Celebration of youth

For young and versatile Jayachandran Palazhy, experimenting with dance is a passion. An exceptional dancer himself, he claims that his kind of dance is a sensorial narrative experience involving the audience. LALITHA SRIDHAR writes.

HE is trained in Bharatanatyam, Kathakali, folk forms, Kalaripayittu and the Brazilian Martial Art of Capoeira. After studying at the London Contemporary Dance School, he turned founder-choreographer of the London-based Imlata Dance Company. He is now setting up the Attakalari Centre for Contemporary Performing Arts in Bangalore "where the weather is conducive for eight-hour rehearsals". Having toured internationally with his "Jyro-scape" (1995/96), "Beyond the Walls for Men" (1997) and his latest "City Maps", he is now in India with shows slated in Delhi and Bombay (as part of the German Festival) and in Kochi and Bangalore (in partnership with the British Council). Based on Italo Calvino's book Invisible Cities, this visual dance theatre coupled with video projection seeks to map the physical and mental journeys which people make in their lives. In Chennai, a place he always misses for "it's a very interesting city with some kind of strange familiarity which seeps into your psyche" Jayachandran Palazhy speaks about his dance and the steps he has taken.

"At the end of my degree, I was in two minds. I had been dancing for about three years by then so I felt what should I do? I had a passion for dance but having a passion is one thing and making it work is another - there is no financial security. My friends and teachers urged me to go for it and that was a very important thing. I was always interested in dance but I had to wait till I was in college because it was not that common for boys to take up dance in spite of forms like Kathakali, where men do dance. I moved on to the London Dance School. I borrowed some money and worked my way through. I had always wanted to have a language of my time - one that would tell my stories, or that would speak of my kind of concerns and issues that were important to me. It's almost like finding a new language for a writer - that was the search all along. I was learning dance not as a child but as a young adult. I was really analytical about it. Why am I doing it? What does this movement mean to me? I felt that yes, I respect my tradition, it's a part of me and my heritage, but it works more like a reference book or library. My contemporary concerns are life around me and other art forms which are also thriving, whether literature, cinema or the visual arts where a lot of experiments are happening, even in India. But dance was very tradition-bound and couldn't take on new issues, new ways of expression so I liked exploring the possibility of finding a new language. Sometimes what happens is that when the slate is so clean, whatever is written might appear terribly new although something might have happened in some other part of the world. My stay in London helped me in opening up and allowed me a little bit of space to look back.

"We did a pilot project with the Arizona and Middlesex Universities. The idea was to do research into the possibility of connecting remote locations. We placed several video cameras and motion sensing devices which can actually trigger data in another space. For example, cameras in a performance where I am moving around pick up my movement and that becomes data. That data can be programmed in such a way that it triggers music, lighting or something else in another space so the performers themselves can control the music or lighting by their movement. It leads to many possibilities. For example, live and virtual partnering. My Japanese-American choreographer and I worked together for a live duet plus a duet with virtual partnering where an image was projected and we danced with that image. There is an eight second delay in projection leading to the possibility of looping. So it is as though a new kind of art form were generated. And recently Merce Cunningham (the noted contemporary choreographer) has done a project in which the camera captures the movement but not the outer contours of the person - then that movement is transformed into another drawn picture so that the movement is represented but not the whole body. That and the live performance is a fantastic experience - and a very interesting way of abstracting the idea.

"So technology offers a lot of possibilities for a non-narrative, non-verbal form like dance. It's not restricted by the barrier of verbal language. The physical movements are recognised all over the world. I think another possibility was that the work we did in America was simultaneously web cast and you could log in from anywhere in the world.

"The camera can turn around and you can control the angles from your home. These things are still in their developmental stage but there is so much possibility that I am excited about it.

"People who are not necessarily dancers themselves might get involved in the art of dance - like what happened in music. A lot of people started to make music with the computer. For example, you don't necessarily spend years and years trying to learn one particular instrument but more importantly you will be dealing with the compositional ideas - what you want to say with music rather than mastering on instrument. I am not saying that is right or that is what everybody should do, but things are happening like that which adds another dimension, another facet for the possibility of movement.

"The atheletism of our movements is demanding. It's not a traditional way of placing you body from the point of contact with your feet. The idea of dance as a vertically standing body moving around space is gone for me. The point of contact is any part of the body. The idea of a unicentric body is gone. So when you shift your balance, your focus, weight, everything shifts. It's reflecting a kind of post-modern reality where the space is acting on you - its not only about beautifying the space.

"There is a different kind of aesthetic intelligence in the audience. Choreography is like an organisation of movement and images and the organising principles can be several - spatial, rhythmic, a particular thematic idea, a visual composition. There are several ways of organising this space acting on your body. In an audience, what we would like is a physical reaction to the performance. My kind of dance is not about a literal narrative, not like telling a story like Krishna stealing butter but a sensorial narrative experience which should and has worked with the audience in the places where I have performed. So here the kinesthetical appreciation, not just the aesthetical experience, is what we are looking for. You feel one with the movement. Dance places a lot of importance on the movement itself and you are privileged to have several images unfolding in front of you. That is the sensitivity we hope the audience will develop more and more, by watching more and more. We would like the audience to come with an open mind and say this is a celebration of movement, of youth and of reality."

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