Monday 24 November 2014

Odissi Intensive Workshop for Beginners at Antara (21st December to 30th December)



Syllabus for Odissi Intensive workshop for beginners
-Prayers/Shloka
-Bhumi Pranam
- Exercises/warm ups  for Odissi dance
-Odissi stances
-Basic steps - 10 nos. ( 5 in each chowka and Tribhangi stance)
-Odissi walk
-Turns in odissi 2 nos.
-Hasta bheda or hand gestures
-Paad bheda or feet positions
-Ektaal in odissi writing and reciting
-Stretches and cool downs / relaxations
-Watch some videos together
- Short introduction on history of odissi dance
-Discuss/ share your experiences, doubts and difficulties with other participants and  instructor

Key takeaways
- A good understanding of  basics in odissi
-Learn to appreciate Odissi
-Explore the possibilities of your body
-Get video recordings for self practice
- Sweat a lot and shed a few pounds  :D

Facilitator /Instructor - Poornima
Is a disciple of guru Jhelum Paranjape (Mumbai) for over 20 years and is blessed to have some training from the legendary guru Padmavibhushan Kelucharan Mohapatra. Trained at Nrityagram for a year, she has performed extensively with Guru Jhelum Paranjape all over country. She has also been faculty at Smitalay for 2 yrs. She likes to focus on clarity in understanding and physical practice.

Poornima-From a students’ perspective
Learning dance under Poornima is a rare experience in the world of classical dances today. Despite the work out that the classes involve, it has an after effect of peace and agility. One feels relaxed and active more than tired and inadequate after the classes and is often left with a desire to come back to the practice space in the following week. By sharing with us what she learns from other forms of practice into Odissi space, she cultivates a healthy attitude towards bodily activities in general and encourages an open-mindedness to learn from all forms. My time in the dance class is the loveliest time I have spent with myself and my body. 


Timings
Batch 1: 10.00 A.M. to 12.30 P.M
Batch 2: 5.00 P.M. to 7.00 P.M.
(Limited Seats Available).


Sunday 23 November 2014

"On the State of Puppet Theatre in India"- A Talk by Anurupa Roy

(This talk was organized by Antara Artists Collective Trust along with Abstract Art Gallery in Bangalore.)


As traffic hummed with a post-lunch drowsiness on this Monday afternoon, a few people in the city, were making enthusiastic entries into Abstract Art Gallery to participate in a talk on the state of puppet theatre in India. Anurupa Roy, animated the silent afternoon with her passionate and critical perspective on the pervading imagination of puppetry in Indian society. Puppetry, she said, is fundamentally an art of bringing life to that which is inanimate.  It is this nature of puppeteer’s work that makes it a distinguished performing art, (she quickly demonstrated by making a couple of shoes speak). A theatre director brings characters and stories to life through human beings but a puppeteer labours to bring characters and stories to life through the medium of silent objects. Their art is to make silent objects speak through the literary devices of suggestions and metaphors. Movement (or stillness) is one of the basic phenomenon that “animating” depends on. Therefore, to make movements meaningful and suggestive one has to understand them. It becomes important for a puppeteer to observe and understand how her own body movements emote in order to emote correctly through the bodies of the puppets. This art of bringing silent objects to life is done in a way such that, the willing suspension of disbelief occurs as a double layered process in the mind of a puppetry audience.
1
       1. The audience has to suspend the belief that puppets are not real characters (which also happens in regular theater
       2.The audience has to suspend the belief that puppets are dead objects (which is specific to puppetry)


Thus, by offering a twice alienated perspective of reality to the audience, a puppeteer actually brings them that much closer to reality. Ironically this art that gives life to the lifeless is framed as a dying art. Anurupa insisted that we locate where this idiom of “dying art” is being generated. Largely, we can attribute it to be a state created phenomenon where with the advent of modernism, something monumental called the Indian culture was perceived to be disappearing and endangered.  Jammed between those whole held that Indian culture has to be revived and those who held that it has to be refined, Indian culture was definitely not to be left alone. Puppetry being a part of the Indian culture, like other art forms, came to bear the impact of India’s great nation building project. But what happened in the name of state’s divine intervention to save the arts is tragic. Especially in the case of Odissi shadow puppetry, state intervention actually endangered puppetry art by trying to refine it. In a lot of other cases, puppets from being objects of performance, withdrew into glass cases to become objects of preservation

However, apart from the Odissi context, puppetry as an art practice is not endangered. What is endangered are the narratives that were performed. In a span of two generations the stories that a puppeteer would know has shrunk from 30,000 to 3,000. One can even compare and contrast the trajectory of puppetry with the trajectory of dance where “refinement” of certain dance forms lead to loss of variety in practices. Anurupa drew attention to the fact that there has been no census of puppet theatre in India for 30 years reflecting the hollowness of the claim that puppetry is a dying art.

