Where dance, yoga and urban activism meet

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  Tishani Doshi

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Navtej Johar speaks about how the dance world has lost its inherent intimacy and how he straddles the schizophrenic duality of being an outward-looking activist and an introspective yogi.

Navtej Johar is a Sangeet Natak Akademi award–winning coreographer, yoga exponent and urban activist. Perhaps he is simultaneously all three on stage? | The Hindu

 

 

 

I recently spent three days at IGNITE! A festival of contemporary dance organised by the Gati Dance Forum in Delhi. It was my first dance conference. Even though I worked for many years with the choreographer Chandralekha, and continue to perform her last work...

... I have never felt intimate with the dance world. Talking about dance is difficult, I think. To use words for a medium that is essentially experienced visually and physically. But listening to Navtej Johar talk about dirt and domesticity, beauty and the body, I thought perhaps words weren’t so bad after all. So, I asked him some questions, and in the ensuing chitchat, only two pieces of literature were mentioned.

Navtej, how do you describe yourself — dancer/ choreographer/ urban activist — how do these things work together, or against?

I’m engaged in three activities — yoga, dance and urban activism, and the common denominator between the three is the body. The centrality of the body in dance and yoga is pretty obvious, and in my urban activism I address the concerns of the body as it negotiates the body-insensitive Indian city. I feel that Indian cities are disrespectful, if not contemptuous of the human body. So my practice revolves around the body within various dimensions.

You mentioned you have a schizophrenic existence (something I identify with), when you’re doing one set of activities you’re very inward, and when you’re doing another it’s very outward. Can you explain?

The post–19th century moralistic and nationalistic definitions of yoga and dance both infuriate and bore me. The histories of these embodied practices have been fabricated and manipulated to a point of absurdity. For the longest time I used to feel the compulsion to right these historic wrongs through my work, so my choreography — in some manner or the other — commented on dance, its history, its falsifications, and its appropriation. My art-making was becoming prescribed by and weighed down under the burden of “unsound” history.

A few years ago, I decided to dive right into researching the history of dance with some seriousness, and I chose not to be confined to the colonial history alone, but instead also started to track the history of philosophy. And this led me to the realisation that there has been an ongoing fight between the rationalists and the idealists, or more importantly between schools that were dismissive of the body and others that fully relied upon it; and that somehow the rigour I’ve been putting into my research and writing is freeing my art practice from this burden, so now in my practice I can unhurriedly dwell upon the body, and can quite literally afford myself the luxury to behold and respond to the beauty, intelligence and mysterious workings of the body.

Though I am deeply agitated on one hand, when I hit the dance floor I am purged and oblivious of this agitation. The part of me that is fascinated with the body does not care a hoot about history; and yet, I burn the midnight oil reading, writing and agitating over history and philosophy. So, today my practice is schizophrenic — hyper-aware and political, on the one hand, and attending upon the body with wonder-struck fascination and — actually — love, on the other. Today I locate freedom and autonomy in this schizophrenia. In it I find the potential to exceed the idea of the body.

You said you cannot bear to watch Bharatnatyam anymore, that Vedanta is essentially dismissive of the body. I would love if you could talk more about this in terms of your own choreographic work and the distance you have travelled as someone who is classically trained in Bharatnatyam. In what ways do you think yoga and tantra have a different approach to the body?

Today, Advait Vedanta has come to rule the roost; in fact, for most, it is synonymous with Hinduism. And we have somehow come to position our embodied practices of yoga and dance, quite exclusively, under the umbrella of its doctrine, which is actually both body and matter abhorring. It views the body as morally irresponsible and thus in need of taming, policing, and correcting, whereas for the other schools out of which both poetics and embodied practices emerge, the sensual body is both beautiful and infinitely responsible, even spiritual. So, therein lies a fundamental quandary that has given rise to a convention that will never allow the body to exceed the idea. Today, we essentially dance ideas! I feel in Indian dance the body has become a mouthpiece of these idealisms.

And these idealisms are highly problematic because they are historically unsound and philosophically exclusivist. I often feel that what the dancers are dancing does not really require a body. A slogan or a placard would be a more efficient option. Frankly, the body has become incidental in dance that has been reduced to a show-and-tell routine without any authentic affect upon the body. They jump wildly from one end of the stage to the other and yet there is absolutely no movement, neither inside them nor you. You walk out unmoved, even untouched. Being revved up is not necessarily an aesthetic experience. I often say that we’ve been dancing up the wrong tree.

