Dance Matters

Performing India on Local and Global Stages

Pallabi Chakravorty, Nilanjana Gupta, Pallabi Chakravorty, Nilanjana Gupta

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136516122
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Danza

This volume presents a multidisciplinary perspective on dance scholarship and practice as they have evolved in India and its diaspora, outlining how dance histories have been written and re-written, how aesthetic and pedagogical conventions have changed and are changing, and how politico-economic shifts have shaped Indian dance and its negotiation with modernity.. Written by eminent and emergent scholars and practitioners of Indian dance, the articles make dance a foundational socio-cultural and aesthetic phenomena that reflects and impacts upon various cultural intercourses -- from art and architecture to popular culture, and social justice issues. They also highlight the interplay of various frameworks: global, national, and local/indigenous for studying these diverse performance contexts, using dance as a critical lens to analyse current debates on nationalism, transnationalism, gender and sexuality, and postcolonial politics. At the performace level, some articles question the accepted divisions of Indian dance ('classical', 'folk', and 'popular') and critique the dominant values associated with classical dance forms. Finally, the book brings together both experiential and objective dimensions of bodily knowledge through dance.

III
Aesthetics Embodied and Embedded

9

It Matters For Whom You Dance: Audience Participation in Rasa Theory*

UTTARA ASHA COORLAWALA

Rasa theory since ancient times has consistently noted an inter-influencing relationship between performance and audiences. As dance discourse addresses subtler processes of embodied knowing, Indian theories of perception and the reception of performance become more accessible. From this vantage point, it is astonishing to note the extent to which Abhinavagupta’s list of “obstacles” to rasa can be read in the conventions and structures of current traditional Indian classical forms. His profound but practical observations of the ways that performance can shape the audience’s experience presaged postmodern concerns with the spectators’ participation, complicating narratives with layered images and multiple perspectives.¹

Before moving in on the obstacles, this essay locates the writer’s relationship to practice and summarizes current terms derived from rasa theory with examples from actual performances and an often-told legend.

The reign of Emperor Akbar, the Mughal ruler, is celebrated in tales and performances as a period when Hindus and Muslims went beyond respect and tolerance to explore the arts, concepts, and lifestyles of each other. In this story, Akbar’s court was graced by the musical genius of singer Tansen, whose renditions of raga were so accurate on the subtle realms of sound that they could induce rain or fire. One day Tansen sang a song, composed by the blind seer and poet Surdas, that deeply touched Akbar’s heart. Emporer Akbar summoned Surdas to the royal court, but his messengers dallied in Surdas’s presence. Eventually, they returned transformed but without the singing sage. Noticing their state, Akbar decided to visit Surdas in his forest hermitage. After returning to his court in Agra, Akbar began to needle Tansen: “O Tansen, I always thought you were the most amazing and wonderful singer alive, but now I have heard Surdas. Tell me, how is it that the impact of his singing is exceedingly more profound than yours?” Tansen replied, “O Jahanpanah, undoubtedly Tansen sings for the Greatest Emperor on Earth, but Surdas—he sings for God.” The implication could not be stated more effectively that a performer is only as great as her/his audience.² Despite its tit-for-tat humor, this legend propels us straight to the core of the interactive aspect of the aesthetic theory of rasa that has resonated on a personal level for me. This legend illuminates my own experience as a performer in India in the 1970s, when television, internationally convertible currency, and globalism had not yet inflected the lives of most urban persons. Performing the same solo concert in major Indian cities and for not-so-metropolitan audiences taught me that performance is an ongoing dialogue between performer and audience.

