woman, so these things do affect me. There's the need for me to cause people to accept the challenge and for a lot of the audience it does seem to be a bit of a challenge to slow down the pace of thinking and the need to receive so much information all the time. And as for the people for whom it works you have the potential of watching a performance that might have slightly entertained you but you might also come out a bit mindless and spaced out. There's a real potential that I hope to reach even more in the future-really having something of value even if it's only a small moment of that. And I can't understand why people just stop trying to do this.
corpus: Entering the space as audience you are loaded with the festival topic transporting let's say a frame of a certain exoticism. How do you relate to this?
Chettur: It has been an important question to me whether to show my work in these forums or not. And even though someone like Michael Stolhofer might say its just giving something a particular context, or you are condensing so people can observe something about a country in a focused span of time, for me it has always been a problem. Not only because it conditions the mind of the audience coming in, but also because of who those audiences are and what they come for. Does that change if someone is in the festival of India and China as opposed to something else? And oddly enough the more I ask myself this question, the more people seem to want to do it. The festivals of India are not going to stop and I have given up somehow.
corpus: You say you don't address the question of identity directly in your work. Yet the work is rooted in the context of a very broad tradition—and still you decided to go back to India and produce work there.
Chettur: But I never felt that I left India. I was traveling for some months but I had also not left India with the intention to be in the west. The choice to stay and make that work, that's of course a conscious choice. But this choice had less to do with dance, rather with where I wanted to raise my daughter and questions like that. I've actually grown up in the city I have lived in since the age of 7. I had been born in England. So I did go back at some point. But then I often wonder how important those earliest years of our life are in terms of informing aesthetics I so naturally reject most of the Indian aesthetics and find them ugly—and I'm wondering why. It's kind of odd to feel like a foreigner in your own surroundings.
corpus: The question is more aiming at the culture and how local culture for example develops in global times. To a certain extent (post)modernism is a way of production and this way of production has also included India and made it part of the world. And at the same time it is erasing certain aspects of Indian culture as it is erasing aspects of any culture worldwide.
Chettur: I'm one of these who believe that tradition isn't something that remains static—and it shouldn't. And I think the real traditions are those who withstand change and time and those are really the important ones. In the case of India since we opened the markets, entered the economies and became globalized, what became alarmingly prevalent is such a lot of fear of the sense of loss of culture...
It's the same as what's happening in Bollywood culture and in traditional art, people are sort of clinging to it and it becomes a kind of a touristic thing which is also marketable. There's nothing non-marketable about tradition I think—but it has become much more close-minded than ever before.
We clearly start to differentiate between modernity and westernization.
Or we even clearly try to distinguish our modernity from western modernity.
Talking about modern production in the area of culture in India it's really negligible compared to other parts of Asia. Of course the effect of industrial production is somehow controlling the dynamics of entertainment, even traditional entertainment, and is really damaging, but at the same time the problem has never been "modernity." The problem is always something else. It's much more political than economical—I don't have the sense that something is being lost. I think we lost that tradition a long time ago and then, after we got freedom, we tried to resurrect the whole thing but already there started a problem.
corpus: Talking about "modernity," usually our understanding of the term is defined in a western sense. Is there a different understanding of modernity in Indian culture?
Chettur: We clearly start to differentiate between modernity and westernization. Or we even clearly try to distinguish our modernity from western modernity. How it works is not always very clear. If we talk about garments, the way people dress, it's very clear what aspects are borrowed from the west and what is coming from within. Local people still are dressing with local textiles by local crafts people. But, to be honest, the issue is very complex and to say "this is my thought that came from India" and "this is my thought that came from the west" is not possible anymore. I come from a generation of Indians who have all been educated in the British way with English as the main language. I have been exposed to almost everything the rest of the world is exposed to, so the idea of a cultural priority is very difficult to talk about now. Perhaps everything is a kind of fusion and sometimes it works better than others.
corpus: It's working both ways—for example Yoga is very popular in the west and in the 60's and 70s there was a big romanticism about India and people went there. Recently David Lynch wrote a whole book about his meditation technique which has influenced his filmmaking for 35 years. Again, the flow of information back and forth is quite intense.
Chettur: It seems to be more of an issue when artists from the east are coming to the west. In the case of Bollywood it's clearly Indians who are making complete idiots of themselves all over the world but it's good for the economy... Exoticism is always something to be discussed.
corpus: Could you elaborate on your position towards the gender agenda? What do you observe around you?
