'I don't call my work a performance. I call it an experience'

- Malavika Sarukkai

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Veejay Sai is Indian classical music/dance critic and Special Correspondent of www.artindia.net. Veejay Sai can be contacted on veejaysai.vs@gmail.com Copying this interview in part/full without the written permission of www.artindia.net is against law.

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It is not often that someone easily casts a spell on you and it stays like a hangover for a long time after her dance performance. In south India, every other house has either a dancer or a musician undergoing tutoring even as you read this. While that is a wonderful idea and sounds encouraging for the future of performing arts, very few of these artists manage to make it to the stage and sustain a successful career. And a fewer worth mentioning when speaking of people who have done justice to represent their dance forms. After having enthralled audiences across the world for the last few decades, she now takes the illustrious position of being one of the finest exponents of Bharata Natyam. In an exclusive interview with well-known writer and critic Veejay Sai, danseuse, recipient of ' Padma Shri' Malavika Sarukkai shares her passion for life and how it couldn't be entwined with anything else but her art. She was touring the launch of her new DVD titled 'Vahini' released by Times Music.

The DVD 'Vahini' is an assortment of Malavika's pure dance and creative choreographic presentations. 'This DVD was an idea that came out after much thought. For many years I would travel all over the world and perform. I had audiences who would come and tell me that much as they loved my performance, they didn't have anything to take back home. So it was this need to give back a slice of my art that came about in the form of a DVD of this nature. I was supported by a very dear friend of mine who encouraged me to do it. It costs money to make a DVD, it doesn't come easy. And the other thing is it comes across as a very different aspect of dance. It is one thing to dance in a theatre space performing in front of an audience. The whole concept of putting it on to a visual medium and recording it is different. For me it is quiet a milestone because it makes dance available to viewers and in a sense is dissemination of what dance is about. I am glad I did it. I'm very happy I've been able to give a cross section of pieces in this DVD. So it's not just the maargam or the traditional repertoire that I do, I've also a padam and other structures of choreography in it ', she explains speaking about 'Vahini'.

On a first impression the double-DVD set is indeed a delight to view and it surely is a must-have if you have been a connoisseur of Indian dance. It has a wonderful eclectic assortment of productions done by Malavika over the years. It serves as a great classroom educative viewing for students of dance.

While she is well-acclaimed for her classical dance she has also choreographed new productions of contemporary dance with a strong Indian idiom. 'Traditional dance pieces have a structure and there is almost a habit in it. You follow it and of course you can be very inventive about how you interpret it. There is vast scope for that. But I think when you do a completely different choreography, it's like walking into a room where there is complete silence and there is nothing on the canvas, you look at it and ask 'where and how do I start? What do I want to fill this canvas with? I think it's almost a kind of intuitive process. At least my work is a lot of intuition on how I feel the movement. There is cerebration to it. There is a concept. There is an overall structure. Like I did a piece called 'Sthithi-gath', which is stillness and movement. That came about because I've seen a lot of sculptures and seen the inter-relatedness between sculpture and dance in India. Standing close to these chola bronzes, at the Saraswathi mahal library museum in Thanjavur, you see those bronzes and they live! They still resonate with energy! You can walk around them, look at them and still there is that beatific smile, that grace of the arms, the length of the body, the torso and so on. It's absolutely a living presence. And I watched them closely and wondered what is it that makes them so lively. I think it's the energy of stillness and movement which is the intent with which the sculptor has actually created the bronze. This creative process is also very meditative. At least in India when we are talking about spiritual, it is a seed which lies within choreography. My kind of choreography is very rooted in the sacred. Seeing those bronze sculptures one feels there is a movement from within. You can sense the movement. So a choreographic piece like 'Sthithi-gathi' I was aware about the fact that even if I pause, there is an energy radiating from within. And these things are very much to do with how the mind participates in dance', says Malavika about how she responds to working differently as a dancer and as a choreographer.