I was struck by what you had to say about public spaces, and how in India it’s difficult for us to feel that those spaces belong to us because of this conundrum that the home is clean but what is outside is dirty, so in a sense we are trapped within our homes and estranged from outside space. Again, it’s an inside/outside divide. Can you say more about this?

So, we have disenfranchised the body at a very fundamental level. We even envision and design our cities without keeping the body as a central point of reference. We resist paying attention to the outside, because it is essentially impure and the domain of those who have been contaminated due to engagement with polluted matter. Thus, we don’t only abhor matter, especially after it has served its purpose, but we equally abhor those who engage with matter, i.e. the lower classes.

It might be fashionable to complain about the condition of our cities but we have to realise that we are actually quite well adjusted to it. They are like that because we choose to keep them that way. Because, perhaps, we are subliminally okay with keeping the poor adequately inconvenienced.

Your recent work has centred around domesticity. You say you’re fascinated by domesticity. Why?

Today, in our middle-class homes the pure inside and the polluted outside collide headlong. Because, to run our homes we invite the very same impure people to clean, cook, mind our children and even feed us. So, now that the physical gap between the two has been breached, the only way we can maintain a psychological distance is by assuming a stance — a disdainful one — that can be read in the body language, in the flick of a finger, the tone of the voice, the arch of the brow. This stance is almost ground into our bones and many of us don’t even know how to ever shed it because it has become self-defining.

I notice the weight of these entrenched stances each time I see someone struggling to sink into a shavaasana at the end of a satisfying yoga class. And I don’t necessarily mean that these are class stances alone, they could be equally gender, race, or status stances. I work so carefully to offer my yoga students a satiating experience, but there are some who refuse to sink into the pleasurable repose that a good practice promises. And I feel it is because to enjoy the sensual comfort and pleasure of the body requires letting go of the tension and anxiety of encoded social stances. I find more and more middle-class people today who are incapable of letting go. For them, immersion seems like an impossibility. So, my last three works have focussed upon the volatility of these stances. In 2010 I made a piece based on Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing”, in which a black servant kills her white lover/mistress in apartheid South Africa, and then have made two pieces,Charumathi Claire Singh and Frenemies..

... that are both based upon Genet’s The Maids, in which the two maids are constantly impersonating their madam while, at the same time, plotting to kill her. So, I like to highlight the embedded nastiness and violence in ostensibly harmless middle-class gestures and attitudes towards servants and the lower classes.

If you had to explain to a non-dancer what dance did for you — in terms of body, spirit, mind, not just as someone who dances, but also as someone who watches dance — how would you describe it? “Why should we care about dance?” is what I’m essentially asking.

I both love and hate dance. For me dance and yoga worked in tandem. Had I not been equally committed to the practice and study of yoga, I would not have had the insights and opinions that I so strongly harbour today. Yoga has offered me the capacity of immersion. In yoga I have learnt to rely upon the sensitivity and the inherent juiciness of the body. And it took me a long time to arrive at that level of immersion in dance. I particularly love Indian dance because it not only can allow me a highly nuanced engagement with the body but, in addition, it also offers me the opportunity to externalise my interiority. For me the exercise of abhinaya is deeply satisfying and deeply human, it allows me to fictionalise my interiority and let it out, reorganise it, render it abstract and poetic, and then eventually reabsorb it. It is miraculously fulfilling and self-enhancing.

But on the other hand, nothing is uglier and even self-violating than the show-and-tellabhinaya that we get to see today. And it is ugly and uninteresting because it offers no possibility of immersion, grossly overlooks the intelligence or the sensitivity of the body and harps on ideas that are sounding more and more false and regressive with each passing generation. Today, apart from a handful of dancers, most dance has become truly unwatchable. But I still privately continue to love it because it offers me the possibility to immerse and to behold the body, as it distils from gross to subtle and from the literal to abstraction, through the delicacy and vitality of authentic movement along with the freedom to fictionalise, poeticise and render abstract an inner reality.

http://www.thehindu.com/thread/anything-but-books/article9245116.ece