Chettur: I find it interesting to be living in India and coming abroad with my work to where the situations are so different just in terms of society. The original Bharatanatyam-dancers in India were also prostitutes but quite high-class prostitutes; there was no shame or embarrassment. The form of Bharatanatyam itself was created to be appreciated by men so the female dancer is always dancing to (please) the male and therefore being the object of desire. And oddly enough throughout all the years when the form was reconstructed; what never changed was the way the female dancers have to act. So there is a sense of coquettishness and seduction with a very linear goal. Being a woman in the audience you can feel quite stupid.
In terms of popular culture we have nothing else besides the Bollywood-model. It is extremely vulgar. There is utterly no respect towards women even in the treatment of characters, but especially in this whole idea of song and dance. Opposed to this, my starting point with my choreography was to think about women on stage and not have to entertain or seduce anybody. We're not telling stories, the women are not playing characters, they are just there as themselves and many issues about themselves get addressed.
One of the dancers in the group was coming from a quite conservative family background and her family didn't want her to dance. When we went on tour to Korea, her brother refused to hand out her passport. This became very interesting. There we were talking about women's rights and this girl had a completely patriarchical-acting brother who was not allowing her to live her own life. Finally, with the encouragement of the whole group, she went to the local police station, told them she had lost her passport. She got a new one and without telling her family a word she came to Korea. This was very radical for her. These are the kind of changes that work like this can make in the lives of women coming from families with patriarchic structures.
Why is it always the female character being thrown about
or flung about or being violently inflicted on in a certain way?
And it's also the intention of giving back some dignity to the idea of dance itself. That there is intelligence, that there is something to be thought about while doing the work. We have so many clichés in India : After your marriage you don't dance in public as a woman because it's vulgar. There are all these conditionings, dress codes.
What I've understood also from the last many years of traveling is that how ever much one travels into each others' contexts, there are some very deeply grained codes that one can never really fully access or understand. And for me the one code especially within the performative world was the way I see gender being used within western performance.
My first strong thinking about this was when I saw the first piece of Sasha Waltz "Allee der Kosmonauten" which was touring in India. Why is it always the female character being thrown about or flung about or being violently inflicted on in a certain way? But when I brought the idea up to Sasha she didn't want to discuss it. I've seen this in many performances from Gilles Jobin to all sorts of very incredible choreographers. Then a French choreographer said to me that I'm reading it completely the wrong way and that it didn't actually mean that. But when I see the same thing in a Bollywood film, when a woman is being raped—I don't think that's a nice thing to be in the viewers' eyes all the time. And somehow there's a completely different acceptance of this kind of violence and dealings in terms of gender. That's why I don't deal with dual gender.
corpus: How do you envision your future?
Chettur: I don't know where my work will go, I don't even know if I will work much longer. This is due to the practical situation I am living in. It took me three years to make this piece, "Paper Doll". Dancers kept coming and going, co-productions took too long. There's no situation of work I can fall back on. It's getting more and more tiring. I feel that when I've said enough or I don't really have something more to say or I can't say it with conviction, then I have to do something else.
corpus: It's a particular self-image of some artists that they continue for their whole lifespan...
Chettur: ...to the wheelchair. (laughs) Some can do it. My old choreographer Chandra she started to choreograph when she was 55. And then she could do it until she died in her 70's. I was in a big hurry to get started with my work-I was in my early twenties, and she said: "Padmini, it's too soon, it's too soon." And sometimes I think, maybe she had a point, maybe I should have waited another 20 years.
corpus: Could you imagine to do your work also with European dancers?
Chettur: No—for two reasons. Something I do believe in is a certain physicality. The physicality of my work is so specific to Indian-ness—now we finally have to use the word—there is some attention to detail with dancers having grown up in India or having had local dance training which is quite special and I like to work with that. And the other point is that I don't actually like to work with people who know everything. So I don't like to work with very skilled dancers. It would frighten me. I like to learn with the dancers and vice versa through the process of the creation. I've done some workshops—but the way the mind can really live in the body is something quite special and you have to take the time to learn it. I don't want to mystify it—but it has to do with it.
That's what the work is for me as well:
I provide a space for women with progressive politics.
Sometimes in India I teach evening classes for public, not for trained dancers, for housewives, designers, all kinds of people. To teach them a few small things—how to relax for once—it takes a long time and they really value it, because on a daily basis everything is so fast and stressful. And to find this ability to center the mind is a nice thing.
corpus: Coming back to the gender issue-politicality, time-economy, representation of femininity. Information we get here speaks about the difficulties of women in India... yet it seems hard to use this word in relation to the huge diversity of the Indian society.
