Dancing the Classical
Plus an interview with dancer Tuli Bera!
Some Viscera sits in the conceptual frame of the arangetram, a Tamil word meaning “ascending the stage.” The arangetram is the long-form, solo performance through which students of classical Indian dance and music debut as mature artists. It’s a profound opportunity to master the fundamentals of these art forms and become an autonomous artist. It’s also a powerful way for the diaspora to access and perpetuate cultural knowledge and its history.
For many, the arangetram is affirming. For me, it was lonely and painful. As a kid I was mesmerized by Bharatanatyam, a form of classical dance from South India. I begged my mom to let me learn and eventually joined a group of girls for giggly weekend lessons. When I began to train for my arangetram at 14, I left that camaraderie. For months I danced alone in my teacher’s basement while she called me lazy and complained about my skinny arms. I cried in class. Competition sprouted among my peers and our parents. Whose arangetram would be the best, the most talked-about? Who received the best choreography from our teacher? When the local paper ran a laudatory story about my arangetram a few weeks before the big day, it irked the parents of girls who received no press before theirs. Tired of comparisons with my best friend, I ended our friendship—a decision I regret to this day. After my arangetram, I stopped dancing for twenty years.
Some Viscera premieres this week on September 26-27 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago! Don’t miss this gorgeous evening of dance and music performed by a 9-person ensemble. In my last letter before the premiere, I’m discussing the idea of “the classical” in dance, which forms a central part of Some Viscera’s study of childhood, memory, and nostalgia in the Indian-American diaspora. Read to the end for a mini-interview with Tuli Bera, one of the dancers in the premiere!
For Some Viscera, the arangetram offers a lens for thinking about dance in the context of pre- and postcolonial nationalism in India and the Indian-American diaspora; and the concept of “the classical” in relation to the institutions that shape art. I became interested in these topics when I learned in Kathak classes with Rachna Ramya Agrawal that it was the Indian government that determined which dance forms were classical. This was (long overdue!) news to me. What was “classical” about classical dance? If the government granted this status, what were the implications for classical and non-classical forms in India and abroad?
In short, there was no classical dance in India until the end of Company rule and the British Raj.1 The designation of what is and isn’t classical is entwined with India’s struggle for freedom and self-legitimization after decolonization. Previously, the region that became India was home to hundreds of heterogeneous local dance forms. Performed in sacred and secular spaces, often beyond urban centers, they were informed by diverse ethnolinguistic groups that included Hindus, Muslims, and Jains.2 Dancers came from hereditary dance communities and performed works that were often overtly erotic and explored gender far beyond the western colonial binary.3
The notion of the classical arrived in India with the British.4 In the decades before India won its independence in 1947, its founding elites believed that establishing classical forms would overcome Orientalist views of the future nation-state as primitive and give it a respectable, ancient past. Around this time, the styles that became “classical” were undergoing a complex process of change that involved selectively choosing and codifying diverse movement traditions into fixed gestural vocabularies.5 Partly thanks to British rule, which deemed women dancers to be prostitutes, this process also erased the overt eroticism of many of these forms.6 (My paternal grandfather disapproved of my learning for this reason.) Many styles became not only more religious, but explicitly Hindu.
In the case of Bharatanatyam, the process above included its appropriation by Brahmins from the non-Brahmin communities in which it originated.7 In 1943, Rukmini Devi, an early Brahmin practitioner of the form and a pivotal part of its achievement of classical status, wrote with palpable relief about “…the complete separation of our work from the traditional dance teachers… Now there are so many girls from good families who are excellent dancers.”8 Good families. Brahmin families.
In the 1950s, the Sangeet National Akademi (SNA), India’s state institute for the performing arts, assessed which dance forms would be classical. Some, like Bharatanatyam, received the status immediately. Others, like Odissi, required some advocacy.9 What made a dance classical? According to one member of the SNA, “One, it must have its roots in the past. Two, it must have an evolved technique. Three, it must have certain authoritative sources as shastras [sacred texts]. And four, it must have certain perfected forms of expression and communication. Such a dance may be classical and not a dance that came up 40 years ago.”10 These categories reflected and hierarchized the new and changing local and regional identities with which these forms were associated.
