Bharatanatyam practitioner Dr Priya Srinivasan distinctly remembers her confusion at seeing the ‘mothers of modern dance’ Ruth St Denis and Martha Graham dressed like Indian dancers, with hand and facial gestures just like those she had spent ages imbibing from her own gurus.
Long made to believe Indian classical dance and western contemporary dance were in opposition to one another, she was surprised to learn they were more intertwined than anyone had imagined.
Now, her latest piece Copy of the Copy attempts to uncover the historic commonalities between styles thought of as disparate.
“My ultimate goal is how do we find ways to connect to one another in these culture wars that tell us what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours, and we will never meet in between,” Dr Srinivasan says of the show. “How is it that we can understand the common enemy is not each other?”
Collaborating with both accomplished Indian classical artists (Hari Sivanesan, Pirashanna Thevarajah, Ranjitha Suresh) and contemporary dance masters (Danielle Micich of Force Majeure), the show blends dance, music, a lecture and even food.
Copy of the Copy is based on her career long exploration into the history of her Bharatanatyam practice, during which she encountered Louise Lightfoot, who learned to dance in Kerala and brought Indian classical dance to Australia during the White Australia policy.
Copy of the Copy explores this flow of inspiration, where over time, new elements are added, subtracted and sometimes due to external pressures like colonisation and anti-immigration laws, ‘kinaesthetically appropriated’.
“I want us to understand the histories, unpack it. Not to cancel [people], but ask how can they make reparation? How can people take responsibility for the erasures that they’ve created and at the same time work together and move on,” Dr Srinivasan says.
“That includes our own castist framework that attempted to erase the hereditary practitioners within the Indian context and put [Bharatanatyam] on middle and upper-class bodies.”
Drawing from both her Bharatanatyam research and training, as well as western contemporary vocabulary, Copy of the Copy presents this discussion in a way that speaks to both the diasporic Indian classical audience as well as followers of contemporary dance.
Ankle bells and varnams are as much a part of the performance as projections, coloured spotlights and Martha-Graham-like-convulsions. From a recreation of an Arangetram, we are then immersed into a fluid underwater world, and then into an abstract shadowplay featuring a Konnakol-spoken word beat.
“My concern has always been how we unite our different communities and the aesthetics of each community,” she says.
“One community likes things a lot more abstract and less literal, and another community likes a little bit more storytelling and wants things told to them…How do you marry those forms in a way that engages people and is inclusive of multiple audiences so everybody feels like they can go on a journey?”
Equally difficult was converting a research journey into one for the stage.
“What I cannot tell people. I show through the visuals, and I would say to craft that has been probably the most challenging thing, where you don’t reveal everything like it’s a lecture and just show PowerPoints,” Srinivasan reflects.
She landed on the image of a chapati, the ultimate example of a recipe translated and reinvented over generations. Audience members are invited to read aloud numerous projected recipe cards, with one person invited on stage to make their own chapati.
“In Copy of the Copy, I mention Ruth St Denis was taught by Indian men in her house to dance, and they made chapatis together. And then I talk about how Muhammad Ishmael sued her for stealing his choreography because she never gave him credit,” she explains.
“I used the chapati as a metaphor, a forum for audience participation… reading the recipe and being given permission to make the chapati, which is also the recipes for contemporary dance and Indian dance – I play with what the recipe is for these different forms.”
A meditation on what has been gained and lost over various iterations through time, Srinivasan demonstrates that Bharatanatyam, built on generations of students learning from their gurus to rigidly reproduce a dance, doesn’t have the unadulterated lineage we’d imagined it to.
“We are taught to be the copy of the copy – do not change the copy, because if you do, you’re breaking tradition,” says Dr Srinivasan of Bharatanatyam pedagogy.
“We invented [new Bharatanatyam] traditions because we were colonised…when you take intercultural ideas and you put them inside your form, but then you say your form is ancient and uninterrupted, that is the lie at the heart of Indian classical practices.”
As for Srinivasan’s own contribution to the ‘copy’ to come? Though the blueprint of her gurus, including Dr Chandrabhanu OAM, is visible within her movement sensibilities, she prefers not to teach through reproduction.
“I don’t teach form, because form is about the copy. I say don’t copy me – find for yourselves your truth? What is the way that your body wants to move,” she says.
“I teach concepts, and I want people to find their own bodily response to that, whatever their form is.”
READ ALSO: Dr Chandrabhanu on Bharatam Reprise: revisiting a legacy
