This piece was commissioned by and published in Material : No 2, November 2019.
I am a practitioner of a dance form that not many white people have heard of, let alone are able to pronounce, so half the conversations I have are reduced to me trying to explain what I do. These conversations inaccurately render Bharatanatyam a minority practice, and I a minority artist, trying endlessly to relate what I do to an elusive notion of ‘mainstream dance’. There are thousands of dancers in the UK practising Bharatanatyam; they do so in dance academies tucked away in residential neighbourhoods, large temple halls, small living rooms converted into makeshift studios. They’re not booking studios at The Place, or sharing work at Siobhan Davies Dance, or indeed applying for funding from the Arts Council. These dancers sit outside of the specific infrastructure of white contemporary dance, and they are made invisible and minoritarian as a result.
I usually explain: Bharatanatyam is a classical form, just like ballet, in that there are strict aesthetic codes and technical rules which take years to master. It has a formal technique that is strongly linked to body design [I hold up natyarambhe] and certain geometries [I demonstrate an adavu]; the grounded demi-plie [I lower into araimandi] and rhythmic footwork play an important role. This is not what Bharatanatyam is to me. This is how I make Bharatanatyam relatable for the British contemporary dancer. I choose dance terminology that will give Bharatanatyam its best chance at being accepted, included and not othered. I choose to not spend those few minutes speaking about the centrality of emotion, of narrative, charm, facial expressions, eyes, mythology, costuming and love stories; these elements are unpalatable to contemporary dance, and as a minority artist, I am trying to achieve visibility.
I infiltrate mainstream dance infrastructure in order to find this visibility. But when I book a studio at a contemporary dance building, the ceiling wobbles a little bit with all my ‘stamping’. It’s noisy; there’s none of that slidy, releasy, socked, light footwork that these studios invite. People come and peer in to see what all the chaos is, and I have to work against the strong impulse to dissolve my footwork. The attempt to be palatable is a narrative that speaks of minority experience far beyond the dance world. Immigrants are more palatable when they’re integrated, Muslims are more palatable when they’re liberal, black women are more palatable when they’re not angry, women are more palatable when they’re passive. Palatability speaks more of majority culture than it does of minorities; it reveals more about the palettes themselves than what is being sampled. Despite the value-neutral identity that the UK contemporary dance scene continues to claim, the hierarchies that define high art from low art are far from extinct.
Bharatanatyam seems more palatable when dressed down, presented in clever ensemble choreographies, when formal and abstract and virtuosic. I see these trends emerge, proliferated when awarded a sense of palatability. I am complicit in some part of this and I find it difficult to understand how not to be. Often, it’s unclear to me where certain parts of my own palette originated; whether they were born from a desire for validation from white audiences, or whether they arise from inherently personal aesthetics. Recently, I’ve joined forces with five other noisy, stampy, gesturing, storytelling, emotive Indian-classical dancers to form a collective. By surrounding myself with others from the same tribe, I don’t have to spend so much energy explaining what I do or trying to untangle my palette from those that are imposed on me. We can dance without diluting, corrupting, exaggerating, disguising, reducing or compromising what we do. It’s just one way out of this riddle, but it’s one step closer to becoming happily unpalatable.