Essays on Classical Indian Dance

Donovan Roebert

• Publisher: Jenny Stanford Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000260755
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

The book is a wide-ranging collection of essays on Indian classical dance, which include writings on dance appreciation, the criticism, theory and philosophy of dance, as well as some historical and light controversial articles. Also included is a seminal and unique monograph on the contribution of Sanjukta Panigrahi to the development of Odissi. The book approaches the subject from an internationalist point of view and opens up new possibilities for the appreciation of Indian dance in the context of a global intercultural critique. In addition, it is beautifully illustrated with a number of photographs captured by Arun Kumar. It will enrich and provide new ways of understanding for classical Indian dance, both for the dance community and for the general reader.

15

The Language of the Dancing Body in Nritta: Part One

In this essay I want to try to discover what kind of language is being spoken by the dancing body in nritta, and in what ways that language ought to be understood. I am confining myself to the language of the dancing body in a nritta recital because the natya and nritya modes are designed to convey certain discursive narratives and their accompanying images and sentiments whose meanings are pre-symbolized in the codes of dance. Thus, if in the course of a nritya performance we are presented with the tribhangi posture, with feet in the dhanupada and the flautist’s arms and fingers, we know that we are being referred to Krishna. In the natya and nritya modes then we are to a large extent being addressed by means of a dancing sign-language whose meanings we can interpret easily enough if we are familiar with its significations.

In the pure nritta, on the other hand, we are confronted with a dancing body whose signs are not intended, or ought not to be intended, to convey any meanings other than those contained in the geometry and flux of the dance as pure dance, and from which all the language of drama is necessarily excluded. We are dealing, that is, with the language of the geometry and flux of a given form-in-motion, and with no other language besides. How then can we begin to decipher its kinetic-glyphic meanings?

15. Jessica Fiala, Ragamala Dance Company, Minneapolis.

I would like to turn for help here, as I have done in other essays, to the kind of language used in poetry, because poetry is in some ways the linguistic-literary equivalent of dance. It is dancing language. And for my purposes here I want to distinguish between two kinds of poetry, the mimetic and the imagist.

In mimetic poetry, whether narrative or descriptive, we are able to discern directly, by the usual processes of thinking and feeling, what the poet is saying to us—because the meanings intended in this kind of poetry can be written down as a statement or summary in prose. Though the language is raised to that of poetry, we are still essentially dealing with the kind of language which we normally speak or write in order to make ourselves understood through the usual usage of words.

In imagist poetry, however, we are confronted by a language made up purely of juxtaposed images, the flow and sequence of which have not the discursive logic of ordinary linguistic syntax but instead the logic of imagery-in-motion. Here is an example from T.S. Eliot:

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

Now quite obviously this stanza offers nothing to discursive thought. We cannot hope to rewrite it in prose and try to get at its meaning in that way. It is a completely different and far more difficult language which speaks to a different and more obscure aspect of the reading, interpreting mind. What it offers to the surface mind is not much more than the images of eyes, a perpetual star, a multifoliate rose, sightlessness, and so forth, in addition to its stanzaic form and metrics, which we can analyze if we want to. But what then? We are left with a meaningless assemblage of linguistic units, with an adavu of language that proffers at the surface only its geometry, flux, shape, rhythm and pictorial imagist units.

As an adavu then, or perhaps as a short jethi, the discursive mind can discover nothing more in it than its elegance. If we wish to uncover its inner meaning, to force it to communicate with us in a living way, we have ourselves to turn inward and try to get at the sense of what it is saying at the subconscious, pre-discursive mental level. We have to grasp its logic in the areas of mind that precede ordinary, everyday logic, and which in preceding it reveal themselves as the obscure regions from which that logic arises into clarity.

Now in the language of the body as it is used in the nritta we discern a similar principle at work. The instruments of geometry, flux, metrics and rhythm are being used to communicate at the pre-cognitive level, at the level of the primal. In addition, this formal communication is enhanced by the lyrical qualities of the hastha mudras and facial expressions which belong to the special category of abstract abhinaya that is proper only to the nritta. What is at play before us, therefore, is a complex combination of geometric elegance and lyrical sensuality. At the primal mental level where it does its work, this combination-in-motion asserts a pre-logical logic of its own, a logic of sentiment whose task is to make conscious a particular flavour of experience whose meaning resides in the flavour itself.

In the nritta the dancing body is using the principles of geometry, flux, metrics, rhythm and nritta abhinaya as a composite force for generating and containing a powerfully concentrated lyrical elegance. In asserting this, let us pause to remember that geometry, rhythm and so forth are not human inventions but the discovery of certain inward principles that form the basis of human thought and sentiment. That is why it is in our nature to put them to use for both practical and aesthetic ends once we have found them in our primal subconsciousness and brought them to formal refinement through reflective thought.