The process of selectively appropriating, reconfiguring, codifying, and even renaming what became the classical dances is often called “revival.” This suggests that a stable art form nearly disappeared before it was resuscitated, unchanged.11 Yet the forms that became classical were new—with undeniably ancient roots. They were experimental, created not just in response to an anti-colonial movement, but as part of it.12 They were the movement of the movement.
India’s nine classical dances receive tremendous support from the state. The rest of its countless traditional dance forms do not. State intervention has also fostered conservatism among the classical dances.13 I’ve seen brilliant, celebrated dancers assert that their style is distinctive because it more accurately reflects the ancient, “original” form of the dance, unable or unwilling to acknowledge that their work pushes boundaries. Of the classical forms, Bharatanatyam has achieved cultural hegemony, enjoying unparalleled national and international popularity. It’s the form that girls in the diaspora are likeliest to learn and perform in an arangetram, perhaps because it’s associated with middle class Brahminism.14
Nationalism is a vital fuel for anti-colonial freedom struggles, but it demands a price. What responsibilities accompany the love and performance of classical dance? At the premiere of Some Viscera, Kinnari Vora, Shalaka Kulkarni, and Tuli Bera draw on their respective expertise in Bharatanatyam, Kathak, and ballet to join me and Asha Rowland in inhabiting these tensions: the competition for status among dancers in the classroom; the competition for status among the classical dances of India; the toxic dangers of “the classical.” With uneasy joy, we also celebrate the sisterhood of the classical classroom and the powerful acts of creation—and experimentation—that it engenders. For India, classical dance was essential to the making of India and how its diaspora makes and remakes itself.
And now for a mini email interview with Tuli Bera (she/they), who will dance in the premiere of Some Viscera this week! See you at the show?
Love,
Lakshmi
Interview with Tuli Bera:
L: You access a dance vocabulary that draws on a wide range of styles and forms, including Bharatanatyam, ballet, and contemporary forms. How has your relationship with ballet specifically evolved, and what led you to explore non-ballet dance after dedicating your early years to ballet?
T: As a movement artist/creator, I’m starting to describe myself as an autonomous chameleon with a toolbox. But that wasn’t always the case…my early dance exposure and training were wholeheartedly dedicated to Ballet, so much so that my full existence was defined by it. I did have a few years of Bharatanatyam, but I quickly let it go because it wasn’t Ballet. It wasn’t until my early 20s, when I was in college, that I was exposed to other forms and styles of dance. I would enter those classes as a Ballet dancer. The concept of entering as “just me” was uncomfortable and I fully rejected it. I felt an emotional and physical awkwardness with other forms as if I was always doing it wrong. I distinctly remember saying to a friend, “[blank] style of dance isn’t for me, I’m too Ballet.” In the last year of undergrad, I felt pressure to crack the Ballet shell, and upon graduation, I vowed never to involve myself in Ballet again as a dancer/performer. I felt it was the only way to find out who I was outside of the form that defined me for over 10 years. I wanted to know if I could exist as a dancer without Ballet.
L: Ballet is among the classical dance forms that make an appearance in Some Viscera. Where does ballet fit into discourse about the classical and how does it fit into this production?
T: Parts of Some Viscera look at the social impact of the classical, how we define it as individuals, and its role in our daily lives. It has urged me to ask myself, “What are the core characteristics we embody having been deeply invested in our respective classical dance forms?” Cult, power, wealth, status, competition, exclusivity, and oppression come to mind when I think of Ballet. However, I also acknowledge and lean into aspects of celebration, camaraderie, youth-like play, curiosity, and simple love for the ways in which my body chooses to express itself. These positive aspects of the classical are left out because of the prevalence and perpetuation of toxic supremacy in the classical to this day. Some Viscera feels like critical analysis and questioning, but with a humanistic and holistic approach. My personal history and my human emotions ARE relevant to this project. Ballet, as a classical form, is central to the discourse in Some Viscera since it exemplifies both the oppressive dynamics often associated with classical traditions and the beauty and joy that these forms can offer. This tension is a key element of our exploration of the piece.
