Professor of dance at UCLA and Pillow Research Fellow Lionel Popkin explores the complicated history and relationship between Indian dance, American modern dance, and Jacob's Pillow. Posing pointed questions about the 'use' of Indian dance movement and aesthetics in the work of the Denishawn Company, Popkin examines the curatorial lens applied to Indian dance over time, and ultimately the influence and legacy of those choices on the dance landscape of today.
Professor of dance at UCLA and Pillow Scholar, Lionel Popkin explores the complicated history and relationship between Indian dance, American modern dance, and Jacob's Pillow. Posing pointed questions about the 'use' of Indian dance movement and esthetics in the work of The Denishawn Company, the curatorial lens applied to Indian dance over time, and ultimately the influence and legacy of those choices on the dance landscape of today.
Lakshmi Vishwanathan: https://danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org/lakshmi-vishwanathan/varnam/
Ragamala: https://www.ragamaladance.org
Shantala Shivalingappa: http://shantalashivalingappa.com/en/
Nrityagram: https://nrityagram.org
Akram Khan: https://www.akramkhancompany.net
Aakash Odedra: https://aakashodedra.com
Pramila Vasudevan: http://www.aniccha.org
Hari Krishnan: https://www.indance.ca
Lionel Popkin: http://www.lionelpopkin.org
[Music begins, composed by J.S. Bach, performed by Jess Meeker]
NORTON OWEN: Welcome to PillowVoices, a production of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival with content from the Pillow Archives. I’m Norton Owen, the Pillow’s Director of Preservation, and it’s my pleasure to introduce Pillow Scholar and dance writer, Lionel Popkin.
LIONEL POPKIN: In 1995, the London-based artist Shobana Jeyasingh’s company performed at Jacob’s Pillow. Toward the end of the post-performance discussion, the topic of symbolism in Indian dance came up. Let’s hear the question and then Jeyasingh’s response.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have a question. Umm. Is there any symbolic meaning for the plié when they run across the stage more easily, you know, the plié where they are running? Is it symbolic [inaudible]
SHOBANA JEYASINGH: In the first piece you mean?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah it was mostly in the first piece.
SHOBANA JEYASINGH: Well, I suppose it is a difficult question because I think all movement in a way is kind of symbolic isn’t it? I mean you know, whatever you see, the minute it is designed and put on stage it, it symbolizes something, it symbolizes some intention that the maker of the dance has given to it. So, in a very general way, yes, I suppose it symbolizes travel and power and contact with the ground, but it doesn’t have any particular other kind of symbolism. I think it’s a question again, you know, its, Indian dancers and Indian choreographers get asked this question a lot, about symbolism, and there seems to be this feeling that somehow things which are not western must be loaded with profound sort of symbolism and uh, we aren’t really. It’s, I don’t know. I think it partly comes from, I think it’s changing but you know traditionally the west has had a very particular attitude towards the east, and it’s, I suppose one could call it orientalism. It’s something that’s been there for a very long time. It isn’t actually, it starts with the colonial period. It was there even when the Greeks were writing their tragedies. It’s a very particular attitude and the orient is such a kind of fiction, it’s really um, a play space which has been created by the west. It’s got nothing really to do with the reality of the east. It’s, it really is there as a fictional place which has given a lot of enjoyment to people in the west and it’s a place which I have gotten to know very well because I have often, you know, suddenly found myself put in it and sort of wondering what I am doing here. And there are certain features of this orient and one of the features is that everything in the east is very symbolic, it’s terribly spiritual, it’s very profound, all the hand gestures have meanings, you know, um, it’s very graceful and, I suppose part of what all of, all of us do is to challenge that idea of, of the orient, because we live in a place which is not that orient, but, you know, we know what people are getting at and we have to keep telling people that actually it is not like that at all.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: At all?
SHOBANA JEYASINGH: No, It isn’t. It isn’t. Well, not for me anyway.