In the contemporary context this “save the art”, idiom has taken the form of not just state intervention but also the form of well wishing corporates. A lot of capitalist firms bring art onto the stage in urban spaces under the tag of “folk art”. Dislocated from their contexts these art forms do not fit properly within the fabric of an urban society.  Due to this mismatch and lack of being able to make sense of this art in a relevant way, people are prompted to reaffirm it as “folk”. According to Annapurna Garimella (one of the participants and an art historian), any kind of engagement with puppetry (and other arts) within the system of capitalism gets framed either as paternalistic (saving the art form) or as developmental (bringing this art into urban spaces is good for the development of society). In either of the instances the relationship between the artist and the state/organization is unequal. It creates an illusionary relationship where one is doing a favour for another. Having problematized bringing puppetry into urban spaces does not imply that one has to necessarily visit the rural spaces or villages to experience and appreciate the art form in its “true” context. These art forms must be taught and practiced in urban spaces as well but not in a way that simply mimics and dislocates the art but in a way that is well contextualized to the changing needs and ways of the society.

The solution to salvage puppetry from all these pervading stereotypes and imagination is to bring criticality to the practice of puppetry. It is in this context that Anurupa situated her vision to start a school of puppet theatre where she intends to build a troupe of puppeteers who can critically engage with the practice of this art form. It is required for such schools to be built in our society because an individual, who does not belong to a puppeteer family, who is interested in doing puppetry has no organization to associate herself/himself with. Such people have to either be self-taught or join a school abroad where puppetry is taught systematically.  Largely a self-taught puppeteer, Anurupa had to travel a lot to different places to watch and learn the craft of puppetry. These experiences and perceptions will be the mud and bricks of the school she wishes to build. Contextualizing her dream she gave people more clarity to perceive it as a rising vision amidst all the stereotypes, policies, politics and the ideologies surrounding the art of puppetry.

Summary of Talks at Antara


(This talk was organized as an initiation of critical dialogue on arts at Antara)

Thursday morning at Antara saw a dozen of people warming themselves and each other up with chai and conversations, slowly tuning the air into a talk mode. Aparna Banerji was soon giving the introduction, kick-starting the monthly series of talk for critical engagement in performance and other arts at Antara. She located the event in the larger context of Antara’s objective to be a forum which is not limited within the academic circles, encouraging the participation of the academicians, practitioners and the general population alike.

The first speaker, Sammitha, a research affiliate at Antara, engaged with those nodes where the philosophical and the cultural in her research intersect. Drawing on the age-old aesthetic debate between form and expression, she articulated the limitations of perceiving dance as a purely formalistic art form. Dance, according to her, cannot exist but in its practice and performance. While as a theory, formalism has been tackled and exposed, a large part of dance-teaching in contemporary India treats dance formalistically as it has become very prescriptive and text book dependent. This formalistic understanding of dance flourished in post-independent India when dance became institutionalized. For correcting this over-formalistic perception of dance, she proposed that we explore that culture of India which was deeply oral and performative. The absence of the “written word”, encouraging criticality in practice. Hence, apart from practicing dance she is engaging with aesthetic concepts from Indian tradition of thought such as Nrtta, Bandha and Anibandha as potential substitutes of Western formalism.

Vivek Vijayakumaran, the second speaker, journeyed us through his intellectual and an emotional life as an actor. His story embodied his philosophy, slowly revealing to us the continuous interiority of an acting-self despite taking on different roles. The modern - urban “self” became the locus of his story as he recounted his experiences of learning traditional Kudiyattam in Kerala (near Trissur) and taking acting classes from Kanhaiyalalji in Manipur.  Through these experiences he explored his body as a repository of memory as he gave us vivid descriptions of the changes he underwent psychologically while he learnt and practiced various bodily exercises. While speaking about extrapolating the criticality built in these traditional art forms into contemporary theatre practices, he held the ritual of surrender of “self” in these art forms as a critical practice for himself. The talk ended with discussions and sharing experiences of the ritual of surrender in different dance practices and in other performing arts.

