A Moving Landscape

Homi K Bhaba reflects on the transformative nature of dance


More than any other art form, dance explores the living link between epiphany and everyday life.

The language of dance encompasses the full range of our most mundane movements and gestures, but turns them into acts of social significance and creative celebration.

Classical dance, with its ritualistic heritage, makes visible the ideals and habits of a culture: its aims, aspirations, trials and tragedies. Modern dance frees movement from inheritances that may be inhibiting, without destroying the inspiration of discipline and training.

Akademi beautifully bridges the classical and the contemporary. It turns dance into a greater social performance that reflects the best creative traditions and tensions of living in a multicultural metropolis, in a world where tradition and innovation require a transnational stage.

In this adventure of the body and the spirit, Akademi takes a lead by showing us that it is only through acts of cultural translation that we can both display our cultural differences and share in a wider solidarity of historic and cultural commitment.

The transformative spirit of dance moves from the inner psychic space of any one body into a wider public recognition of a communal life. Akademi’s twenty-five years have brought maturity and beauty to an ideal of the transformation of traditions.

How do you keep in step with the cultural history that you feel most ‘at home’ with, while dancing to the contrasting, even conflicting, musics of other peoples and other times?

In its various programmes and performances, Akademi has made us reflect deeply on this absolutely crucial question. But it has done much more than that.

Akademi has given us a vision of what it means to live with your cultural traditions, without being imprisoned within them.

To translate between cultures, ideals and aspirations is the only way in which we can transform our lives to conform and collaborate with the diverse landscapes in which we live in the twenty-first century.




_Homi K Bhabha is Tripp Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, University of Chicago and Visiting Professor at University College, London




Shifting Paradigms

Christopher Bannerman considers the globalisation of South Asian dance

Today in Britain, the influence of South Asian culture, whether in music, film, literature, theatre or dance is more widespread and profound than ever. From popular to ‘high-art’ forms, the vitality and freshness of British cultural life owes much to this phenomenon. However, focusing only on the British context can disguise the fact that after decades of pioneering work, South Asian dance forms are present on a global scale; they are making, and I believe, will continue to make, a significant contribution to world culture from their new foundations as global forms.

We might interpret ‘foundations’ to imply a single edifice, constructed in a discrete physical location. In fact, these foundations are multi and transnational and the edifice is fluid, flexible and therefore vibrant and vital. History has shown us that art forms travel, inspiring significant cultural exchange – kathak’s migration and its transmogrification into Flamenco has been documented and explored artistically. But the present circumstances of globalised communications and rapid movements of people have resulted in an unprecedented matrix of dynamic development and exchange which is generating and sustaining a new artistic pluralism. Both tradition and innovation are nourished and renewed in this context as performers, teachers, students, critics and audiences are linked and often interlinked in dialogue and exchange through communications technology and travel.

This is the arena in which Akademi operates and this is the process to which it contributes. Through its pioneering development of Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing (ISTD) syllabi for bharata natyam and kathak, through the classes it is offering to aspiring performers and through a new South Asian dance strand in London Contemporary Dance School’s BA (Hons) Contemporary Dance, Akademi is making a major contribution to the dance forms themselves, and to the rewriting of the map of British dance.

Other dance forms have made this journey in the past and the most appropriate parallel that springs to mind is ballet. We often refer to Danish, French, English, Russian and American ballet, and we are beginning to say Japanese, Chinese and Korean ballet as well. Although the roots of ballet were firmly located in France, the development of ballet is seen as an internationalised project.

This is now true for South Asian dance, as evidenced by the use of that blunt instrument of enquiry, the internet. On 19 January 2004, the google search engine provided 514,000 entries for South Asian dance and 2,190,000 for Indian dance, (as against 153,000 and 480,000 entries respectively on 26 January 2001). While these are geographically defined terms, the entries defy this restriction. The traditional gharanas of kathak have been joined by a Toronto gharana, and informative websites posted in Sydney, Australia and Missouri, USA detail the requirements and planning necessary to present a successful arangetram.