Chettur: Two of my dancers are divorced, I seem to attract this kind of people. People who come—and there is a space. That's what the work is for me as well. I provide a space for women with progressive politics. There is an active movement in India, and has been the last 30 or 40 years, but nothing compared to the European feminist movement. What is alarming now is that in the context of fanatic religious parties you find spread all over the country, there is a sense of what we call "moral policing." For instance in the case of a friend, a Tamil poet who recently published a small poem book called "breasts." She is a very small, thin woman, quite flat-chested and she wrote this book about the female body which is quite overt. Since then she has been harassed, threatened by editors of newspapers saying the most crude and vulgar things. And this happens more and more. This is frightening to me.
corpus: Could we say there is a conservative backlash happening?
Chettur: That's the frightening result. The minute something is happening like Richard Gere coming for a charity and kissing an actress—she had these fanatics after her saying that's a western thing to do, it's not in our culture. There is this whole business of what is in our culture and what isn't.
The first time we performed in Calcutta in the year 2001, 800 people (of 1000) walked out of the auditorium. It was a big national festival and the government invited me for the first and the last time. So I'm quite nervous every time we perform there. But this is what we are dealing with a lot. Most of the Indian critics say that my work is made for the European market.
I'm still waiting for a change. And through the government,
nothing is happening. That's very clear.
So within all this, there seems to be no time to think about the future. Somehow one has to be in the present and immediate, getting involved with so many things and not only dance. Dance is very important but it has to maintain these links into society. You know I'm performing every two years in India so what does that work really mean to India? The work has to mean something there in another way almost—and this way is not performance unfortunately. It's a difficult time for women artists now in India. In Madras we have a big classical dance school which recently had a new director taking over, a very vibrant woman in her forties and we all were happy because we thought she could open it up a little—and she is already receiving threats from various Hindu fanatics.
I often think it's so useless to be a dancer. It's hard to live in a country like India where so many things have to be done. So I find it a little bit luxurious to go in a studio for six hours every day. And not having a platform in India I never see the usefulness of my work itself.
corpus: Wouldn't this rather be a reason for continuing and for setting up a platform?
Chettur: It's incredibly hard because the people who are controlling culture—it's not like here with Michael Stolhofer who loves art and has a sense of taste and value—these people with money, already there's an issue of a social class where art doesn't actually matter. It matters that they have a festival but it's so much more about glamour. I'm still waiting for a change. And through the government, nothing is happening. That's very clear.
corpus: Do you have production partners here in Europe?
Chettur: I have some but they change every time. I have been working with Kunstenfestival and Springdance for example (besides sommerszene here in Salzburg).
corpus: And getting funding in India is not possible?
Chettur: Not at all. Most companies work by not paying their dancers and I don't want to do that, which is why I take money—and I was also criticized for that: "Why do you take money from the west and then live in India?" But I want to pay my dancers. And if the work is touring enough then also the company can sustain from this touring and not only on co-productions.
corpus: What is the social background of your dancers?
Chettur: They are all educated, they have all been through basic university courses. So they all have the skill to have other jobs—including myself. I´m a scientist by training, I studied chemistry. Sometimes one of them has a part time job, or another project is happening. There was one girl who said she needed a western academic dance education. That's why she went to P.A.R.T.S.
We all know each other. It's a small community.
Sometimes I worry about them. Not all of them can become choreographers. So when people come to me I always ask them: "Are you really sure?" And I keep asking them.
corpus: Are you in contact with other people in India who also feel the urge to work in this field, not necessarily with the same aesthetics?
Chettur: There are a couple of them—you can count them on one hand. We all know each other. It's a small community. But as it is a large country, we are often not in the same city. And most of the other people that I have been working with consistently are doing solo works more in a theatrical style. Not so many people work purely with forms.
corpus: It's surprising that formally generated art can be so political. Especially as there goes the saying that abstract art is not political. In this case minimalism is causing turbulences because it's in opposition...
Chettur: ...to kitsch. It wasn't always like this. If you look further back at ancient Indian art, sculpture, architecture, tantric art , there is a lot of wonderfully formal geometric sorts of visual material. What has been fixed up the last 50 years has unfortunately been of rather bad taste.
corpus: If you think about the next project, what would it be about?
Chettur: I have been thinking and working a little with the dancers and I want to move a bit away from the need of physical memory to perform the piece. And I want to create a structure for the piece with a lot of improvisation within but not evidently visible from the outside. A quality which is very quick and very light. The problem is, nobody is used to improvisation. It's a real skill to learn how to improvise. So to bring something out of them, I have to look for many different methods, like drawing, writing. And then to translate it into the physical. This is how I finally make all of the work. The vocabulary of the pieces is always achieved by a process which does not have to address the body directly.
[Special thanks to Kate Mattingly for her corrections]
(5.7.2007)
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