LIONEL POPKIN: There is so much going on in this question and response from 1995; this back and forth which took place nearly 30 years ago. The first audience member’s desire to place a London-based artist within the frame of Indian symbolism, the artist’s refusal to give in to that categorization. Then just at the end, another audience member’s desire to question the artist’s refusal, and finally Jeyasingh’s emphatic clarification, ‘Well, not for me anyway.’
And then there is that play space, which as Jeyasingh says, was created by the west.
I admire Jeyasingh. It is not easy to stand up to a question like that. Nor is it easy to continually ward off questions that have more to do with an audience member’s preconceptions about how Indian bodies should dance and how they should fulfill, or at least respond, to the audience’s preconceptions, rather than, say, allowing for that body to exist in full conversation and dialogue with the world of today.
So, where do those preconceptions come from? What do we think about when we hear the term Indian Dance? What kinds of images arise? And what about Jacob’s Pillow? How has Indian Dance – whatever that may mean – existed on the stages and in the imagination of the North American concert dance world and specifically, who has been invited to perform at the Pillow? One of the pleasures of this podcast is how it draws from the Pillow archives for its content, but that also means the events focused on here are dependent on what could historically happen at the Pillow. What ideas have been allowed to flourish and what ideas have been brushed aside? Who has had the authority to frame the Indian dancing bodies and who has been in charge of the narratives curated for these stages?
This podcast will delve into these questions, but first, we need to back up and talk about why it is important to even ask about how conceptions of Indian dance operate within western concert theatrical dance. I may be crazy, but I think that without Indian Dance, Jacob’s Pillow would not exist. Perhaps even more outlandishly, I would say that without Indian Dance, American Modern dance and the concert theatrical tradition we think about in dance today would never have materialized.
Stay with me. Ted Shawn purchases the land that became Jacob’s Pillow just as he and Ruth St. Denis are professionally separating and Denishawn, their company, is dissolving. Denishawn toured the world and established its reputation with its multiple Orientalist dances and repertoire at its core. Shawn’s Cosmic Dance of Siva and St. Denis’s Nautch numbers were frequent notable pieces on their programs. Although Shawn and St. Denis first met in 1914, it was in 1906 that Ruth St. Denis established herself as a rock star choreographer and performer with her suite of Indian Dances: Radha, Cobra, and Incense. Indeed, the birth of Denishawn, its progeny of Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and others, as well as the subsequent generations of artistic mainstays such as Merce Cunningham, the Judson Era, and yes, even the experimentalists of today all owe an enormous debt to western conceptions of Indian Dance and not just because everyone is taking yoga.
In Shawn’s earliest festivals, he frequently presented Indian Dance and often sought Indian artists for presentation. Many important exchanges were experienced in the Berkshires for the dance world, including performances by groundbreaking Indian artists like Balasaraswati, Shanta Rao, and Ram Gopal, all of whom performed at the Pillow in the 1950s and 60s. Other artists deeply influenced by Indian dance included the renowned La Meri and her pupil, Nala Najan, whose birth names were Russell Meriwether Hughes and Roberto Rivera respectively, both were frequent performers and teachers at the Pillow through the 70s. And of course, St. Denis came to the Pillow nearly every summer and frequently performed parts of her Indian repertoire. Indeed, for their Golden Anniversary celebration in 1964, Shawn and St. Denis danced the Siddhas of the Upper Air, with full Indian regalia and thematic aplomb. As important as Indian Dance was to their careers, images, and dancing – how could they not?
The problem here is that Indian Dance, like American Dance or any other form of dance, is immensely complicated and contains a multitude of forms and artists, many of whom contradict each other in their aesthetics and emphases. The other awkward aspect is that many of the artists celebrated on the Pillow’s stages were not actually Indian and were conjuring an Orientalist gestalt from their conceptions of India for the shows. Some would argue, and I will go into this in detail a little later, that even those artists from India had to fit within Shawn’s and the Pillow’s audience’s conceptions of what an Indian artist was, and they learned those rules from their introductory white interlocutors such as Shawn, St. Denis, La Meri and the other artists chosen by the Pillow curators. As I hope you can see, the choice of whom to perform and what type of Indianness they would portray formed an essential part of how the Pillow arose and how it still operates.