Aparna, the final speaker, tied up the event by pulling strands from both the previous talks. While she  insightfully articulated the history of dance in general and Odissi in specific, she also spoke of body as a site of knowledge, memory and heritage. Dance is not simply moving bodies but is a “culturally structured moving system”. For Aparna, the weight of history that a dancer’s body silently bears is one of the many aspects embodied in a dancing subject. She spoke of the dancer’s body as a many-layered subject which is simultaneously a recording, transmitting, reflecting, performing and a miming body.  Drawing the historical and the practicing aspects of dance together she focused on the need to develop pedagogical techniques that nurtures a reflexive attitude towards understanding one’s history and also one’s own body as a multi-faceted system.

These talks triggered varied responses in the audience as they honestly expressed their opinions that were shaped through their mode of interaction with performing arts. As the gathering dispersed, everyone carried a piece of the event as a potential beginning of meaningful dialogues on critical practice and theory in performing arts. As far as Antara is concerned, this event is the beginning of what will soon culminate to be a monthly event of critical dialogue and discussion. 

Saturday 22 November 2014

Antara - Redefining a Dance Space


Tucked away in the corner of the city, Antara is a world of its own. Antara Artists’ Collective Trust, is a dance community, made up of teachers, students and is open for anyone who is passionate about dance. Kathak, Odissi, Bharathanatyam, Violin, Tabla, Sitar, Hindustani vocal and Carnatic vocal are traditional art forms taught in Antara. In this urban-Indian society, where becoming a classical dancer is so formulaic, Antara gives us a unique perspective on dance and what it is to be a dancer. To become a classical dance artist, in today’s society is a matter of learning the syllabus and passing the junior, senior and vidvat exams.  

Syllabusizing” dance and having huge productions and performances in enormous auditorium is not a thing here. At Antara, performances take the form of sunset baithaks in the glow of oil lamps. During performances, the audience and the artists share an intimate time and space so that appreciation happens at a deeper, face-to-face level. Without making a display of dance by evoking the idiom of “preservation of Indian culture”, Antara nurtures dance-form as a vital bodily practice. This keeps the art functional, alive and relevant without deadening it into a historical artefact. For people of this community, dance is fundamentally a practice and the objective is to internalize it as a bodily and reflexive activity into their day-to-day lives. Aparna Uppaluri Banerjee, who is the founder of Antara and an Odissi dance teacher says, “What matters is the depth of experience. Lot of people who come here need not wish to become long-term artists but in whatever time they spend here, it is important that they find a new relationship with themselves through dance.”

Young children use their mind and body alike in the learning sessions reflecting the coexistence of practice and theory. While they learn to gain control over their bodily movements, they are also encouraged to articulate it.  It is heart-warming to read their small yet tremendously thoughtful essays about how they feel and think about dance practice. An eleven year old student, Sakshi writes to her Aparna aunty, “You might usually feel that your mind is the master and can make your body do whatever it wants to. But that isn’t true. If your body would not exist your mind would not exist. Your mind is the one who makes you stressed out, angry, unhappy etc., but your body does nothing it’s just there. It teaches us to be. So, when your mind gives instructions to your body, give your body the freedom to think and explain to the mind too.” Apart from the dialogues and discussions, Antara houses a library with handpicked books on traditional arts in order to facilitate serious theoretical pursuits.


However, by simultaneously being a classical dance school and a radical space for kinesthetic exploration, Antara faces its share of struggles. Teaching the classical arts, having small traditional crafts exhibitions are some of its main livelihood sources. This is precisely the cause that Antara is motivated by - to create a forum for teachers, students and enthusiasts alike by bringing them together and offering a space to support meaningful learning. To stay true to its cause and to keep away from corporate overheads and banners involves commitment from all its members. The people working here to keep the place alive, reflect the emotional and intellectual bonding that they have with each other and the space.  Subverting the dominant employer-employee relationship, Antara is a family set-up where the spirit is that of give and take. Moreover, it is through daily activities like having lunch together and serving each other that Antara thrives like a family. Due to their sustained efforts Antara is growing now. Nevertheless, they make sure that they flow with their own definition of growth, constantly struggling against the tide of profit and display. 

Hello Folks!


Antara Blog is a space dedicated to the arts and culture of South Asia. We encourage perspectives  on arts and culture from the world of practitioners, artists, researchers, lay people and initiate dialogue between them.


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