Our Liberal Notions

Journal 33; April 8, 2009

“Everything is vocabulary. If one speaks many languages, one is a new non-dichotomous person, but a chronological person. We speak many languages. We must not compartmentalize.” –Hari Krishnan

There is a place that is known as the East, but it does not exist anymore. There was a place that was the Far East that existed before that, which also doesn’t exist anymore. What is in its place is a land similar to the United States, full of a vibrant history and an equally embarrassing streak of pop culture, a disciplined history and an invasive sexuality, but with all of this flowing into and out of itself at the same time. Welcome to India, past and present, without borders or rules, with only the limits of imagination as limits. Welcome to Bharatanatyam.

Hari Krishnan displays a firm grasp of tradition with nearly every possible for of interdiction. In this way the “traditional” dances take on an odd form, both past and present at the same time as in Box, where a traditionally dressed dancer performs the Bharatanatyam dance in synchronization with a woman dressed in no form, a dancer without place in history and a place in all history. It’s not so much a paradox here as a representation of all periods of time, how the dance changes and differs between seasons but remains exactly the same; even the movements of the “past dancer” are not hindered by the traditional garb, though she may be a bit more shiny than her counterpart.

We see this sort of subversion of form in Bollywood Hopscotch too; the dancers appear onstage dressed in glowing necklaces circa techno nightclub and many forms of lingerie, though they perform dances with as much fervor and dedication as in any other section, movements of taking energy and serving it out with the flick of a wrist, flashing the feet around on the floor in quick but distinctly measured movements, and all of this while looking at what Bollywood has done to Indian drama. We see everything here; heavily dramatic crying scenes punctuated by dancers burning, pining perishing, imaginary-gun-toting performers mimicking the bravado of the testosteroned action hero, and in all of these things I see the embarrassments of bad film as a representation of culture, and I think of movies like Live Free or Die Hard, Dirty Harry, the Notebook, and wonder who doesn’t fit into this group of overindulged emotion.

In all of this I don’t see a representation or otherization of India or its dancing, but a form of the core of humanity, both in its representation of the classical and its movement towards experimentation. Like every place else, a vibrant history makes for an interesting soul-searching experiment both in life and on the stage, taking, moving, flowing, and trying to present without glorifying, to show without denouncing. It just so happens that we use what we know, and we know quite a bit from everywhere, and it would be a pity not to throw everything together into the same pot and see what we end up with.

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