In a filming diary for the Guardian newspaper, Shobana Jeyasingh describes the challenging shoot of her latest dance film, (Don’t) Say My Name, in the Spanish desert, where dancers were pitted against scorpions, fierce winds and punishing sun.

Read the full article here

Unauthorised copying of any material on this site in whole or in part and in any medium or format is not permitted.

Until the Lions- Shobana Jeyasingh
La Filature, Mulhouse, France

October 9, 2022

Reviewed by Donald Hutera

Shobana Jeyasingh isn’t the first choreographer to direct an opera. Nor is she the first to use one of the stories from the Mahabharata, adapted by the writer Karthika Nair, as source material for a stage production. Akram Khan created ‘Until the Lions,’ a dance-based take on an episode from Nair’s versified version of the Sanskrit epic, in 2016.

Now comes French composer Thiérry Pecou’s musical treatment of Nair’s text, adapted by the latter into libretto form, and bearing the same title, but with Jeyasingh at the helm. Commissioned a few years ago by Eva Kleinitz, then head of Opéra National du Rhin, the production was subsequently hit by two unexpected calamities: Kleinitz’s premature death in 2019 and, the following year, a pandemic. Despite this double whammy, the work finally premiered in late September 2022 at the Opéra in Strasbourg before transferring to Mulhouse. Was it worth the wait? I’d say yes, even if qualifications are attached to my experience of it.

First off, Jeyasingh’s staging looks splendid thanks to designs by Merle Hensel (whose previous collaborations include work by Jasmin Vardimon, Hofesh Shechter and Jeyasingh herself on the brilliant Contagion). The set is split into two levels by dark, angled walls, each fitted with a seamless sliding panel to create a wide window or doorway. Protruding from the lower wall, startlingly, are the sable bodies of two horses, legs in flight and unseen heads seemingly embedded as if they’d hurled themselves forward at great speed. Her costumes, meanwhile, tend to be vivid in tone and glitteringly detailed, befitting both the royal and martial status of characters – kings, princesses, warriors – embroiled in a morally complicated, nominally dread and power-wielding scenario of humiliation, destruction, transformation and sacrifice in which women are given a strong and, indeed, leading voice.

It’s no surprise that Jeyasingh’s interval-free production is, by and large, physically as well as visually striking. It opens like gangbusters, with the sixteen-strong dance ensemble (one recruited from Jeyasingh’s UK-based company, the others members of Opéra du Rhin’s in-house group) in tribal attack mode. A foundation of their kinetic vocabulary was the south Indian martial art form kalari, utilised in stylised battles marked by flicking kicks and punchy, limb-hooking vigour. Another, later fighting scene, in which combatants enter one by one to join an ever-growing circle of aggression, was likewise impressive.

Ultimately it is colours and textures of imagery and movement that I will retain from ‘Until the Lions,’ rather than sounds or storytelling. Declamatory vocals, whether fervent, quivering or trilling, and buzzing, shimmering or battering instrumental dissonance are central elements of Pecou’s score. Such atonal modernism is perhaps galvanising in the moment, but the impact can be fleeting. It was also, I confess, a struggle to follow the narrative despite English text intoned by the actor cast in the pivotal role of Satyavati. And so, unable to invest in the drama of the piece and feeling detached from the characters’ choices and destinies, I settled for the sensations afforded by dance and design.

British South Asian dancers, choreographers, curators, Arts Council policymakers, and directors of South Asian dance agencies, used ‘hybridity’ as a multi-faceted historical, political, cultural, aesthetic and public culture trope to constitute what is today known as the British South Asian Dance Sector in the UK. This constitution story, initiated under the ideological signs of British multi-culturalism, hybridity and cultural diversity, remains unexamined in theatre, dance and performance scholarship because scholars have not historicized the term and failed to see how it was used creatively as an interweaving trope to facilitate the integration of South Asian dance into British mainstream dance milieu in the three stages of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.

Drawing on the work of Homi Bhabha, I show how Shobana Jeyasingh, Akram Khan and British South Asian dance organizations used ‘hybridity’ as a multifaceted, historical, institutional, theatrical, choreographic and political trope to integrate South Asian dance forms into mainstream British dance milieu in the forty-year period from 1979 to 2020. I develop my argument by drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) and focus specifically on the distinction he makes between the two forms of linguistic and cultural hybridization, which he identifies within the frames of ‘unconscious’ organic hybridity and ‘conscious’ intentional hybridity. Significantly for my argument, Bakhtin explains that intentional hybrids build on the historic foundations provided by organic hybrids and deploy these pasts, intentionally, to create new visions in global diasporas. In this paper, I extend Bakhtin’s analytic frame and show how British South Asian chorographers and curators, decontextualized the classical forms of Bharatanatyam and Kathak and reused these, intentionally, to create a hybrid, post-colonial British South Asian dance phenomenon that was both Indian and British simultaneously.