Since the person who chooses the performances has a great deal of say in the range of possibilities in front of us, I would like to take a moment to talk about Shawn’s view of the East. As the founder and curator for the Pillow from its inception until his death in 1972, Shawn spent decades at the helm and forged the Pillow’s identity from his own worldview. His influence on his successors is inescapable. Here he is in a 1963 television documentary observing a class taught by La Meri and explaining why he thinks non-western forms are important:
TED SHAWN: And the course is called ‘The Use of Ethnic Source Dance Material for the Enrichment of Creative Contemporary Dance.’ And that is exactly the approach. Using these techniques, not always in completely ethnic traditional style, but enriching the vocabulary of what is called Modern Dance by the knowledge of the dances of Spain, of Java, of Siam, and from all over the world.
LIONEL POPKIN: The idea of ‘using these techniques,’ in Shawn's words, sets up a dynamic where the west is taking from the east. Modern Dance is, to use his words again, being ‘enriched.’ Although with the best of intentions, what Shawn reveals here is a process by which the western world takes what it wants from the rest of the globe. This dynamic is commonly called colonialism, and allowing it to go unnoticed or even worse to excuse it and perpetuate it, is just not ok.
We are about a third of the way into this podcast, and my mother would be appalled at my manners. I should personally introduce myself. Hello. My name is Lionel Popkin. I care about dance; about how bodies cultivate and express somatic experiences. I grew up in Indiana, my mother is from India and my father is from Manhattan. As a dancer and choreographer, I have spent decades parsing how mixed identities inhabit the stage. From 2013-2015 I toured an evening-length work called Ruth Doesn’t Live Here Anymore that conversed with Ruth St. Denis and the Denishawn performance legacy, as a cheeky homage and pointed challenge to how their archival presence registers on today’s stages.
How the past speaks to the present - and the future - is something I have held in my body with great thought and care. For me, the way a body inhabits a space, a world, is a source of endless wonder. I can watch a body try to figure out how it should be where it is for hours. As a body who has had to live betwixt and between, both within that ‘play space’ Jeyasingh mentioned and consciously pushing against it in a manner that is sometimes less than playful, I’ve frequently wondered what it would be like if that not so enjoyable playspace wasn’t always lurking.
I’m glad we’ve returned to Jeyasingh and her opening quote about play spaces and Indian dance because the 90s were a particularly intriguing decade for Jacob’s Pillow and its relationship to Indian Dance. The decade holds four artistic directors making curatorial choices with the sunset of Liz Thompson’s tenure to start the decade and moving through Sam Miller for four years, then Sali Ann Kriegsman for another four, and then Ella Baff, who spent nearly two decades at the helm of the Pillow starting in 1998 closing out the decade at the beginning of her tenure.
Internationally, the decade also marks a major reform in India’s economic policy, opening it up to global markets in the early 90s in a way that had never before been available. And in the United States, the culture wars had somewhat morphed into a desire for multi and cross-culturalism with major arts institutions like the Pillow fully engaged in the boom of cultural exchanges. There were positive and negative consequences to these interchanges, many of which are still being sorted through today. For example, the Billboard number one music single in 1996 was the Macarena.
In an exceptional confluence of programming, there were four artists on the two major stages of the Pillow who identify with India in their work between 1994 and 1998. Although all four had extensive training in Bharatanatyam, one of the many Indian classical dance forms, each represents a very different aesthetic lineage, vision, and relationship to the global stage.
Malavika Sarukkai performed in both 1996 and 1998 and is a major exponent of the form of Bharatanatyam that developed in what was then Madras, now Chennai, in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s as upper-caste Brahmins in India began to adopt and institutionalize the dance form. If this particular history interests you, we’ve included a link to Professor Hari Krishnan’s excellent article entitled “Contemporary Bharatanatyam at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival” in the episode notes.
