Lotus pocus

It’s hard to keep up with Anita Ratnam. When we speak on a weekday morning, this dancer and cultural organiser is at home in Chennai, slightly jetlagged from a transcontinental journey that has ended the night before.

Some days later, she is off on an African safari. Amidst her frenetic travels, she finds the time to play producer and artistic director for Padme, a contemporary dance performance that premiered in Bangalore recently. 

While Ratnam continues to create and perform contemporary dance work, it is easy to see that Padme has invaded her imagination. Over the past few years, she has devoted a significant part of her energies to planning and curating seminars and promoting contemporary dance in India in various ways.

 With Padme, choreographed by Dutch dance artiste Kalpana Raghuraman, she turns her attention to commissioning high-quality dance work set on Indian dancers towards widening the scope for contemporary dance in India.

With a modern twist

What’s exciting for Ratnam is that Padme is an attempt to bring a rigorous work environment to the milieu of classical dance. Using the lotus as a metaphor, the choreography works with classical and modern dance concepts, combining dancers’ personal experiences with religion and ideas around the relevance of spirituality.

 She consciously steered clear of making artistic decisions for Padme. “I didn’t want to go and inject my opinion. I wanted Padme to be something the choreographer and dancers bond about. Their enthusiasm was amazing — they made sure they rehearsed in the months when Kalpana was not around. Padme is more than a dance performance; it is a space where these dancers can continue to investigate process and be mentored,” she explains.

Ratnam spent a decade maintaining her dance company and working with younger dancers, until sheer exhaustion prompted her to go solo. Dancers brought personal problems to her, and she ended up feeling like a ‘den mother’. “I didn’t want to be a guru. Gurus inherit all these problems,” she says. As an independent performer, she felt she could be clearer about what she was saying.

Her focus is on choreography that reflects her understanding of herself as an older woman in a young culture. For instance, in MA3KA (2009), she draws on her background as a women’s studies scholar to find the woman’s voice in received mythical narratives.

 The sacred feminine is infused with personal identity as she tells the stories of her grandmother, mother and daughter, using the template of icons like Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati as a broad arc. Her Bharatanatyam background is a strong undercurrent in the piece, as it places a deeply personal history within the framework of a kauthuvam, a traditional mode of dance composition, where the dancer praises a deity or a figure.

Ratnam places great emphasis on making her choreography go beyond ‘dance performance’, adding personal interpretations and layers to mythological narratives to make them her own.

While she would love to provoke the audience’s imagination through her work, she also wants them to stay rooted in the present. She says, “As a performer, I don’t want to stop being myself and pretend that I am Saraswati or Durga. In classical dance, we were not supposed to be; we only infer or suggest. That is why, in Bharatanatyam, you finish your moment of suggestion and then walk back. My walk back interrupts and punctuates a dance portion with storytelling and speech.” 

Ideas and movement mark the start of Ratnam’s creative process. She plays around with them in her studio, gradually becoming aware of the soundscape that matches the scene. Drawn to minimalism in her musical score, she prefers Indian folk, traditional and ritual sounds and claims to detest synthesised sounds and sound effects. 

Unleashing creativity

“I don’t start from the classical premise of taking a song and choreographing to it. It is important for me to know what kind of sound will work for that piece. It could be small — like the plucking of a single string, as opposed to the playing of the violin. I take these thoughts to my musician friends, who then articulate ideas in music,” she elaborates. 

Padme significantly departs from this musical aesthetic, its score chosen by Raghuraman, one that Ratnam terms ‘European and edgy’. Padme is her first foray into commissioning work, an idea she hopes will gain more currency with time.

 Despite her role as producer, largely uninvolved in the artistic process, Ratnam often gets asked why she didn’t choreograph Padme herself. She points out that it is normal to commission dance work outside India, adding, “It would be healthy to do it in India and bring in diverse points of view. Instead of developing our ideas, we tend to imitate and copy. How can we uncover new possibilities by inviting different choreographers to work with the same group of dancers?”

Firm in her belief that dance should be a means of livelihood, Ratnam dipped into her personal income to finance Padme. Close links to tradition and divinity have meant that classical dance is seen as an ethereal calling, with little attention paid to how dancers survive and pay the bills. With negligible government support extended to dancers, Ratnam feels that corporate funding is the way to go. But even there, a shift of perception is imperative; as she puts it — corporates put football players on their payroll, but not dancers.

Later this year, Ratnam embarks on a tour of Argentina with tango and flamenco dancers. For now, she is revisiting older choreographies that she’d like to enhance with feedback from her contemporaries — archiving some of them is also on the cards.

However, Padme is never too far from her mind. She looks forward to showcasing it in Chennai during the December music season and finding alternative spaces to present it in, like malls, for instance. There’s more to be done, though. “Padme should have more showings. The system around us makes us want to give up. But this is a challenge and we are full of hope,” she remarks.