But the dancing body departs from poetry (and here the analogy also touches it limits) in that it is a living body, alive and dancing in our presence. It differs fundamentally from poetry, which is a communication from mind to mind. The language of the dance is in the first instance a communication from body to body. This is as undeniable as it would be absurd to say that we experience the geometric flux of the dancing body in the same way as we do the changing patterns in a twirled kaleidoscope.

There is nothing at all abstract in the direct and immediate communication between dancing flesh and onlooking flesh. And this speaking from body to body is made all the more intense by the coded geometric concentration of physical lyrical elegance, which is the foundational method of dance, the method underlying the surface codes by which its methodical purpose is achieved.

And, though we usually do, we ought really not to blush when we write or read that, in the course of the dance, body speaks to body in the language of body. Rather, we should tremble because the gateway to inner unity provided for us by the language of the dancing body is as undeniable as the force of sringara itself—a primal force that every one of us knows instinctively and intimately in him- or herself.

We could go on to speak then of the sublimation of sringara as though sringara could ever exist as a rarefied abstraction, as though knowing it in its essence could ever be similar to knowing and thinking about the kaleidoscopic patterns we recall after we have laid the kaleidoscope aside. When we speak of sublimation we are theorizing, not living in the presence of the dance.

Because, in the presence of the dance, being addressed in its language, we are really being driven not towards the abstract but into the primal regions, where union through sringara is both beautiful and terrifying. We need not wonder at this. Anyone stopping long enough to look closely and deeply at all its implications will know why it can and always must be as fearful as it is lovely.

Then, at this primal stratum of inward experience to which the language of dance has driven us, as poetry never can, we find the terror and beauty of sringara reconciled in a unity that we are used to calling ananda, bliss. And we all know, too, what that means.

But to speak in the language of devotion, of bhakti, we can surely agree that union with the divine, or with the living principle of what some call the divine, can never be an abstract matter. The mathematical formula for the deity, if such a formula existed, could not be the deity. It could only be an escape from the deity into a dead abstraction. It could not be the divine embrace.

Whereas the union with that living principle to which we are led by the language of the dancing body touches us at the very roots of our hair, and raises it.

16

The Language of the Dancing Body in Nritta: Part Two

In the essay immediately previous to this one I discussed the language of the dancing body in its communication at the level of the primal, and I said that this interaction occurred between body and body. I knew, however, even while I wrote it, that this could not be, and ought not to be taken as, the only kind of communication that occurs in the course of the dance. Still, I wanted to make what I have always felt was an obvious though largely avoided case for the primal language of classical Indian dance, and I wanted that case to stand alone there, and on its own naked feet.

In this continuation of my discussion of the language of the dancing body in nritta I want to try to comprehend the kind of communication that takes place, at the same time as the primal speaking from body to body, between the dancing body and the attendant mind—because it is at least as obvious, though certainly less controversial, that the observing mind is also being addressed by the body dancing within its purview.

Before looking more closely at this interaction I want to say at once, what I also insisted on in my previous essay, that I don’t consider the communication between dancing body and onlooking mind to be occurring in an abstract mode. While the dance is in progress and the rasika looks on, the communication is a living and palpable conversation, in which the dancer expresses herself and the rasika agrees—if the dance is any good—with what is being expressed by the dancing body.

16. Ramya S. Kapadia and Kasi Aysola, Natyarpana School of Dance and Music, Durham.

Afterwards, as an exercise in mere criticism, we may resort to abstract notions of the theorizing kind. But, while the dancing body is speaking its language in an atmosphere charged with immediacy and directness, the communication can only be concrete, physical and existential because the mind is being appealed to by a living dancer dancing in codified motion. And it is precisely in this juxtaposition of the living dancer with the codified principles of the dance that we find the clue to the kind of communication that is taking place not at the primal but at the conscious level.

What we are witnessing here is the vivification of a set of lifeless principles through the living dance that brings them into quickened motion. This is akin to actually hearing the music that has until now only been codified in its score, the score which is the appropriate object, too, of any abstract analysis we may wish to undertake.

So that, in the vitalized oneness of code and dance, which we are experiencing in our minds while the dancer dances, we discover the first unifying mental principle offered us by the language of the dancing body. We are imbibing a kind of visual music, made alive in our presence by the resurrected quickening of the underlying musical notation.

More than only this, the things that are being made alive-in-oneness in our presence are the fundamental creative principles (as Pythagoras knew) of geometry and motion, the principles inherent in the shaping and quickening of the whole of the universe and the life through which its wholeness is known.

This then is the first act of unification represented to us through the body-to-mind mode of the language spoken by the dancing body.

The second act of unification comes through the creative aesthetic process by which these now vivified elementary principles are harmonized through elegant arrangement and constrained into a single continuity by the formalism of classicism. Classical dance is not arbitrar...