Often my first act as a choreographer in a studio is to point out and heighten awareness of the border that separates the body from the space to it.
Read the full paper here: Beyond the Liminal
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My brief for today is how do I go about choosing dancers to work with and my reflections on a career in dance in Britain.
The choice of dancer collaborators (for that is how I think of them) for any choreographer depends on the vision they have for dance itself, and I am no different. What I have found in my experience is that choreographers take a bit of time to find out what kind of dancers they would like to collaborate with. It is part of the same journey that they make to find out what they really want to say and how they would like to say it.
Read the full speech here: Classical Dance Contemporary Dancers
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How does a choreographer connect to the work of academics and their research interests? That’s a question that I mulled over in my new role as Knowledge producer at the Cultural Institute at King’s, a programme that connects academics from King’s College London with artists. I’d spent more than 25 years mining human physicality for meaning through movement so I decided to see what the college offered in terms of alternative narratives of the body.
I chose film studies (bodies interpreted through a lens), cultural studies (the body in society), geography (the body in landscape), robotics (body mechanics) and neuroscience (inscape of the body). There followed some of the most intense, inspiring and informative conversations I have ever had.The passion with which the academics spoke about their work was palpable. I listened spellbound. I wish school had been more like this. As I had – sadly – anticipated, the world of contemporary dance was a closed book to all but one of them. Not for the first time, I wondered what contemporary dance lacked in its dissemination that it failed to embrace the very individuals who would respond to its seriousness of purpose.
I must have been about 6 or 7 and was on holiday from my boarding school in Colombo . My parents lived in a small town in the hill country of Sri Lanka and one of the treats that awaited me at home were the family magazines that my mother had been reading during my term time away.
Read the full paper here: Under the Influence
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I am going to preface my presentation not with dance or choreography but with a limerick introduced to me by an uncle in Chennai when I was a teenager. There was young man from Deal Who said ” I know pain isn’t real But when I sit on a pin And it punctures my skin I dislike what I fancy I feel”
Read the full paper here: Looking for the Invisible
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“The Dance is occasioned by no specific need. It has come into use because it creates beauty”. Bharatha in the Natya Sastra. An important part of the history of Bharatha Natyam in the west is the methods and avenues through which the westerner has striven to understand and respond to it.
Read the full paper here: Getting off the Orient Express
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“Small is beautiful” as Schumacher said and for most practising artists the personal is beautiful since the choice to be an artist is an internal and intimate one. The ways in which you are different from another is often where you recognize your creative path.
Read the full paper here: Cultural Rights
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“All that matters is the present sensation” argues Tom Sutcliffe in defence of maintaining a fruitful ignorance in the face of theatre dance . A dance performance, like the eating of a particularly yummy cream cake, strikes him as an event that celebrates the joyfully instinctive and anti- intellectual part of our faculties.
Read the full article here: Dance, Seriously.
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Choosing a composer is probably the most important decision that I make every year. I have always found it difficult to work with pre existing music, though that is the most economical option as producers often point out to me! The idea for a new dance work is also the start of the search for the ‘right’ composer for that particular piece.
Read the full article here: Working with Composers
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Before I set about the daunting task of unwrapping the aesthetics referred to in the title of this paper I have to face the equally challenging task of unwrapping what exactly we mean by South Asian.
Read the full Speech here: South Asian Aesthetics Unwrapped
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