Traditional vs. Contemporary - a Kathak Tale

 This week on a Facebook group that I belong to, someone posted this excellent link for our consideration. It is a series of letters between a dancer and an awards and festival organization. In it, an accomplished Kathak dancer, Aditi Mangaldas of New Delhi, turns down a prestigious award for her body of work. Why? Because they didn't honor her for her Kathak; the award was in the category of Creative and Experimental Dance, and not in Kathak--her life's work. The exchange further brings to the fore a discussion about what makes an art for what it is--how rigid should our definitions be to maintain tradition, while still being flexible enough to accommodate natural evolution and growth of the art form?


And I am sure you will see the parallels here for bellydance and our intra-community struggle to define our art accurately. Let me share a few snippets, and hopefully you will see the commonalities that many dance forms--art forms!--share when it comes to evolution, tradition, costume choices, personal interpretation, preservation of ideals, and much more. I read it and it was all-too-familiar, and I thought you would enjoy it, too.

"All my work has been in the field of Kathak, 80% of which is in the classical idiom and 20% is contemporary work, which is also strictly rooted in Kathak. Over the years, I have persevered towards preserving, making it relevant, letting it harmoniously and homogeneously evolve, helping the stream of Kathak to expand and be ever rejuvenating and full of energy and life."
-Aditi Mangalds

I think this quote embodies a how a lot of "evolutionists" in the bellydance world feel today. They feel is a significant part of their training and production is firmly bellydance. Yet some are dismissed for the 20% that is not. This asks all of us to question, "What is the line in the sand for traditional versus modern?" At what point has an art form evolved so far from its root that it has become someone else, or is at least best identified as such for clarity? Evolution seems natural to many, and repulsive to others, yet as Aditi put it so well:

"When you say traditional, what does one mean? How far back in history do we go? The structure of the Kathak ang, musical accompanying instruments, literature, ambience, presentation, costumes have all undergone constant evolution and refinement. Kathak has developed and grown, adapted, changed with a change in context to the community or the ambience. It has been enhanced by the relentless inputs of great artists and dancers. Each dancer, albeit from different gharaanas, has constantly expanded the vocabulary of Kathak, “Aaharya” being an integral part of this change.

Would you not agree that there is no absolute in what we call traditional? But in fact an evolution in which many factors play a part."

 It's tough for me whenever these debates come up in the bellydance world. I can see both sides of this issue. Just because I am a fusion artist, doesn't mean I don't appreciate the passions of those who hold the traditional forms sacred. Just because I don't agree that the art should remain the same doesn't mean I am blind to all the ways in which it is often all-but-obliterated in the name of change. But drawing the line, identifying how much is too much, is impossible to agree on. Instead, focusing on the spirit behind some of Aditi's most poetic words might help us regain some perspective (the bolding is her emphasis from the original post):

"We need to recognize the multiplicity in classical arts. They are not and have never been uni-dimensional. Like a river, tradition needs to rejuvenate itself and flow. Preservation can only happen by a constant input of evolution. We don’t need to be afraid of change but be observant. Change is the only constant in life.

Kathak today is an amalgamation of multitude of tributaries that has fed it over the centuries. To reinforce it, maybe we need to make sure that this gushing water is always rejuvenated by fresh input from today’s performers. Only the substantial will remain, all else will fall away like dead skin."

Read the entire exchange between Aditi and the festival organizers here:
http://www.narthaki.com/info/rt/rt53.html

But more importantly, what do you think? Is there a line, and if so where would you draw it? After reading the full article, would you put as much emphasis on costuming in your definition of the dance? What are the major elements of "traditional bellydance" in your mind? 

I always welcome your thoughts, so please share them in the comments below!

Six Steps to Becoming a Great Dancer (no, really!)

If you have been reading my blog for even a short time, you have likely come across the popular "Four Steps to Becoming a Great Dancer" article I posted in late 2011.  That article stands as the first and most important list of "to do's" to improve your dancing, period.  BUT!  We all know there are a few more steps we can take, which can support those first four magical steps, and push us on to becoming stronger and more confident in our dance.  So here they are, Six Steps to Becoming a Great Dancer, coming atcha!

1. New dancers should diversify.

When a dancer is first dipping her toe into a new genre of dance, in this case bellydance, it is vital that she explore many facets of the dance in those tender first months and years.  Take classes from different teachers and take workshops as they are available to you--even ones you fear might be over your head, or below your notice--take them, the bellydance world is your smorgasbord!  Watch lots of professional videos.  By professional videos I mean professionally produced DVD's and online videos with established professional dancers. (While YouTube can be a great resource, for new dancers who don't know how to discern the great stuff from the terrible stuff, it can sidetrack you. Just be aware of that as you troll around for inspiration.)

To Dance is a Radical Act

Here is a thought-provoking and inspiring read to lead into our first week of tribal bellydance classes of 2012. Prepare to nod your head, and "hell yeah" at this one...

"...we humans are not rational minds dwelling in bodily containers. We  are bodies. We are bodily selves whose movements are making us able to  think and feel and act at all. And if we are to achieve a just and  sustainable world, then we must make sure that our processes of getting  there honor the wisdom and agency present in the movement of our bodily selves.

To dance is a radical act because dancing reminds us that the bodily movements we make make us who we are."

"...as we now know, not everything that is written down is important, and  not everything important can be written down. There are forms of  knowledge that exist in media other than verbal ones. Reading and  writing themselves are bodily activities demanding the precise  articulation of muscle movement. Words cannot grant themselves  authority. That authority comes from the lived experiences they express,  and the lived experiences they enable.

