Mix-master Uday

Thanks to the groovy globalism of such sixties culture mavens as George Harrison and Yehudi Menuhin, pretty much everyone has heard of Ravi Shankar, the classical sitar virtuoso and composer, who passed away in 2012. His life, with its jet-setting, its string of beautiful and accomplished women, and its Zelig-like confluence with the major cultural events of world pop-culture in the sixties and seventies would make a brilliant biopic. But at one time Ravi was just a dancer and musician in the internationally recognized touring troupe of his older brother, Uday. 

I first learned of Uday Shankar from a book of Gordon Anthony photographs called Dancers to Remember (Rizzoli, 1980) that must have been a birthday present back in my baby bunhead days. At twelve, I thought that these older, black-and-white photos of pre-war primas and heavily made up demi-character danseurs were a bit embarrassing. I do not recall seriously perusing the photos at that time, but several years ago my mother sent me a box of my old papers and books and I found this in the mix. On page 115 there is a gorgeous, full-page reproduction of a photograph of Uday and a dancer named Simkie (more on her rather unusual story here) posed in what seems to be a classical Indian dance tableau.

Against a deep, velvety black ground, the two dancers appear nearly at the front of the frame, a strong, silvery spotlight on the left of the picture giving his right arm, face, and torso the stark, illuminated-from-within quality of Caravaggio’s David.  The above print of the photo is from the website of the V&A in London.

The costuming and the pose suggest that the dancers are enacting the classical Indian motif of Radha-Krishna; the divine masculine/feminine conjoined in dance. It really does capture that distinctive pairing of soft/sinuous with rooted/angular that characterizes classical depictions of Krishna and his cow-herd girls. 

Temple sculpture, Khajuraho group of monuments, Mattar Pradesh, 10^th-12^th century

The photo dates to 1937, when Shankar was touring with his troupe of dancers and musicians, but it could almost be a publicity shot for Kalpana, the 1948 film/manifesto that he wrote, directed, and starred in. The title means “Imagination.” The film was not a huge success, and was in fact lost for many decades, only restored in 2010 and very hard to come by. Still and all, it is frequently described as the ur-point for the Bollywood musical. A synopsis from the British Film Institute describes it thus:

Drama filmed as a ballet and based on Uday Shankar's own experiences as he set up the Almora dance centre in the Himalayas and is caught up between two women - Kamini and Uma. Shankar wrote, directed, and starred in this drama. A writer goes to a film producer with a story in the hope of selling the idea for a film. As he is explaining it to the producer, the scenes from his movie come to life as well as passages from his own life. Reality and the surreal are combined throughout the story. When the producer refuses to back his movie, the writer makes a passionate plea for Indian filmmakers to break with tradition and take on new cinematic challenges. 

 (http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/253986?view=synopsis) 

So avant-garde for 1948! I love it. It also seems to be in keeping with Uday Shankar’s commitment to making Indian fine arts as contemporary and relevant as the classical art forms of Europe were struggling to be in the face of the rise of cinema. How do you take these beautiful but antique forms and reinvent them for a new eye, that of the film camera, the eye of modernity?

Uday Shankar was not, in fact, a classically trained Indian dancer in any one of the eight forms that are recognized as “classical Indian dance.” When he began his performance career in London in 1920 he was actually an art student. But he was certainly familiar with the movement vocabulary of Indian dance, both folk and classical, and clearly the family had showbiz in its veins (dad was a small-time impresario). In one of those “only in the life of an artist” moments, his name came to the attention of

Shankar and Pavlova in "Radha-Krishna"

Anna Pavlova, who sought him out in 1923, and the two ended up in a creative collaboration that produced a trio of short ballets, performed by Shankar, Pavlova, and her company that September at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. So, here was the greatest classical ballerina of her day mentoring a young, imaginatively gifted (not to mention physically beautiful) South Asian artist, and producing something that was a mashup of wistful orientalism and genuine cultural hybridity. Oh the doctoral dissertations we could write! (A quick search of ProQuest reveals only three or four that deal directly with Uday Shankar).