Stages of Evolution
One of the arguments that face choreographers is that their work is all highly engineered and it is bereft of any creative spontaneity. 'In a pure dance performance as in Nritta, we have rhythm, structure, taala and things we work with. The spontaneity or the freshness happen when the movement is performed with an acute sync of mind and body. Am speaking of very dance technique here. When the body and mind are in complete sync, even if you've practiced it fifty times before that just to get it right, it comes to live on stage with newness. This comes when the mind sharpens movement. The intent of the mind, what am I thinking when I dance, when I stretch my arm out in space and so on is important. May be I could sum it up in saying it's a form of 'mind fullness'. Be it abhinaya or nritta, it is this 'mind fullness' that keeps it alive and live in the present. I have often talked about my dance saying that it is a language of the present tense. People often say classical dance as if to speak of the past. I say it's in the now. In the today. Making of that movement on stage is re-creating it, rather than imitating it. There is so much riyaaz and sadhana in classical dance people often tend to see it as something that is not growing or living but is stagnating. But living dance, I know it is not that way. I would almost call it meditative. And that movement has to be created every time. It cannot be commanded, imitated or simply called upon. I can't say I did it last week this time, so now come again. That cannot happen. It is a movement you make in the moment. Now that is what gives me, as an artist, a continuous freshness in my dance,' she explains going further into the very process of how she works.

While purists question the importance of the outcome and value of choreographic performances, it's foolish to deny that choreography in turn has managed to sustain the interest in dance amongst newer audiences. Is the process as important as the outcome? 'The process is very important and there is a lot to process but in art, as in classical dance, the moment happens out of anywhere. It is created. There is a lot to do with process, technique and cerebration. There is a lot of precise and clear thinking in every choreographic piece. The mind plays a huge role in my work. My work is not about huge concepts which have to be explained a lot. It is about deep-rooted concepts which I hope I keep the essence of it. Frankly speaking I don't even call my work as performances, in the end. I call them experiences. I reworked that for the last few years. I decided I am not going on stage to perform. I have done that earlier. Now I go on the stage to experience something through my art. With the sadhana I have done for so many years, I find I can experience something.

Process has thinking to it but there is also tremendous freedom within it. We normally say tradition OR change: that big word 'Or' which we put in the middle to demarcate. But I've always looked at it as tradition AND change. It's a continuum. Tradition doesn't exclude change. I think an artist's responsibility is to adapt and that's why we have continuity in this country. We are given the freedom and responsibility as if saying 'please now this is your tradition, see how you continue it'. As an artist if I look at the last twenty-five years I have done choreography, it's because I've seen the potential of change within it. When I can keep to the classical grammar and identity, and within that, especially because I see it as a language, I have never seen Bharata Natyam as a 'style' I dance; I see it as a language I speak. So when I look at it like that I also realize that I can speak it in different ways. I can make new words, new sentences, and rewrite, rephrase so on and so forth. Those people, who want to see Bharata Natyam as a maargam, should by all means go ahead and do it. When I see maargambeing presented, which we see very little of it now, I see it as 'period'. It has its own reason, beauty and place to exist. For me it's different. I think I've been too much of a thinking and questioning artist. I have looked at maargam, seen padams and jaavalis and things written for courts and kings, it had a certain context under which it flowered which was very meaningful at that time. But I see this time and ask myself what is meaningful. For me the now is meaningful. There are audiences who like to see maargam because there is a certain comfort and familiarity for them to go back to it again and again. It can coexist for those artists who want to perform it and those audiences who want to enjoy it. But for some other artists, and I fall into that category, there is a great need to explore the medium. There is a need to find new meanings, challenges, perspectives and that's why I have seen it more as a 'language' of dance. And when I say language, there is so much possible', she adds.