Audience members cast votes on the performance by the ways in which they attended to it—drawing closer, becoming restive, still, or discussing the dance even as it was occurring! Some audiences gave love and support; others drained energy into a consuming black hole. Some bore witness to an inner journey, adding their intensity and experience into the mix of my body memories. Others withdrew in resistance. Then, in the early 1980s, came the great excitement and joy of performing on three separate occasions for the rasika (ideal spectator) of my innermost desires, my spiritual guru Swami Muktananda Paramahamsa or Baba.³ These experiences intensified and clarified my consequent awareness of audiences and of dancing. Then, seeking to further understand the nature of the dialogue between performer and audience, I found it exemplified in live performances, in stories about performers and most profoundly, in the theoretical expositions of bhava and the ways that dances can be deliberately structured to ensure that viewers remain active and alert. Understanding and conceiving of rasa became an intertextual game of reading written and performed texts. This is not to suggest that Indian theater and dance have not changed since the 1970s or that there have been no diasporic or intercultural dialogues. However, this essay aims to show embedded structures that might at first glance be taken as exemplary of global influence.

The Ideal Spectator or Rasika

The performer–audience relationship has historically been considered crucial in determining the quality of performances. If a performance is to be successful, there must be rasa. But it is not the performer’s responsibility to evoke rasa. The performer’s role is to represent the prescribed emotional moods or bhava with sustained clear focus. Sattva, or the luminous communicative energy (“presence” serves as a partial synonym) that results from the performer’s bodily activities and mental focus becomes flavored, as it were, with the appropriate emotion or bhava. The sympathetic (sa-hridaya) but critically discerning viewer (rasika) apprehends the emotions within a performative context, not as a cathartic experience but as a state, rasa (Bharata 1956–67, vol. 27: 49–58). Rasa literally translates to that which is tasted, relished. Rasa is a reflective experience of actively tasting rather than of devouring or being devoured by emotions. Rasa involves seeing with an inner eye, hearing resonances, and touching inner spaces.⁴ Until the poem is read, it has no existence. Unless the spatial aesthetic and symbolic characteristics of a sculpture are apprehended, it is no more than inert stone. An image of a deity in the temple, a moorti, remains just another icon until the worshipper is transformed in its presence. Without at least one viewer to taste (even when that viewer is The Unseen Witness), there cannot be a performance.

This leisurely inner savoring of a performance, poem, or artwork is not only a mental practice assiduously cultivated by those educated in traditional Indian arts and literary forms. The intensity of this experience of rasa is the measure by which success is evaluated. Rasa may involve a spontaneous experience of insight ( pratyaksha). Very often, a performer of Indian dance will attribute a spontaneous flash of creative improvisation to the presence of rasika(s). Accomplished and master performers build audience dialogue into their presentations:

After performing a few items Birju Maharaj said he was very uncomfortable and requested that the overhead nontheatrical lighting be turned on, so that he could see the faces of the audience. He spoke in English (which he rarely speaks) for his invited guests who were unfamiliar with Kathak. Once the lights were turned on, he appeared to be more at ease, structuring his presentation according to the responses of the audience and playing off their moods. At the end of the performance, when he was being showered with applause, he said in wonder that it was the heart of the audience that had inspired him, that he had found himself performing with insights and subtleties that surprised him; he did not know from where they came, but that it had to do with “the heart of the audience.” He said that the rasa of this performance would surely remain with him for a week. (Coorlawala 1991: 36)

And the reverse unfortunately holds true too. At one of Balasaraswati’s appearances at the Jacob’s Pillow theater, she is said to have cut short her performance. When asked about this, she is said to have felt that the audience had been insensitive to her art. However, she declared that she would not be averse to performing for the students and faculty that same evening after the paying public went home. Apparently she did just that and held them enthralled. So goes this story told by Ted Shawn in one of his “curtain speeches” to educate American dancegoers as to the performer–audience conventions of other cultures.⁵

In Mumbai, I was attending a concert featuring the well-known singer Bhimsen Joshi. Beside me a gentleman slouched back in his chair, his eyes half-closed. About forty-five minutes into the performance he suddenly sat up alert and beaming. Noting my interest in his changed demeanor, he bubbled over, “Now—now he has warmed up! Now [music] begins.” How I had misperceived this person! Now clearly his patience, stamina, generosity, and discerning expectations all signaled “rasika!”