Let’s listen in to Sarukkai’s 1998 post-performance discussion with Pillow scholar Suzanne Carbonneau. Sarukkai has been asked about her training and watch how her answer, three years after Jeyasingh’s comments, offers a very different perspective.
MALAVIKA SURUKKAI: And of course in Indian Dance, it is also the mind. We don’t do anything without our mind. So it is not, we don’t just train our bodies, but our mind also, so it’s uh. It’s uh simultaneously it’s an internal and external experience. You know it’s something together. You know because, and that’s why I think it has a quality of, I would call it spirituality. I think Indian Dance has it because it’s um, it’s not something we do you know just outwardly.
SUZANNE CARBONNEAU: Yes.
MALAVIKA SURUKKAI: It’s something where we train inwardly whether it is in pure dance where we are moving or, or in expression. There’s something we train our whole being to harmonize, to be at that point.
LIONEL POPKIN: About ten minutes later another audience member follows up on Sarukkai’s point. Let’s join as Carbonneau repeats the question before Sarukkai responds.
SUZANNE CARBONNEAU: She’s asking about while she’s dancing is there, is there a spiritual connection that’s happening?
MALAVIKA SURUKKAI: I think if you call, I mean you know in dancing one has to be so much in the moment, you know and since I said Indian Dance is a question of training both body and mind, then it does become, it does become special, it does become spiritual in the sense of a kind of completeness. A sense of the moment which lives you know, nothing else lives. It’s the moment you celebrate, it’s the, it’s the moment you are in, and I think then it becomes something, different and also because in Indian Dance you know we, we recreate on stage – and if I have to feel something intensely enough to make it appear through, through expression, through movement, through the creating of something you know, so that becomes a very, it’s a very intense uh feeling.”
LIONEL POPKIN: So, what are we supposed to think? In 1995 we had one artist telling us Indians are not all that more spiritual than anyone else. Now in 1998, there is a real attachment to connecting a special sense of spirituality to a presentation of Indian dance. No wonder the guy questioned Jeyasingh in that first excerpt we heard.
One of the other major strains of Bharatanatyam develops from the hereditary dancers in South India. Perhaps none were more renowned in this style at home and abroad than T. Balasaraswati who lived from 1918-1984 and made her U.S. debut at the Pillow in 1962. Again, I have to give a shout-out to Hari Krishnan and his other article “Introduction to Bharatanatyam and the Legacy of T. Balasaraswati at the Pillow” which we have linked in the episode notes as well. Here I would like to focus on Balasaraswati’s daughter, also an established dancer, who performed at the Pillow in 1997.
Listen here to how the moderator for the post-performance discussion, then Pillow scholar-in-residence and now colleague of mine at UCLA, David Gere, steers the conversation to the back story of who is on stage and how they are connected to the history of the form. Gere starts by asking the youngest person on stage, Aniruddha Knight a question.
DAVID GERE: There is some, some family feeling here and I’m wondering Ani, I’m asking you to um, to explain all the family connections here in this group.
ANIRUDDHA KNIGHT: Well, first of all, Lakshmiji is my mother. And, obviously her mother was a very famous dancer
DAVID GERE: Whose name is…
ANIRUDDHA KNIGHT: T. Balasaraswati
DAVID GERE: Whose pictures by the way are over here on the wall. You might want to take note as you leave. There are some beautiful pictures of her, she had a debut here which we will talk about in a little bit.
ANIRUDDHA KNIGHT: And, actually I became interested in dance when I was very young. I guess before I can actually remember. And I started taking dance very seriously at the age of 8 I think.
DAVID GERE: And now you’re 16?
ANIRUDDHA KNIGHT: Yes, now I’m 16. So I’ve been practicing on and off.
DAVID GERE: Did you start when your grandmother was still living?
ANIRUDDHA KNIGHT: Um, well it was mostly fun for me. Dancing was just, fun. And I was only 4 when she died. So I actually don’t remember much.