One of the biggest banes of dance recitals has been that many dancers often come on stage with a hangover of their older performances. The same movements and structures get stereotyped, consciously or unconsciously, on stage. How does one avoid this sort of over-lapping of creative work? 'That is something I work on very astutely. I don't want any of these spill-overs. Just because I have done it before, I wouldn't take the same thing, smoothen it out into another piece and then say I have done a new performance. Over the last twenty-five years I've been saying that each piece has its special quality. I have been very determined to give each piece its exclusivity. So I had to actually work very hard on myself. That demands a lot from yourself because you are not going to fall into a 'repeat' syndrome. Every time you have to pull out of yourself something else which that particular choreography demands. I have been very clear that I want to do that. I am very hard with myself. You will hear a lot of stories of how malavika akka dances for many hours and she also expects her musicians to rehearse for many hours. Yes I do. It all is true. Otherwise you can't do justice to the piece and give it that uniqueness. Some time ago, I choreographed a piece on Devi 'Mahishasura mardhini'. Devi was a subject I kept far away from myself thinking I don't know if I can handle 'Devi'. I was not ready to handle the concept of 'Shakthi'. I was working with NCPA and P.N Goswami and before I knew it I realized I had decided to work with it. If you see that piece, it is entirely different from anything else I have done. I work with Bharat Natyam but there are in-flows. I am distilling, observing from life inside me and this slowly becomes a movement in my choreography. It is like the underground river process. You know you can't see it but there is a lot of movement happening. So I demand a lot from myself', she says on the various psychological stages of being a thinking dancer.

Personal is political
Every artist, some or the other way, gets influenced by experiences life bestows. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, these experiences leave a long-lasting image on one's thinking and philosophy which slowly reflect in their art. 'Shringaaram was always a part of Bharata Natyam repertoire; all those nuances of padams and jaavalis and so on. I used to really enjoy my classed with Kalanidhi maami in the late 1970's and 80's when I trained with her. And that time it seemed to be such a fabulous world filled with the filigree of shringaaram, man-woman relationships, and all those unseen, would-be-seen, perhaps-seen, wanting-to-be-seen movements which was like a huge high for me. You know life looks very different at that stage. Then a few years ago, I lost a dear friend of mine who used to do music for me. As long as she was there it was like 'she is there!' and one day she wasn't there. That affected me a lot. The sudden absence of a person makes you realize what he or she really means to you. At that time I was doing this story, the journey of a courtesan called 'Kashi Yatra'. I had done the first part after which my friend passed away. I had to deal with this emotion of death. What is it? What is loss? So I found that in the story and choreography I was building up, I created a scene where the child died. It just happened. I was trying to, through dance; confront this emotion of loss, grief, desolation and the pain of death. Which was a sudden thing that was not a part of the repertoire at all. No maargam has anything on death. I did that because after a certain point, life was not all about shringaaram but all these different facets to it. Then I also did that 'Astam gatho ravi. I have done something from the Mahabharata which speaks of war and death. The whole meaninglessness of war. Gandhari's lament when she sees this devastated battlefield before her, abhimanyu's death and Uttara's lament and various other pieces. You can't make sense of it. All you can do is put it forth, through art and ask the audience 'why'. Images stay with me in my mind. I remember doing this Gandhari's lament. At that time there was this big attack and a blast in a school in the Soviet Union and there were all these little school children who died. The picture was that of a soldier who comes out holding the body of a dead child with the most ghastly expression on his face. You looked at it and thought is this the world we live in? Is this the horror and pain of it all? And I think through art, if one can bring about a deeper reflection on it, rather than just an agitated response. I think art works through the verticals. I have done pieces on environment. I have done so many pieces on trees. I love trees. I really feel that they are presences. When I say the language of dance I need to empathize and find out how a tree feels. I don't know. I have to find out through dance. How does sap feel rising in the tree. How do I capture that movement and that energy when the sap goes into every branch and twig, how do the leaves feel twirling in the breeze, what is it for a tree to feel birds on its branches, so it's a passionate empathizing which I do to re-create,' she says speaking about how her own personal experiences have shaped her work.