MARCH DANCE 2020
The work
“But what does it mean?” is perhaps the most often heard response to dance that doesn’t in itself propose meaning.
Some years ago, in a text, visual art curator Zasha Colah wrote: “Watching Chettur’s works, the complexity of an imaginary of the present moment becomes palpable to ourselves. In this, Chettur’s work is a new form of philosophy that starts from the knowledge of ideas, to an intense description of them, becoming philosophical enactments.”
The project Philosophical enactment 1, began with readings of reviews written about my work over the last twenty years, and a feeling that dance viewers struggled with the dense, abstract nature of my form. Around this time, I began a conversation with Aveek Sen, a writer well known in India for his writing on photography and visual art. A mutual interest in evolving a script, that could perhaps articulate the physical procedures, and ephemeral moments that constitute the material of my dance practice, developed.
The ‘body’ of the work imagines layers of circles and arcs around a central axis. These rotational movement possibilities are used at times directionally, allowing the body to move, at times in opposition bringing the body to a dynamic stop.
Set to a sound score by Maarten Visser, that proposes gentle shifts in temporality, Philosophical enactment 1 plays with a ceaseless motorical imagination of the body’s capacity to expand and retreat.
Sound and text are layered to ‘describe’ movement, and at times are described by movement. Weaving textual images both literal and propositional allowing the audience to find multiple entry points and perspectives.
Philosophical enactment 1 is a dancer and writer in search of form. An articulation of inarticulable, a questioning of the very question: “What does it mean?”
The performance will be followed by a conversation with Chettur and Sen.
Credits
Choreography and dance: Padmini Chettur
Music: Maarten Visser
Text and voice: Aveek Sen
Thanks to: Anandam Dancetheatre
Duration 27 min
Artist’s bio
Padmini Chettur began her contemporary dancer’s career in 1990 as a member of the troupe of Chandralekha—the radical Bharatanatyam modernist choreographer, whose own opus dealt primarily with deconstructing the form of Bharatanatyam. Breaking away from Chandralekha’s work in 2001, Padmini formed a practice that shifted the choreographic tradition to a minimalistic language and visually translated philosophical concepts of time and space as they relate to contemporary experience. Deriving vocabularies from phenomenology, cultural studies, insect movements, astronomy, physiotherapy and sports, she created a taut visual language that exit the narrow bounds of the stage. During her choreographer’s career ranging over almost two decades, she collaborated with sculptors, light-artists, filmmakers, and sound-artists to realise her choreographic works.
Zasha Colah – ‘Body Luggage’
Aveek Sen is senior assistant editor at The Telegraph, Kolkata. He is the recipient of the 2009 Infinity Award for Writing on Photography, awarded by the International Center of Photography, New York.
Back