Better perhaps, to process the Pavlova/Shankar collaboration in terms of dance itself. What would this jazz-age spin on Indian mythic narrative dance, filtered through the partially-anglicized sensibilities of an upper-crust Rajasthani and a Russian ballerina look like? How would it move? Though there are a few film clips of Shankar’s later performances with his own troupe of dancers and musicians (the first clip in this article from the Guardian is absolutely delightful, with Ravi Shankar narrating and the fourth generation of Shankars looking on http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/oct/07/anna-pavlova-uday-shankar-dance-movetube) , there does not seem to be a filmed record of any of the three one-act ballets, only still photos. 

The music might reveal something, but I have been unable to track down even the name of the composers, far less the scores – several articles mention that the music was performed by a western-style symphony orchestra, though, so it will not have been, as it is in the later film clips, Indian sitars, tablas, etc. 

Another great photo from the V&A (http://www.vam.ac.uk/users/node/8367)

Perhaps the best evidence will have to remain these haunting black-and-white photographs that capture something serious and something fantastical about the endeavor, a little like the seriously fantastic spirit of younger brother Ravi’s collaborations with George Harrison and Philip Glass almost half a century later. Or just maybe some bright young choreographer, steeped in the new globalism, will probe the archives and make anew the kalpana of Pavlova and Shankar.

Postscript: As with all web-related rabbit holes, this one took off in unexpected directions. Evidently, around the same time Pavolva and Shankar collaborated, Martha Graham took up a theme she had first come across under the guidance of Ruth St. Denis, the Radha-Krishna divine romance, and because she was teaching at the Eastman School, it was filmed in an early color technique in 1926. This film has recently been restored and is available online thanks to the National Film Preservation Foundation. I find it unwatchably twee, but if you can, enjoy! http://www.filmpreservation.org/dvds-and-books/clips/the-flute-of-krishna-1926.

Nothing Doing/Doing Nothing

Not this kind of nun

Around the block from my childhood house in Seattle’s North Capitol Hill neighborhood was a Catholic retreat called Still Point. To imagine the nuns who ran the hostel, erase any ideas you have of wimples and habits, of piously folded hands and tightly closed mouths. These women, mostly in later middle age, wore Birkenstocks, handwoven smocks and practical trousers. They played guitar, grew sprouts in a jar in the kitchen window, fermented their own goats-milk yogurt, and babysat the neighborhood children. My grandfather, Italian, Catholic, and deeply distrustful of the vernacular mass, did not like them.

These nuns were hardly cloistered; they belonged to an activist order of teachers, nurses, and social justice advocates. And they were anything but still; my favorite among them was Sister Rosario, a weatherbeaten woman in her sixties who was always doing something with her hands (though much later I learned that in fact she also practiced Zen meditation). All that activity, however, provided a space for rest and contemplation for others, for the weary clergymen and laypeople who came to Still Point to escape whatever it was that had worn them down spiritually, physically, emotionally, whatever.

Not this kind of yogurt

They were interesting people, too. I remember sitting at the kitchen counter in the big, sunny, health-food smelling kitchen listening to a priest who had just returned from a mission in Bulgaria (can this be right? we’re talking about 1975 or ’76, so the middle of the cold war), talk about how people there made their yogurt in a sheepskin, and then just carried the sheepskin full of yogurt around house to house to sell it. To my seven year old mind, that was pretty much the craziest, coolest (meaning, grossest) thing I had ever heard. Yogurt in a skin! I mean yogurt -- spoiled milk you ate on purpose -- that was already kind of a new and weird and uncomfortable concept. But in a skin!

