- Mapping conflict through bharata natyam
The evocative and interactive medium of dance is one of humanity’s most powerful art forms. Like all forms of art, the influences that shape art are as diverse as art itself.
This week, a particularly unique book by an equally unique author on the dance form “bharata natyam” was awarded the 2021 de la Torre Bueno First Book Award presented by Dance Studies Association. Written by Ahalya Satkunaratnam, Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict: Practicing Bharata Natyam in Colombo, Sri Lanka looks at the role of the Bharata Natyam dance form in the context of Sri Lanka’s civil war. Focusing on women dancers, Ahalya shows how they navigated conditions of conflict and a neoliberal, global economy; resisted nationalism and militarism; and advocated for peace. Her interdisciplinary methodology combines historical analysis, methods of dance studies, and dance ethnography.
Brunch sat down with Ahalya for a look into Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict and to learn more about how she views dance and art as a tool for mapping conflict.
A scholar and dancer, Ahalya is an Associate Professor of Humanities at Oakton Community College in Illinois, where she teaches women’s and gender studies, cultural studies, and performing arts. Her interests lie in the relationships between arts, embodied practices, and local and global politics. Ahalya’s introduction to dance and to bharata natyam came through her mother who encouraged her to study dance. Ahalya found herself drawn to the beauty of bharata natyam and its capacity for storytelling, loving how she could find meaning through the performance and symbolism of the dance form.
Training under Hema Rajagopalan in Chicago (Ahalya is of Sri Lankan origin, and was born in Malaysia. Over the course of her life, she has lived in Malaysia, Canada, and the US), Ahalya went on to be a member of Rajagopalan’s dance troupe for several years, followed by creative performance work with other projects where she was able to fully understand using art for social justice issues, making art accessible to all communities, and how art tells the story of communities and allows them to bring up social issues.
‘Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict’
At its core, Ahalya explained that Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict is an ethnography of bharata natyam in Colombo, from its early days through to post-war.
Speaking to practitioners, dancers, choreographers, and students of all levels, Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict looks at the stories, archives, and scrapbooks of early practitioners, and paints a vivid picture of the history of bharata natyam, how it emerged in Sri Lanka, what it was like for the women of those first families to take to the dance form amid the stigma of women dancing publicly, how the civil war affected the education and practice of bharata natyam, and how the dance form was maintained despite the war and ends with an examination of bharata natyam after the war.
Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict also looks at the choreography of bharata natyam throughout its journey and also looks at the production side of the dance form – the politics of dance, funding productions, and the choices choreographers and directors had to make to do productions.
Ahalya’s journey writing Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict has been a long one, beginning the process when she visited Colombo for the first time in 2004. “I got to speak to practitioners during that first visit, and then I came back later on in 2006 and had the chance to spend the most amount of time in Sri Lanka out of all my immediate family,” Ahalya shared. “Visiting as an outsider and as part of the Diaspora, I was very lucky to be able to come back to the country and be welcomed by so many people who were interested in art and dancing.”
With Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict having won the 2021 de la Torre Bueno First Book Award, Ahalya shared that she was tremendously honoured for her book to have been selected among so many other wonderful books on dance by first-time authors. “I’m also thrilled that this work on Sri Lanka is understood as valuable. I also feel that Sri Lankans should be happy too. The country is so diverse and so complex in terms of what people have gone through. People should pay attention to this amazing history and the ability to navigate through its complexities.”
Bharata natyam and dance as a way of mapping and examining conflict
Speaking about how she came to understand dance and the stories of dancers, as a tool of mapping conflict, Ahalya explained that this largely came about through her broader understanding of art.
“I think of all art, including dance, as inherently political and a part of greater culture that is shaped by governmental policies, and unofficial practices of power in society, by what’s included and what is not included in discourse, what is staged and not staged, by influences and popular trends, by society’s likes and dislikes, and what we value and what we don’t value. It’s all tied to politics and power,” she said.
With bharata natyam and how it maps conflict, Ahalya shared that this comes through in how people move and react to the conflict, and how those movements and reactions make their way into the dance form. “Dance, and in this case, bharata natyam, is inherently shaped when people are moved from parts of town, or when they leave the country. The institution itself is shaped by who remains,” Ahalya shared.
Expanding on how arts, embodied practices, and politics connect, Ahalya said that with all art being political, what surfaces to the top is honed by politics, regardless of what influences that art, noting that even the content we find popular on platforms like TikTok is shaped by politics and power, by who we want to mimic and what trends we want to be part of, which is, in turn, informed by political and social practices, the media, globalisation, and any other number of politically nuanced factors.
Ahalya also addressed representation in art, sharing that to her, all forms of representation matter. She said: “When we are excluded from representation in art, we may not identify with that piece of art or we may aspire to be included. And in terms of art, representation is a political question or decision. Even in popular culture when we think about TV shows and movies and so on, there are so many decision-makers and the final art is influenced by these decisions, which is where the finer details about decision-making imbued with political meaning comes into play.
“For many of us, we’re questioning our traditions, and we’re questioning whether the stories we’ve been told about ourselves are true, and art allows me to investigate that and to also think about the people who are bringing their own voice into their art.”
What’s next?
While she hasn’t yet begun working on her next book (and is still undecided what the next book will cover), Ahalya is currently working on a dance film centred around her most recent work, “Agni”, a contemporary ensemble piece that explores war and dispossession through mythologies of fire. It will be released as a dance film in 2022.
Heavily shaped by bharata natyam (the dance form Ahalya is most comprehensively trained in), Agni blends the storytelling element of bharata natyam with modern dance approaches to movement, along with influences from the other two dancers in the ensemble – one of whom is Colombian (Juan Villegas) and one of whom is Japanese Canadian (Aina Yasué). Agni looks at the Vedic fire deity Agni, and focuses on the sun as a source of light, and the role of fire in firearms of war, especially the Global War on Terror, which has marked most of Ahalya and her ensemble’s adulthoods.
Agni is set to an electric sound score by Matt Rogalsky, who transforms the sounds of fire into a moving, distorted track. It is performed to a visual design projection by Métis/Cree filmmaker artist Gregory Coyes, who has created a slow media format of long shots of the environment to set the tone for the Agni story.
Agni was initially meant to be a toured performance, but because of the pandemic, the format of the performance was made into film, with Ahalya and her ensemble (who lived in different parts of Canada at the time) workshopping together and then performing in a very short window in July. “I’m waiting on the cut from our videographers, and we hope to do a proper launch event for Agni,” Ahalya said. “We hope to release in 2022.”
