As a classical dancer I always feel a bit cagey. This irritation, that its not enough to express myself.
I've often wondered, of all the things that I could have chosen to focus, why this? I guess its a means to mediate my existence - the odd genetic constitution that has deemed me chemically more susceptible to feel, than to think. In other words, I choose to focus on the thing that will use this natural tendency for a greater good.
But its not enough. Nope. It becomes gut-wrenchingly clear, when a guitar plays in the distance, or I find myself staring at a perspective-less chinese painting, of cliffs lost in mist. There are things in there that I could never put into mere words or bodily movements.
The medium of expression, the language- be it painting or a type of music, is never limitless. There are just some ideas that are out of its grasp. Take English for example. I began writing when I was very young, into a book that only I would read, because it was the only way to decode my existence. Once an experience or an emotion was locked into a word, and pressed onto a page with the nib of a Hero pen, it was REAL. It was something someone else could recognize and understand. Until then, it was like a dream or a ghost. An unreal thing, a thing with no handle. Unprovable.
The art of a good writer is to present familiar feelings in words that ring true. Then you have to play tricks with it, you have to juggle it into metaphors, spice it up with hyperbole, you have to allude to stories of yore. Of its own accord, the language's scope scope for expression is really limited. How wonderful it would be to have the gift that was stolen at Babel. Grasp all languages and hence have access to ideas that are accommodated easily in one language, but are almost absent in another. Take Zeitgeist for example. Or Bismillah. Or Namaste. There is not one word for it in English, though we can string several to make up the meaning-roughly.
So of late, I've been feeling that Indian Classical dance is not enough. In this dance, all the energy of the universe is drawn from the earth and is centered in the dancer- so bharatanatyam is like advanced yoga, set to song. There's no room in there to express my Conan-the-Barbarian-spewing-fire-and-venom seasons; even if I can get mad on a colossal scale at God Almighty and all, it still seems to require a language, say Tamil or Telugu, and it still requires allusions to stories of yore. I'm in 2010 now. I'm 23. I need another form to allow some room to explode in and its not just Bharatnatyam that fails me. The other disappointments are:
I've often wondered, of all the things that I could have chosen to focus, why this? I guess its a means to mediate my existence - the odd genetic constitution that has deemed me chemically more susceptible to feel, than to think. In other words, I choose to focus on the thing that will use this natural tendency for a greater good.
But its not enough. Nope. It becomes gut-wrenchingly clear, when a guitar plays in the distance, or I find myself staring at a perspective-less chinese painting, of cliffs lost in mist. There are things in there that I could never put into mere words or bodily movements.
The medium of expression, the language- be it painting or a type of music, is never limitless. There are just some ideas that are out of its grasp. Take English for example. I began writing when I was very young, into a book that only I would read, because it was the only way to decode my existence. Once an experience or an emotion was locked into a word, and pressed onto a page with the nib of a Hero pen, it was REAL. It was something someone else could recognize and understand. Until then, it was like a dream or a ghost. An unreal thing, a thing with no handle. Unprovable.
The art of a good writer is to present familiar feelings in words that ring true. Then you have to play tricks with it, you have to juggle it into metaphors, spice it up with hyperbole, you have to allude to stories of yore. Of its own accord, the language's scope scope for expression is really limited. How wonderful it would be to have the gift that was stolen at Babel. Grasp all languages and hence have access to ideas that are accommodated easily in one language, but are almost absent in another. Take Zeitgeist for example. Or Bismillah. Or Namaste. There is not one word for it in English, though we can string several to make up the meaning-roughly.
So of late, I've been feeling that Indian Classical dance is not enough. In this dance, all the energy of the universe is drawn from the earth and is centered in the dancer- so bharatanatyam is like advanced yoga, set to song. There's no room in there to express my Conan-the-Barbarian-spewing-fire-and-venom seasons; even if I can get mad on a colossal scale at God Almighty and all, it still seems to require a language, say Tamil or Telugu, and it still requires allusions to stories of yore. I'm in 2010 now. I'm 23. I need another form to allow some room to explode in and its not just Bharatnatyam that fails me. The other disappointments are:
- ballet, because ballet is all about flying, there's no grounding in ballet and that upsets me.
- contemporary western dance- because that has spun off of ballet and is miserable at keeping time, thanks to all the arbitrariness involved in flying
- contemporary Indian dance- its fine, but i still require a fully developed genre.
- hip hop- because, its just not me, I can neither make bro' nor ho'. Its not flexible enough to accommodate just anybody's personality.
So while I've been stewing there in this frustration, I happened to find something extraordinary in the show I was running today- a Flamenco performance by the students of Los Tarantos, a local school for the dance form. And there it was, what I'd been looking for- Its well timed and 'earthed', with feet staying on the ground, while the soul soars. The language of song Spanish, is beautiful, but you dont really need to know what it means. While the dance is complex, the complexity is not in technique, its in the expression. And all energy here is centrifugal, it comes from the core of the artiste's emotional experience and spirals out into the world like a phenomenal whip. And balance and beauty here, comes from release.
Perfect.
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