Many dancers in India are considered,
by others and even themselves sometimes, to be exclusively performers. People
who work on dance in spheres other than performance are wrongly but commonly
construed as having first failed as a performer. I’m not sure if this is an
ignorant assumption or a sad truth, or a bit of both.
I say a bit of both because it
might be true that some people who work on dance today were first desperately
trying, and failing to be performers. But loving dance and all it encapsulates
too much to let it go, they ‘resorted’ to becoming public critical spectators,
dance critics, writers or dance scholars. But it may also true that some
dancers recognize the importance of theorizing about dance, academically engaging
with it along with performing it. Moreover, there are a handful of people in
India who do not dance and are dance scholars and thinkers of great repute, and
have attempted to give dance scholarship a position that is equal and not
subordinate to the performance of dance.
I do not know for certain which
of these scenarios is more prevalent. But as I said, one does often hear of
young aspiring scholars and critics that they first ‘tried their hand at
dancing’. If this is the impression of dance research and scholarship in India,
then it is problematic on many levels.
First, it builds a mythical and
harmful hierarchy where the performer is at the pinnacle, and the researcher,
critic or spectator is below the performer. This not only disturbs the
equilibrium of the dance world but invents power relationships (between
performer and audience, performer and student, performer and critic – which I have
written about in previous articles) that are distorted and harmful.
More importantly, it creates the
wrong impression that performance is more important than scholarship and
research on dance. This hierarchy might be the reason why a comprehensive
conference or seminar on dance is not possible in India without the presence of
at least some international dance scholars. Perhaps performers in India shy
away from scholarship and research because they will be seen as having
‘resorted’ to it because they failed at what they ‘really’ wanted to do.
Finally, if it is true that dance
scholarship was a ‘last resort’ to staying within the realms of the dance
world, then young scholars and critics are likely to be resentful and not
appreciative of the field they are in. Such a situation presents problems of
its own – where spite, malice and envy inform their research and work, rather
than academic inspiration and an intrinsic value in what they do.
This disturbance of equilibrium
in the dance world further complicates ‘what dance is’ in the minds of young
people, aspiring dancers, critics and scholars. It pits one aspect of learning
against another. Young dancers are more keen to ‘get on stage’ than to even
learn the basic theoretical aspects of dance. As a dance educator, I come young
across dancers who claim to have been trained for a decade and have no
knowledge of the basic theoretical tenets of dance; I stumble upon dance
students who sleep through discussions on the importance of dance criticism,
history and theory; I fumble to explain to a student in his or her second class
that it will be a long while before he or she ‘gets on stage’; and I struggle
to keep students whose parents I have told this to. Performance seems to have
overridden all other aspects of dance! The ambition to be on stage, then,
crushes all other learning in its path.
In such a scenario, it becomes
easy to cast off research and scholarship as subsisdiary or optional aspects of
the training and learning process of a dancer. And under such circumstances,
dance scholarship in India will never be what it is becoming in other parts of
the academic world – a serious and crucial study.
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