DAVID GERE: And any other members of your family here in this semi-circle?
ANIRUDDHA KNIGHT: Viswanathan.
DAVID GERE: And how is he related to you?
ANIRUDDHA KNIGHT: He is my, I think my great uncle.
DAVID GERE: Which is to say that he is Balasaraswati’s brother, so he is of the same generation as the great dancer Balasaraswati whose pictures are up here.
ANIRUDDHA KNIGHT: And my father Douglas Knight Jr.
DAVID GERE: (inaudible) So you can see that four of the performers tonight are related to one another and that this is a lineage that has been passed down through many generations.
LIONEL POPKIN: Again, we see a huge difference from the other artists we have discussed here. Surukkai was on stage alone for her discussion. Jeyasingh had her dancers join, but most of the questions were directed to her as the choreographer. With Lakshmi, and the connection to Balasaraswati, the whole family chimes in, and they all take turns answering questions. It’s a family affair.
I want to close out our discussion of the 90s with the performance that was chronologically first, in 1994. Chandralekha, who lived from 1928-2006, is widely considered to be an Indian dance pioneer and heavily influential revolutionary artist. She brought her company to the Pillow in 1994 to perform a piece called “Yantra” which was dedicated to Pina Bausch.
Chandralekha’s blend of yoga, Indian martial arts, and the geometric structure of Bharatanatyam combined with her attention to detail and a radical approach to tempo created a singular artistic voice completely distinct from the other three artists we have described here. Very little audio or text survives from the company’s visit, but if you get a chance, I encourage you to visit the Pillow in the future and ask to watch the video. To give a sense of Chandralekha’s poetic structuring and use of time, here she is reciting the prologue to Yantra within the performance.
I hope you can hear the expansive use of time alongside her resonant voice and evocative words.
CHANDRALEKHA:
Here man is the platform on which she turns
Blessed indeed are those, the very few who see you here
Goddess mounted and bended
And tide of pure events and of complete joy.
LIONEL POPKIN: So, where are we now? In 1994 the Pillow welcomed the Indian dance pioneer and revolutionary artist Chandralekha. Similarly, the 1995 appearance of Shobana Jeyasingh’s company brought one of Great Britain’s leading artists of South Asian heritage who was inventing and hybridizing Bharatanatyam with other modes of performance structuring. Both Chandralekha and Jeyasingh use group compositions, juxtaposition, layering, proximity, and hybridized vocabularies to parse their kinetic questions of life in Madras and London respectively.
Then, immediately following those two experimentalists, Sarukkai and Lakshmi arrive, Sarukkai in 1996 and 1998 and Lakshmi in 1997. Both are renowned exponents of traditional Bharatanatyam and each represent one of the two key lineages in Bharatanayam’s 20th-century revival. Lakshmi, as the daughter and progenitor of the heralded Balasaraswati, brought her son, her husband, and her uncle, Balasaraswati’s brother, with her to the Pillow for these performances.
Sarukkai is an exemplary exponent of the Brahmin-led 20th-century creation of what is known as classical Bharatanatyam. This return to traditional and classical programming echoes Shawn’s earlier decisions to present traditional Indian dance and indeed replicates the environment where Indian dancing bodies represent a foreign and exotic aesthetic to be seen in counterpoint to the western forms which dominated the Pillow’s programming.
Since the 1990s, there have been a number of performances within the Indian milieu at the Pillow, with the Inside/Out stage providing the bulk of the events. Notable exceptions between the two main stages at the Pillow 2003 and 2018 are two Bharatanatyam performances. One by the Chennai-based Lakshmi Vishwanathan and the other by Minneapolis-based company Ragamala. Also three performances by the Kuchipudi exponent Shantala Shivalingappa. One engagement by the Odissi and Bangalore-based Nrityagram company. And two performances by artists trained in Kathak and based in the UK: Akram Khan and Aakash Odedra.