L: In the world of ballet, what are some of the most interesting debates about what is and isn't normatively classical?
T: The discourse of what is classical ballet and what isn’t interests me. It begs the question, “How far back in history do you go, and what and whose definition of classical are we aligning ourselves with?” In the past, my idea of what was classical was based on how I learned and embodied Ballet technique (I trained in the Russian Vaganova method, which was established in the early 1900s). If I saw flexion at the ankle, I would immediately conclude that it wasn’t Classical Ballet—even if there were pointe shoes. At this point, especially after taking the time to explore Ballet’s almost 500-year history it’s been eye-opening to see how much Ballet has transformed. What has stayed constant, who in the Ballet world has visibility, and who drives the narrative of what Ballet is today etc.
This question also takes me to gatekeeping. What does it take to be known as a Ballet dancer? I often return to the question, why not call myself a Ballet dancer? Perhaps because there are negative associations, I fear placing the word anywhere near my name without a detailed explanation. I would like to see and be a part of conversations that acknowledge that there is a spectrum when it comes to Ballet. It’s possible to say, loud and proud, that I am just as much of a ballet dancer as your prima ballerinas, it's just that our relationship and time with the form look different.
Let’s keep unpacking!
Pallabi Chakravorty, “From Interculturalism to Historicism: Reflections on Classical Indian Dance,” Dance Research Journal 32, no. 2 (2000-2001): 108-119; Davesh Soneji, “Critical Steps: Thinking through Bharatanatyam in the Twenty-first Century,” in Bharatanatyam: A Reader, ed. Davesh Soneji (Oxford University Press, 2010): xi-xix; Michael Harp Allen, “Rewriting the Script for South Indian Dance,” in Bharatanatyam: A Reader, ed. Davesh Soneji (Oxford University Press, 2010): 205-252; Anurima Banerji, Dancing Odissi: Paratopic Performances of Gender and State (London: Seagull Books, 2019): 3-8, 222-351.
Banerji, Dancing Odissi, 44, 50, 75-78, 86-87.
Allen, “Rewriting the Script for South Indian Dance,” 205-210; Banerji, Dancing Odissi, 3, 20-21, 187-221.
Phiroze Vasunia, The Classics and Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Allen, “Rewriting the Script for South Indian Dance,” 205-207; Banerji, Dancing Odissi, 222-351.
Anne-Marie Gaston, “Dance and the Hindu Woman: Bharatanatyam Re-reritualized,” in Bharatanatyam: A Reader, ed. Davesh Soneji (Oxford University Press, 2010): 273-275; Banerji, Dancing Odissi, 18, 54, 245, 278.
Allen, “Rewriting the Script for South Indian Dance”; Aditi Murti, “Tell Me More: Talking Caste Dynamics in Bharatanatyam With Nrithya Pillai,” The Swaddle (accessed September 16, 2024).
Allen, “Rewriting the Script for South Indian Dance,” 207.
Banerji, Dancing Odissi, 222-351.
Banerji, Dancing Odissi, 313-313; Mohan and Ashish Khokar, The Dance Orissi (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 2011): 255.
Allen, “Rewriting the Script for South Indian Dance,” 205-252.
Allen, “Rewriting the Script for South Indian Dance.,” 205-252.
Banerji, Dancing Odissi, 222-351.
Janet O’Shea, “At Home in the World?: The Bharatanatyam Dancer as Transnational Interpreter,” in Bharatanatyam: A Reader, ed. Davesh Soneji (Oxford University Press, 2010): 297-310.