Innovation in Choreography- Workshop by Jhelum Paranjpe

  Innovation in choreography - (For dancers from any discipline and with min. 5yrs of learning experience)

As part of Antaradhi- workshop series, we bring the maestro - Jhelum Paranjape from Mumbai to share her choreographic process with young dancers of Bangalore. We aim to bring together dancers from various disciplines and help them learn, share and work with a seasoned master and explore  their own creative /choreographic selves. The participants will explore diverse ideas, creative and critical thinking , breaking boundaries of their own movement vocabulary and  eventually fitting their work into their respective forms.  

Key take away for the participants -

1. Know the choreographic process from a path breaking choreographer of a classical dance tradition.

2. Opportunity to innovate within your own movement vocabulary.

3. Learn to assess when change/borrow/modify in the choreographic process.

4. Challenge your creative self and explore the possibility of developing your choreographic skills

   under Jhelum Paranjape's mentorship.

About Guru Jhelum Paranjape –
Jhelumtai, as she is fondly called, has consistently broken new ground in the traditional odissi dance form through her innovative choreography and teachings. In a career spanning  over three decades, her body of work includes vast repertoire of productions like Leelavati, Narmada, Uma to name a few.

While maintaining the core and spirit of Odissi dance, she has effortlessly moved beyond the boundaries placed by any traditional art form. An explorer at heart, she has helped hundreds of students explore a world of limitless possibilities in movement converting them to fit in the traditional/classical vocabulary of Odissi. Using Vivaldi's music from Four seasons to show swarm of bees moving across the stage tracing beautiful patterns or to show a herd of elephants moving rhythmically in a playful mood or a flock of birds gliding gracefully in the evening sky.... and all this unveiling into solving mathematical problems in her production Leelavati based on the 12th century mathematical treatise by the same name.

Maths was never so beautiful before!

http://www.thehindu.com/2001/02/24/stories/0424403j.htm

In another production -Narmada, she imagines the river as a woman. Nurturing, purifying, life giving, yet, standing strong and fighting man-made disasters. In showcasing the many faces of the river, she uses fluid movements of Odissi and juxtaposes it with Gymnastics to showcase the might of the man-made dam. She intersperses this with folk movements to show life along the river. http://smitalay.com/Narmada.html

Besides these, she has created several productions / pieces voicing social, environmental, ecological, political, feminist, educational and feminist themes each scaling new heights. She also brought "Bollywood hangama - Odissi Istyle" taking popular classic and new age bollywood music and weaving it into Odissi vocabulary, taking Odissi to those who generally stay away from "Classical dances". She has performed and taught in many countries received many awards like Kumar Gandharva award, Mahari award, Vidya Bhushan award, Women Achiever's award to name a few.

Dates: 22nd - 26th Jan 2015 Time: 10.30 am - 1.30 pm Fees: Rs. 5000 For registration - click here
Note: Participants may bring a piece of music /poetry that they wish to work on. we will then select a few out of those and work on them during the workshop.

Jhelum paranjape will also conduct a Lecture-demonstration - "Counting, Cooperating and Creating: how does dance help?" on 26th evening 4.30 pm at Antara which will be free and open for all. 

How Do I Engage With Art?

As I was whiling away time on internet, I stumbled across an idea –treat art as if it is a human being. The idea was an image representation- of art and onlooker embracing each other in a kiss. The image spoke to me, telling me something I was struggling to articulate for a long time – how to engage with art? The answer given was simple - engage with art like it is a human being. But can we treat art like a human being- we can’t give art food to eat, water to drink, put it to sleep or actually kiss it.

I remember having left art galleries and auditorium feeling very inadequate for not having understood the painting hung on the wall or made sense of dance performed in an auditorium. Being a student of history and philosophy of art, believing that I was passionate about art, it was disappointing to realize that when it came to understanding specific art work, it was a totally different ball game. This summer, joining Antara as a Research Affiliate, I spent my time observing dance in the dance class and eventually also dancing. I listened to the staccato of the wooden taala, sometimes watching people move to it and eventually moving to it myself. As I started being in this space, how I tried to connect with art in general and dance in specific shifted fundamentally.

What was so different about how I looked at dance in an auditorium and how I looked at it here, at Antara? Settings like art galleries and auditorium do not allow us to explore art, play with it. Often my engagement with art in these places is limited by distance and regulation. Antara was a free space, it let me do what was not allowed in auditorium and galleries, it allowed me to play with it. It let me engage with dance by including me in the environment rather than excluding me from it. In an auditorium, the stage excludes the audience. At Antara, even as an observer I was inside of the environment and felt physically and psychologically close to dance.

When dance is performed in an auditorium, when a painting is kept in a gallery it is decontextualized, we do not know where it comes from, which world it was made. In contrast to this when we see a writers room full of books, a scientists room with equipments we don’t just see objects. Such environments express the relationship of the writer with her books and scientist with her equipments. “Relationship” is the word of focus here. I might buy a book and keep it without reading it. Then I am not really owning the book or have a relationship with it except in economic terms. Only when I read it, engage with it, listen to it and speak with it, can I take the text from the author and make it my own. The environment at Antara allowed me this kind of engagement- allowed me to bring dance closer to myself and establish my own spiritual, emotional, physical and intellectual relationship with it.

Some audience can be really moved by a performance in an auditorium so this is not to imply that one cannot engage with dance in an auditorium at all. This is to say that community spaces like Antara facilitates one to listen to art for more closely and deeply when compared to an auditorium. What the image meant when it suggested that art is human was that it is beyond just any other physical object. What makes it more than a mere object is our relationship with it. So it is not about making art human but letting art make you more human, to let art be the stimuli that evokes your emotion, intellect, body and spirit- all the qualities that make a one a human being.