Worth noting is that each of those artists have a classical form attached to them; Bharatanatyam, Kuchipudi, Odissi or Kathak. Notably absent from the list of Indian dances presented on the Pillow’s main stages are, and I say this in full recognition of my own stake in the argument, American-based experimentalists whose work is not visibly connected to a classical form. What about a site-specific artist of Indian descent like Pramila Vasudevan who works with pedestrian and contact improvisation-based movement and sets dances in parking garages and town squares? Should her voice be included at the Pillow? What about an artist, like the aforementioned Hari Krishnan, who is openly navigating queer aesthetics? Should they only be seen on the outside stage looking in? Is the Pillow audience not able to support them for more than an afternoon?
Let’s return to 1997 and pick up on the conversation between Pillow scholar David Gere and Lakshmi as they reminisce about an event from 1962 when Lakshmi accompanied her mother to the Pillow.
DAVID GERE: Um, Let me ask you about your, your memories from your mother about her first visit to Jacob’s Pillow, which happens to have been in 1962. You mentioned some of these stories to me. I wonder if you might share with us about her entry to the Pillow.
LAKSHMI: It was 1962, that was her first visit (inaudible clarification with other panelist), and uh, we landed in New York, and then straight away we were brought to Jacob’s Pillow. Actually, we didn’t know where we were going or no idea.
DAVID GERE: Had you ever been to America before?
LAKSHMI: No, that was our first visit. Very exciting, and we were here and we were picked up by a limo, I should say this, but we were so scared, we were so silent – we thought who is driving us where? Now I know it was a limo. But anyway, we came here and we were not staying in the cabins here, but I think we were somewhere else. We were staying in a hotel. And, the first day when we came, Bala brought a, we brought a garland, and uh, both of us were sitting in the limo and we entered, and there he was Ted Shawn, he opened the, uh door, and he said, ‘I’m Siva.’
DAVID GERE: In all seriousness, by the way, this wasn’t in jest.
LAKSHMI: It just, and uh, we were uh, quite taken aback, and it was very touching and at the same time, you know Bala was not used to that kind of. So but at first she felt a little shy. And then she got over it and she garlanded him and it was very touching and it was very such garland was (inaudible)- And she was uh, she danced here for seven days. And, she shared it with Maria Tallchief. First, she would dance the first half, and then my mother was to perform.
DAVID GERE: Maria Tallchief was a ballet dancer who would perform the first half and then Bala would dance the second half.
LAKSHMI: And uh, I had a great pleasure, you know it as meeting La Meri and uh, so many artists. We’d never seen a ballerina in person before so it was, all in awe.
DAVID GERE: You also mentioned something about Ted Shawn’s reaction after probably the first performance to uh, to your mother’s dancing. How did he respond?
LAKSHMI: Oh, he came up to the stage and he leant on the stage. There were so many people there, just leant, took her hands and kissed her and said, he was your dancing wasn’t great, it was greatness itself. That’s how he felt, and then there was another touching thing that I still treasure that he gave uh two dolls – Indian, not Indian, but American Indian dolls for, because my mother was very fond of collecting dolls, somehow he knew that and he gave her a pair of dolls that I still treasure.
LIONEL POPKIN: Why is the orientalist fantasy perpetuated by Ted Shawn striking a Natyaraj pose, that’s the Siva pose when he meets Balasaraswati, still of interest? Why is equating that genre with all of India still the prevailing curatorial aesthetic? And don’t even get me started on him giving an Indian an Indigenous American doll and us just laughing that off today. Why are Indian bodies at the Pillow still representing a nation or a mythology and evoking ancient sources? Why do they have to be Hindu? Why not Muslim? Or Zoroastrian? Or secular? Why not Pakistani instead of Indian? Why are we still mired in the question of tradition versus contemporaneity? Where is the space for complication and artistic adventurousness? If the point of these podcasts is to tell stories from the archives, then we need more archives, and more expansive options and categories.
