Restricted view
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Encounter 7 - an evening of contemporary dance
April 25, 2013
'Encounter' is an event hosted by Basement 21, offering young
contemporary art-makers a platform to present their work at Chennai. On
the 10th of April, Basement 21 came up with two fresh short pieces
created by promising young dancers Anoushka Kurien and
Akila.
'Restricted view' by Anoushka explored a choice of four tasks she
appointed to her body and its surrounding space – flipping, rotating,
sliding and resizing. Supported by M Natesh on lights, Anoushka created
an illusory thirteen minutes with a series of often symmetric sets of
movements, abiding her own rules, also playing very intelligently with
various shadows – elongated, or punctuated. Going along with the
background music created by Darbuka Siva, she constantly changed her
spatial references and the quality of constraints in her movements -
shifting the degree of smoothness in her movements as well as the mood
of her presentation, from an apparently lightweight, unregulated motion
of an almost free body barely attached to an axis or a stand (which, in
practice had to be extremely controlled by the center of the body for
the movement to look so casual but unexaggerated), up to a level of
heavy scratchy friction. ‘Restricted view’ ended with a split in the
view of the audience with the help of a slightly larger than life
projection of the dancer – allowing only certain parts of her body to be
highlighted, restricting the rest, one split part complementing the
other.
Counter
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Akila’s ‘Counter’ kept a geometric tension alive throughout the
performance between the body of her co-dancer Aditi Bheda and her own.
Contrasting Anoushka’s comparatively fluid composition, Akila played
with her movements with a weighty, mechanical grace, lines and angles.
The piece developed through a continuous role-reversal of the two
bodies. To start with it was a choreography of two separate entities
countering each other with individual choices of sets of movements -
emphasizing one and only one body part after another, thus also
countering the integrity of one’s own body. But slowly they turned into a
single torso, trying to separate away and in this process tugging the
other along. For example, the right hand, in the process of trying to
get away from the body through the right upper corner, pulls the left
foot above the ground in perfect balance. In this case, as if just
incidentally the right hand and the left foot happened to belong to two
different bodies technically amalgamated into one but with a pillar of
empty space in between dynamically framed by the body contours.
The fifteen minutes long piece, pacing up competing with the deceitfully
(un)systematic rhythmic pattern created by Maarten Visser, was enhanced
by the almost obsessive preciseness and sense of anatomy of each
movement in both dancers.
The event concluded with a conversation between the two dance-makers and
Padmini Chettur. Both Anoushka (since 2003) and Akila (since 2005) have
trained and performed with Padmini Chettur Dance Company. Anoushka
initially trained in Ballet and later in 2011-12, studied at Trinity
Laban, London (where she first explored the beginnings of 'restricted
view'). Akila trained in Bharatanatyam and graduated in Carnatic music
as a vocalist and has been performing for more than ten years. Aditi is a
theater artist and has trained and performed with Padmini Chettur for
last two years.
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