Read the full paper here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/347248086_British_Multiculturalism_and_Interweaving_Hybridities_in_South_Asian_Dance

Exactly a decade ago, Shobana Jeyasingh cooked up a storm in the British dance world with ‘Just add water?’, a never-before-heard blend of choreography and culinary choices. An incredibly brave creation, it dealt with how amidst the diversity of cultures in London, people loved integrating over food.

Read the article here: https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/dance/the-bharatanatyam-dancer-who-is-britains-sought-after-choreographer/article28085554.ece

Shobana Jeyasingh is a British choreographer whose work deploys both modern and postmodern aesthetics. Drawing on the bharata natyam form in which she trained, Jeyasingh deconstructs the classical vocabulary through a process she describes as ‘asking questions of the adavus [units of movement]’. Jeyasingh’s choreography also incorporates pedestrian movement, postmodern dance, ballet, and martial arts such as kalaripayattu. She works within a high modernist tradition that privileges choreographic form over dramatic expression, highlighting non-representational movement, fragmentation, and the arrangement of dancers in complex groupings; she also, especially in more recent work, engages with postmodern, thematic concerns such as taking the surface seriously, exploring personal narratives, and reflecting on the complexity of belonging. An articulate critic as well as a choreographer, Jeyasingh has created a series of commentaries in which she reflects on postcoloniality, globalization, and urbanization as they play out in her work. She was also one of the first authors to discuss the contingent and constructed nature of the bharata natyam tradition. As one of the leaders in the field of contemporary South Asian dance, Jeyasingh created a space in the contemporary British dance milieu for choreographers working with classical non-Western vocabularies. She led the way for a generation of choreographers to challenge the racialized underpinnings of British contemporary dance as well as to query the imperative that South Asian classical forms demonstrate historical continuity, thereby contributing to the vibrant field of South Asian dance in Britain and extending understandings of experimentation in British contemporary dance.

O’Shea, J.(2016). Jeyasingh, Shobana (1957–). In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. : Taylor and Francis. Retrieved 24 Feb. 2022, from https://www.rem.routledge.com/articles/jeyasingh-shobana

In this three-part series Sanjoy Roy looks back over 25 years of Shobana Jeyasingh Dance.

Read Part 1 here: sanjoyroy.net/2012/12/reconfigurations/

Read Part 2 here: sanjoyroy.net/2013/03/choreographic-new-worlds-shobana-jeyasingh/

Read Part 3 here: sanjoyroy.net/2013/07/composer-glyn-perrin-choreographer-shobana-jeyasingh/

Pioneering British Asian choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh has turned classical Indian dance into something postmodern and urbane, writes Sanjoy Roy in October 2009

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2009/oct/20/shobana-jeyasingh

A paper examining the juxtaposition vocabulary from contemporary dance and the traditional, Indian classical dance form of Bharata Natyam in Shobana Jeyasingh’s film Duets With Automobiles

In Duets with Automobiles (1993) three female dancers (Jeyaverni Jeganathan, Savitha Shekhar and Vidya Thirunarayan), filmed inside and outside three London office buildings (The Ark, Hammersmith, Canary Wharf and Alban Gate, London Wall), perform a mixture of vocabulary from contemporary dance and the traditional, Indian classical dance form of Bharata Natyam. I argue that the choreography and filming of the juxtaposition and interaction of the three female dancers with the geographically situated architecture construct these spaces as ‘in-between’. In the process West/East and male/female binaries are blurred suggesting the possibility of a rethought, contemporary, urban, female subjectivity

Read the rest of Valerie Briginshaw’s paper at https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230272354_6

What is Shobana Jeyasingh’s choreography about? [Please tick]

❑ Cultural hybridity
❑ Diaspora identities
❑ Female identities
❑ Updating tradition
❑ An Indian woman in Britain

And the correct answer is:

❑ Other [Please specify]
Shobana Jeyasingh’s choreography is about form, structure, the shape of movement, the qualities of the medium. In short, it’s modernist.

It’s a trick question, of course: you can tick any of the boxes. The point is that reactions to Jeyasingh’s work often focus on cultural issues to the neglect of  the formal concerns that are clearly central to her artistic vision. It is perfectly valid to talk about her work in wider cultural terms (I’ve done so myself, and so has Jeyasingh); too often, however, the dance itself then becomes merely a symptom of something else, and consequently is interpreted in terms that don’t do it justice (‘East-West collaboration’, ‘Indian/contemporary dance fusion’); or sometimes the dance is simply passed over altogether. Jeyasingh the choreographer fades into the background in favour of Jeyasingh the Indian woman in Britain who engages with questions of migrancy, diaspora, race, heritage and so on.

Continue reading here: https://sanjoyroy.net/1997/09/multiple-choice-shobana-jeyasingh/

Sanjoy Roy – Writing on Dance