Fortunately, from my perspective, a new generation is rising up. The children of the immigrants who came to the U.S. after 1965, when the Immigration and Naturalization Act reversed the 1882 Asian Exclusion Act, and recent progressive immigrants are shifting the landscape bit by bit. The reckoning with caste politics and the long, shameful collusion between Indian Dance and religious dominance and caste suppression is finally being questioned and challenged. The politics of Dalit Lives (the caste some call the ‘untouchables’) is, at last, being voiced and heard in some of the places where decisions are being made.
Many Indian artists are questioning the need to represent an ancient symbol or function as an emissary for an entire nation. Just as Chandralekha and Shobana Jeyasingh briefly brought a contemporary South Asian voice to the Pillow 30 years ago, I am hopeful that the sense of inquisitiveness and potential will be embraced again. The “play space of the orient” that Jeyasingh spoke about needs to stop. And speaking of Jeyasingh, let’s return to her post-performance discussion and hear one last exchange with an audience member.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: My question is this. When you began to think about, in a way, integrating – and I’m not saying adding on to the other because it is obviously a creative integration – did this come as a, as a concept or did it come during the the dance work itself or – I’m wondering how you came to this, cause as far as I know this group, what you’ve made, or otherwise, is unique in the world in putting together really the idioms of two very different cultures in a way that’s very special and I wondered how did you come to it?
SHOBANA JEYASINGH: I don’t know if we are the only people who do it. I am sure there are other people who also sort of inhabit this area, but for myself, I suppose I started off as a classical dancer. Cause that was what my training was in.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: In India?
SHOBANA JEYASINGH: In India, yeah. And, so I started off learning dance really for because my mother wanted me to learn it. True of a lot of people - child to do classical dance. It wasn’t something that I had a choice in.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Was she a dancer?
SHOBANA JEYASINGH: No, she wasn’t. She was a maths teacher – completely different. But, you know I enjoyed dancing and you know I enjoyed performing and doing the kind of classical repertoire, but I suppose at one point, I wanted to make my own work. And then, you know, the language and the emotion within the classical dance, wasn’t completely satisfying for me. It was a very gradual thing really. I didn’t actually, the first piece that I made, wasn’t a complete jump from what I had been doing. I think it’s, you know, you confront certain problems and you find different ways of solving it. And this was each year. In a way it was the same problem that just find, you know, a better way of answering those questions. And so I actually don’t, in a way I don’t think of it as trying to put two cultures together, because I suppose in a way I don’t really believe that there are these rigid demarcations that separate cultures. I think, you know, perhaps social scientist do, I mean they have to, otherwise, they wouldn’t have any jobs to do, but I think, you know, as a sort of living, every day, normal person, I think you don’t actually live your life with these kind of huge categories in front of you. I think you just do what is instinctive, and I suppose as an artist you try and do it with some integrity. So, it’s just every day, small, problem-solving acts, you know, become a piece of choreography – at the end, So, that’s we figure that happens.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you.
LIONEL POPKIN: And thank you… small problem-solving. What an intriguing way to think about making dances. Not representing a country, a religion, or someone else’s conception of you. Problem-solving. I guess we could say that little nugget was spoken like the daughter of a maths teacher who is simply problem-solving. Perhaps her mother and she are not so different after all. And, perhaps when we look at the trajectory of Indian dance at the Pillow and even more broadly, at South Asian dance makers from multiple vantage points, we might be able to go beyond simple math and move into the complexity offered by the nonbinary principles of quantum calculus. Artists are already living this complexity. The time has come for the practices of audiences and institutions to catch up.
[Music begins, composed, and performed by Jess Meeker]
NORTON OWEN: That’s it for this episode of PillowVoices. Thank you for joining us today. On behalf of Jacob's Pillow, we look forward to sharing more dance with you through the films, essays, and podcasts at danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org, and of course through live experiences during our festival and throughout the year. Special thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts for helping launch this podcast series. Please subscribe to PillowVoices wherever you get your podcasts and visit us again soon, either online or onsite.