Shobana Jeyasingh Overview

"It is very undemocratic to be prescribed your areas of concern, the issues you want to deal with as an artist." The fact that Shobana Jeyasingh was born in India is a complex fact that audiences, funders, and critics might wish... [more]

"It is very undemocratic to be prescribed your areas of concern, the issues you want to deal with as an artist." The fact that Shobana Jeyasingh was born in India is a complex fact that audiences, funders, and critics might wish she'd address in simpler, more dogmatic terms. The English immigrant refuses to merely reproduce her culture of origin. Yes, her dancers work in the Indian tradition of Bharata Natyam, a temple dance that consists of detailed hand gestures and grounded footwork done with bent knees. But Jeyasingh insists the actual space that her dances occupy is her diasporic homeland, a place like dance itself: at once imaginary and true, shifting in time and space. In 1993 she commissioned modern dance choreographer Richard Alston to make a piece for her company. Naming it "Delicious Arbor," he set the dance to a score by seventeenth-century composer Henry Purcell. When critics found it "exotic" to see her dancers moving to Purcell's "white" music, Jeyasingh took issue. When she uses the movement vocabulary of Indian temple dance to create modern dance, she insisted, she fuses East and West as messily and thoroughly as they are in her own life. Jeyasingh asserts, "Purcell, like Shelley, like David Bowie, is not 'the other,' it is part of my heritage. And in dance terms, Rumani Devi and Merce Cunningham are also part of my heritage." Jeyasingh's collaborations with contemporary experimental composers make things even more interesting. She has worked with Postmodern Minimalists Michael Nyman and Kevin Volans to create formal pieces that absorb the human form into mathematical patterns. On their part, Nyman and Volans have come to integrate Indian musical forms into their own compositions. So Jeyasingh is part of a process of cultural interpenetration that's both careful and haphazard. She is an Indian woman raised on British pop who quotes Edward Said and Salman Rushdie. She makes modern dances in England, with dancers (mostly of Indian descent) trained in a classical Indian form and with music created by Europeans who've been inspired by trips to India. It's no wonder that Jeyasingh finds the "East versus West" tag frustratingly reductive. The tremendous weight of these cultural layers is beautifully apparent in Jeyasingh's work, not as a burden but as a grounding point. The bent-kneed weightiness of Bharata Natyam (a weightiness that has more in common with modern dance than with classical ballet) draws the dancers toward the floor. On the other hand, detailed hand gestures create an airy counterpoint to the body's plumbline. These two opposing impulses come together as dancers tumble and roll along the floor, and create intricate patterns in space. But the emphasis on formalism does not mean that Jeyasingh ignores emotion. After all, she experiments with non-orthodox vocabulary because she finds the strict forms of Bharata Natyam too impersonal. In "Romance*...With Footnotes" (1993) she infused a classical form with emotion by having the dancers she has performing this normally solo form make contact -- touch. Jeyasingh's concern with formal patterns -- whether maps in "Making of Maps" or games in "Raid" -- marks her as a Modernist, but she also echoes Postmodernist concerns. She often writes about dance in terms of politics and engages in the ultimate Postmodern act: mixing it up like a combine painting by Rauschenberg, but in motion. Her work with the capoerista Laurie Booth on 1997's "Astral Shadows" is a case in point. In this piece, the artists uncovered fascinating commonalities between the Brazilian martial art and the Indian temple dance. The interaction between two seemingly disparate cultural forms has the effect of liberating both. "Astral Shadows" is typical of Jeyasingh's intention to speak in her own heterogeneous terms, rather than in binary oppositions. Ultimately she is a Modernist who conducts Postmodernist experiments within chosen constraints of culture and form. Jeyasingh, says critic Donald Hutera, "the brainy moderator of an absorbing dialogue." [show less]