It is clear that there is much activity that is not represented on the web. Research by Akademi in the mid-1990s in London indicated that a significant amount of South Asian dance teaching takes place in school halls and homes for the benefit of individuals and specific communities without reference to public spaces or display. The addition of these classes to Akademi’s network enhanced the strategy of inclusion which has augmented recent projects such as Escapade at the South Bank Centre in London. The exchange is widening, and will continue to widen, as this work contributes to a redefining of what classicism, narrative, musicality, expression, virtuosity and ageism have meant in dance in the West. A redefining, too, of the place of dance in our society as South Asian dancers engage in portfolio careers of performing, teaching, creative workshops and educational work.

The depth of the tradition and the wealth of energy now being channelled into this mission ensure that world dance culture will be enriched by this widened dialogue. We are on the edge of a paradigm shift which has already begun, but which has certainly not ended. The decades to come will provide us with new visions of dance and we will all be richer for it.

Prof Christopher Bannerman is Head of ResCen (Centre for Research into Creation in the Performing Arts) at the School of Art, Design and Performing Arts, Middlesex University


Ken Bartlett finds Akademi’s community dance initiatives thriving outside the conventional framework

Resisting the box

There are some remarkable parallels between the development of South Asian dance and community dance in the UK. Misunderstood within the aesthetics of critical discourse and boxed in by a funding system that, certainly in the early days, didn’t understand the cultures from which these dance forms emerged – their roots, purposes or complexities – they were identified with ‘guilty liberal’ notions of doing good for the poor, the disadvantaged and the other.

I can recall, within the last ten years, a senior Arts Council officer responding to a funding application from a South Asian dance artist of renown by saying that she should concentrate on doing work with ‘her own community’, implying, therefore, that she should not aspire to be taken seriously as a mainstream artist, but more importantly revealing a lack of understanding of both art and communities and the potential of the relationship between them. Confusion about dance, community, South Asian dance and South Asian communities abound and indeed there are many versions of them all within each frame. That confusion can be used to limit what can be done or it can be used as a liberating power – to make definitions that suit us, at any given moment for any given audience. In a sense that is what the best community dance has developed into over the past twenty-five years. Our practitioners have reached out to the widest range of people in our society and have offered creative outlets and forms built on the expressive needs and aspirations of individuals and groups, without forgetting that artists are people and people are artists in the full flow of their lived experience which together with their body experiences can create moments of great beauty that rupture the mundane and offer future hope.

Having observed and having been involved in various ways with Akademi over the past ten years, it seems to me that as an organisation they have covered the ‘field’, taking on everything from tightly focussed projects with schools relating to key stages in the National Curriculum and health projects in hospitals and communities, to popular cultural initiatives with young Asian men, professional development of artists and wild, vastly scaled extravaganzas at the South Bank Centre.

Akademi, under the direction of the fiercely indefatigable Mira Kaushik, has taken definitions of dance, education and community, sunk its teeth into them and shaken them until they surrendered. The organisation, its staff and the artists it has collaborated with have then carefully put these ideas back together, making new definitions and providing new opportunities that have consistently challenged and surprised. Whilst doing that it has worked both within and against the traditions and diversity of South Asian dance. Akademi has recognised that community is something that is dynamic and changing so it has worked within and across the Asian British cultures that are emerging and changing as identity and culture continue to be redefined in twenty-first century Britain.

Akademi nonetheless continues to support strong connections to the spirit and roots from which its distinctive contribution to dance in Britain arises, but it has resisted accepting a single definition of dance or South Asian dance; dance artist or South Asian dance artist; community or Asian community and in that lies its strength and its survival. Resisting the boxes others want to place us in and define us by is one of the important roles artists have in society, but perhaps challenging the notion of boxes altogether is the most important function in a time when ‘the uncertain and afraid’ are seeking to pin everything down and have ‘a place for everything and everything in its place.’ Community dance can and should be about creating more options for living, more human connections for survival and feeding dreams of what we want our futures to be.

Long may Akademi keep refusing to be boxed in, in its work within and across communities, while continuing to build new, unexpected and startling links in the world of dance … and in life.

Ken Bartlett is director of the Foundation for Community Dance


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