To dance is a radical act  because doing so implies that there are forms of knowing that cannot be  mediated to us in words, which give words their meaning."

And so much more to blow your mind at:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-body-knows/201111/dance-is-radical-act

Live in the layers...

The Layers

Stanley Kunitz
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strenth
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.


Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!

On "the Bellydance Police"

On Shira's tribe over on tribe.net (no, tribe isn't dead!), she referenced an article on Gilded Serpent in which another dancer wrote with a fair amount of disdain about those who rally behind the idea of retaining historical and cultural elements of bellydance (what is often termed "The Bellydance Police"). You can see the discussion, and link to the article, HERE. Shira follows it up with a great analogy, which I thought would be nice to share over here. So without further ado, I give you Shira's take:

"Let's say I write a 17-line poem with each line containing somewhere between 8 and 34 syllables and call it haiku. Now, the "poetry police" killjoys would tell you that such a poem does not conform to the properties of haiku (3 lines in length, with 5 syllables in line 1, 7 syllables in line 2, 5 syllables in line 3) and therefore is not haiku. Now, this poem may well convey my vision, my passion, my joy, and a completeness in my quest for beauty. These things would certainly qualify it as "poetry", but they don't qualify it as haiku.

But if I enter that poem in a haiku writing contest, should I expect to win? Should I expect journals that specialize in haiku to publish it, simply because I have chosen to declare that it is haiku, even though it does not contain the properties that people well-versed in the form would recognize as haiku?

If I start teaching classes in how to write haiku, should it be okay that I encourage my students to write any poem of any structure they please, all in the name of their vision, their passion, their joy, and a completeness in their quest for beauty while still calling the end result haiku?

I would argue that no, it may all still be POETRY, and it all may all be worthy of being read, but there is a certain basic set of properties that must be met before you identify it as a specific genre of poetry. It still deserves to be written, and shared if the poet wishes to share it, but ultimately there should be truth in labeling."

Jane of all trades?

Trying to be everything to everyone can be exhausting. I know! I've tried!

Looking back on the evolution of my dance, I can see a sort of wave-like motion. That is, like a wave pushing forward which swells and swells and swells....and finally breaks and crashes and eases upon the shore... Yep, I kinda feel that is what my dance has done.

I started out so simply--much like we all do. Just an image of dance that felt natural and came naturally from my combination of instincts plus research into many different styles which appealed to me. My roots were in cabaret/folkloric, because really that's all there was around here at the time. "Tribal" was not yet a household word, and though I knew of group improv and had the videos, that wasn't what I was trying to do, per se. I just liked dancing, especially with other like-minded women, and I enjoyed exploring all the bits and pieces of theory and aesthetics that my teachers and friends brought into my field of vision.



As I learned more, and added new ideas to my bag of tricks, I wanted to bring them all together somehow. I liked that I was a fusion dancer working among other fusion dancers, and had that freedom. My teachers and friends encouraged me to blend and follow my bliss, and I was not shy about doing so. Of course it was all with an eye toward what would be most effective and appropriate on a given stage, but even with those "soft limits" on my creative output (maybe even partly because of), things began to fracture a bit. That is to say, I understood that doing a dark, moody sword piece at a sunny afternoon faire wasn't really going to be effective, and nor was my folky costumes and music going to have the intended impact at the goth club. So naturally, I felt the need to divide these diverse portions of my dance into some kind of categories. There was costuming for this venue, and music for that venue. And even a vocabulary of movement and treatment which rocked over here, but wouldn't really work over there. So every time we staged a piece, we would pick and choose from these many different components to piece together the ideal setlist for the show we were intending to do. And taken at face value, that sounds idyllic, doesn't it? Being able to adapt and adjust in such a way that we could present several really different bodies of work based on the venue and the audience is a valuable skill.

But the result wasn't quite so simple or ideal.

Spoon's take on the evolution of Bellydance

Tribe isn't as dead as many people think, and over on Shira's tribe, there has been a lot of eager discussion about bellydance fusion and its legitimacy as bellydance. Some purists posit that it is an insult to the cultures from which bellydance comes from to change it or fuse it in any way. I have long held the belief that the nature of human culture is that things grow, change, and evolve over time just by being brought into a new environment. Nothing stays the same, and in the world today it is even more true--we are becoming a global culture where things will mix and mingle and change whether we want them to or not.

Now I *DO* agree that some fusions have moved so far away from bellydance, it doesn't fit the genre any more. And I agree that a lot of these more recent "infractions" are being perpetuated under the mistaken moniker of tribal. But that is another topic altogether. This particular post by Spoon addresses the idea of "change as insult" quite well and I wanted to share.

Conscious Evolution

I am fairly certain that most people would agree that evolution is rarely a conscious process. Particularly in art. We definitely try to push our limits, learn new things, and "grow", but I think in art, as in life, "growth" and "evolution" are two different processes. The former is a shorter term experience, fairly easily quantified and observed both by yourself and others. The results are gross...less in the details. Evolution tends to be more subtle and over a much longer period of time. It is more about the essence of a thing.

I am finding that right now, I am becoming conscious of an evolution of my dance self (and without getting too deep, also some very personal parts of my being as well). Something in my core beliefs...my essence...is shifting. I have never "seen" this happen before. It was always something happening under the surface, beyond my notice, and over years. This evolution is occurring very swiftly--in the last 8-10 months--and in the front of my consciousness. I am finding myself taking notice of it, and making quite deliberate choices to facilitate it.