Rasa Theory

In order for the reader to better follow how rasa theory informs the performer–audience relationship, I need to make a brief digression to summarize how rasa is currently generated in performances of Indian dance that may be new but are in accordance with historic prescriptions. The concept of rasa has generated written texts of philosophical inquiry, which involve dialogue between various scholars (Bharata, Bhatta Lollatta, Shri Shankuka, Bhatta Naayaka, Abhinavagupta) on the nature of perception and how a work of art (poetry, dance, or theater) accomplishes its affect.⁶ There are also practical manuals (shastra) of summarized instructions that were and still are being invoked as evidence of the early existence of multiple lineages of dance (examples include the Natyasastra, Abhinayadarpana, Kama Sutra, Sangitaratnakara, Vishnudharmottara, etc.).⁷ In addition, there are numerous references to dance and rasa in various regional languages and in the Indian arts, from poetry and drama to sculpture and music.⁸

In current practice, lineages of concepts of dance appear and reappear side by side and layered over each other as a palimpsest of performative knowledges. Performers were known to circulate throughout the subcontinent as patronage shifted with the political fortunes of local rulers. Whereas scholars agree that praxis (here, organized notions of training, vocabulary, syntax, form, etc.) preceded the writing of these historic manuals, today performers often assume the reverse, that is, that practice followed the writings. This assumption more accurately reflects our present relationships with these movement texts as well as recent processes of recovering and reconstructing Indian dances as classical forms. In this time of global diasporic movement, it is hard to hold on to the slippery meta-narrative spanning two millennia of geo-culturally specific performance practice. Accumulating traces from previous models of rasa in performance, philosophic inquiry and imaginative play continuously layer and transform meanings with each act of interpretation and each performance.

The following description summarizes performative conventions generalized from both praxis and the principles listed in the Natyasastra and the discourse it generated.⁹ A poet, director, performer, or playwright will first determine a thematic or base mood (sthyayibhava) that will permeate the performance, choosing from the nine generic emotional states of delight (rati), laughter (haasa), sorrow (shoka), anger (krodha), heroism (utsaha), fear (bhaya), disgust (jugupsa), wonder (vismaya), and peace (shanta). Kathakali dance dramas excel in representations of heroism and martial accomplishments, whereas Bharatnatyam dancers might focus on the theme of delighting in love of the eternal (bhakti-sringar). Buddhist dance dramas are likely to choose peace (shanta) as their dominant bhava.

Then proceeds the task of developing complex, multi-layered narratives that digress, return, interconnect with and intensify the dominant mood or sthyayi bhava, as it is termed. Productions may involve several characters played by different performers or a solo performer of either gender who will play all the roles including that of narrator. Building narrative calls for imagination in developing differentiated and plausible situations to which the protagonists will respond, each according to his or her assigned nature. The causes (karana) of visible behaviors (karya) in daily life are aestheticized. In performance these are represented as motivating factors (vibhava) recognized by the behaviors (anubhava) that they engender. A dancer’s gestures may indicate heat emanating from her body. Then she might sigh as the back of her hand wipes off drops of perspiration. The indication of perspiration is recognized as anubhava and the heat as its vibhava. Whether her actions signal climatic heat, the heat of her passion, or both, will unfold. As she continues to wait for her Beloved, the dancer may transit though various vyabhichara bhava or transient emotions such as anxiety, joyful anticipation of his arrival, anger at the delay in his arrival, or fear lest he may have been harmed. Since all these passing emotions arise from her being in love, the thematic bhava (dominant emotional state) of this dance remains love (sringara). The Natyasastra lists thirty-three of these complementary states (vyabhichari bhava) that might be used to build one of eight durable states (sthyayi bhava). The Natyasastra also lists eight extre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• Introduction Pallabi Chakravorty and Nilanjana Gupta
• I Can the Subaltern Dance?
• II Globalization of Indian Dance
• III Aesthetics Embodied and Embedded
• IV The Gendered Dancing Body
• V Alternative Histories
• List of Contributors
• Index