Follow TNM’s WhatsApp channel for news updates and story links.
Practicing a classical artform in the present is perhaps not very different from reading Shakespeare. You appreciate the literary wit and the turn of phrase but also question what about Caliban made him the savage monster in The Tempest. Wrestling with questions of purpose and relevance while practicing the classical in the present seems as pertinent as it is rare.
Priyanka Chandrasekhar, the founder of the Nirali Collective, looks back at her musings with dance and recalls that it is when she realised that the form stopped “serving” her, that a quest to create one’s own purpose for practicing it began. She sat down to talk to me on a rainy Monday evening in Nirali’s lovely terrace studio in Jayanagar. Amidst the many dance spaces and schools in Bengaluru that offer a conventional approach to Bharatanatyam, the Nirali Collective seeks to address pertinent questions about the form’s history as well its place in the present.
Nirali as many things
Priyanka laughs, confessing that despite calling it a collective, she largely runs the space by herself. The desire to do away with the hierarchy that comes with the guru-shishya dynamic is what prompted her to christen it a collective, attempting to mould a space that eventually invites active and equal participation from her students as well as other artists.
What began in 2017 as a one-on-one class with a single student in Priyanka’s own little apartment, slowly moved into the student’s garage when her sister joined the class, then into a small hall in Jayanagar and eventually into their terrace studio that now houses the collective.
Nirali continues to be characterised by an evolving vision. It rethinks the pedagogy of teaching dance, Bharatanatyam in particular, and the intent behind performance. It also occasionally hosts other artists– to perform (Vasu Dixit and Chaoba Thiyam among a number of others have played there) or to simply meet and talk about their experiences with artistry, as in their bi-monthly sessions titled ‘Idhivi’ . Priyanka admits to this being a challenge however, with the city already being saturated with multiple other performance and interactive spaces. She also observes that she encounters more enthusiasm for rigorous perfection than play, which makes hosting certain kinds of workshops and events difficult.
The history of the personal
My initiation into Nirali’s work was through their dance production Kaafi – a retelling of the story of Gandhari from the Mahabharata, to Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s revolutionary poetry. A highly unusual artistic collaboration, it combined complex nritta choreography with an exploration of the multiple meanings of blindness. Featuring a novel marriage of both themes and forms, the piece not only questioned the conventions that often accompany the depiction of an epic but also the expectations of how a woman’s body must look and move in a performative context.
Explaining why none of the dancers in Kaafi wore bindis or danced to traditional Carnatic music, Priyanka says, “She (Gandhari) was foreign. She was kidnapped from somewhere else and brought into India. But how we show her in the Mahabharata serial is like this fully Indian Hindu type right?”
Interestingly enough, what happened to Gandhari is exactly what happened to Bharatanatyam – an appropriation of the form with the intent of assimilating it into Hindu nationalist ideas of “our culture.” Dancing about the personal is therefore not new to the form, but to a large number of practitioners of the present who inherited a highly appropriated version of the form.
From growing up in an orthodox Brahmin family where Priyanka was initially taught that dance was to be practiced without questioning, she later began to think of the history that brought it to her and what she wanted to do with it. She says, “I feel like the personal was always there. I just think Bharatanatyam as the form that came to us didn't have it because that was a deliberate political move. When we were sanitizing and decentralizing the form, I think we took the personal away. And we took the bodies that performed also away. They got marginalized and we took the form and we grafted it onto other bodies.” Understanding the history of the form – one that became classical only when it distanced itself from the devadasis and was claimed by upper caste bodies and institutions like Kalakshetra– is central to understanding its purpose in the present, especially in terms of conforming to its rules.
On not building clones
A pedagogy that focuses on demonstration and careful replication is not what Nirali stands for. “What is this desire to see similar dancing bodies? Like whether it's on Instagram or whether it's on a stage, why do you want such coordinated bodies? I don't get it.” Priyanka admits that while the intent is present, it is an evolving process and challenge to truly implement this while teaching. There is an attempt to strike a balance between teaching the skills that the form is characterised by, and providing students with the freedom to build upon or bend them. Priyanka shares an amusing example of this where her younger students had come up with a new version of the pathaka hastha (a hand gesture used to denote a flag; pathaka meaning flag and hastha meaning hand gesture) during one of their classes- a ‘flapathaka’-- a flapping pathaka.
With teaching children in particular, Priyanka believes in introducing grace, not a binary of good and bad. Agency over one’s own bodies – through dance and within dance – is something she emphasises on and is frequently visible in Nirali’s work.
A developing vision
While the space and the intent exist, Nirali is fairly young and Priyanka believes in tweaking and adjusting her approach as time passes. The Nirali Collective is not defined by any hard and fast rules that seek to impose a certain type of practice onto its students or its viewers. What remains constant, however, is its encouragement to negotiate with the dance form by offering a choice between, or a combination of, practicing the classical form with all its traditional conventions, and subverting them to create one’s own approach to learning and performing.
Students of The Nirali Collective are soon presenting Payana, a traditional Bharatanatyam recital, at the Indian Institute of World Culture in Basavanagudi, Bengaluru on August 29.