The dynamic balance between the nuns’ activity and the stillness it created, that is what I am on about here. Perhaps my thoughts stray in this direction because of my enforced non-dancing while I take care of my hip. Or maybe I am still surfing the excellent wave of energy generated by the panel on No/Thing: Medieval Art and Apophasis that I had the privilege to organize at the International Congress of Medieval Studies at WMU in Kalamazoo last week. Or both. Probably both.

Not this kind of not dancing.

Not dancing pains me, but it also releases me from pain, so I am trying to embrace it for what it is, or as one of the panelists put it in the title of her paper, “the thing it is not and the thing it could be.” Indeed, all dancing is about not dancing, too. Without stillness, without a still point, all movement lacks order. Like music, dance is made up of the thing it is, movement, sound, and the thing it is not, stillness, silence. Or, to borrow a more eloquent expression of the idea from the redoubtable Ursula Le Guin:

Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk's flight
On the empty sky

(“The Creation of Éa” from the Earthsea trilogy)

Which is another way of saying

Form Does not Differ From the Void,

And the Void Does Not Differ From Form.

Form is Void and Void is Form;

The Same is True For Feelings,

Perceptions, Volitions and Consciousness

(The Heart Sutra)

Not this kind of paradox (this is paralipsis)

The caesura, the held breath, the blank space between words, the sudden cessation of movement, all these things draw attention to the most inexpressible thing of all, which is to say, nothingness. Not meaningless nothing, but the nothing of enlightenment, of the Buddhist satori. Apophasis (pronounced like hypothesis, as one of the panelists went to the trouble to find out), is the (usually spiritual) quest to know the unknowable through the things that it is not. Thus, when Christians interpret the 22^nd Psalm as Jesus’ agonized lament upon the cross, the line, “I am a worm, and no man,” is not to say that God made flesh is literally to be understood as the lowliest and lowest form of terrestrial life, but instead that perhaps by thinking on the worm the mind can begin to climb up toward its opposite, the inexpressibly divine.

So, could one imagine an apophatic dance? A dance of negation? Certainly the Danse Macabre of the Middle Ages was a way of thinking about the stillness of the grave through frenzied movement, and the spinning dance of the Sufi dervish uses a kind of centripetal force to fling the soul out into the Beyond. I am not certain, however, that these dances are so much apophatic as ecstatic, which is a different key of spirituality. Does classical ballet admit of such ambitions?

I think it would take a severely disciplined choreographer to get at this; shed the representational urge, the romantic architecture, the virtuoso impulses and get right to the bones of what ballet is (a rigorously formal corporeal vocabulary) and what it calls attention to by way of negation (the incipient disorder and dissolution of frail bodies). It would be something austere, maybe even harsh, but it would not be an empty stage. You need the possibility of motion to make non-motion work as an idea, just as the reverse is true. And it might also not be minimalist. Quite possibly it would look a great deal like certain late Balanchine ballets in which the non-representational logic of the dance is taken to its limit, and here I am thinking of say, Kammermusik No. 2 with its angular, antsy energy. 

Not quite an apophatic ballet, but close.

 

Sister Rosario had a room in the attic of Still Point, as I recall. The dormer windows looked out over the bramble of blackberries that grew along the downslope to the east, across Lake Washington, towards the blue silhouettes of the Cascades. The floor had an old, napless Persian rug, a guitar leaned against the wall, and the air smelled a little odd to my very bourgeois little nostrils, a mixture of old fir floorboards, superannuated wallpaper, sweat and incense, I think. Nevertheless, I liked that stuffy little room. I thought it was her bedroom, but when I asked her about it, she said no, it was just a place to come and be quiet. And then she was quiet and her hands, always busy, were still. Being small, I was not very good at sitting still, and maybe my memory is faulty here, but I remember that something about how she sat there, her wrinkled face wearing a slight, calm smile, made it seem possible just to sit and gaze out that window at the faraway. Sometimes doing nothing is something in itself, or to paraphrase one of the panelists, sometimes nothing is pregnant with what might be.

Not the view from Still Point, but still...