Award-winning choreographer Preeti Vasudevan has been praised for the juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary elements of Bharatanatyam (classical Indian dance) she implements in her work. We ventured to New York Live Arts where Vasudevan will be performing her new work, titled Stories By Hand, later this week.
Preeti Vasudevan "Stories By Hand" photo by Peter Cunningham
So much of Bharatanatyam is story driven. How do you implement that same communication to your audience when you are doing a non-traditional performance?
I think the biggest difference in this project is actually breaking the boundaries of Bharatanatyam to make it accessible. Because with all the gestures we have and the makeup and costumes we put on as well, there's a distancing that goes on. Even in India, not just here. People who know will sort of get it, but generally not too many people know all the fine layers of it unless you're part of the profession. Over here, the idea of also bringing personal stories is to break that wall. People immediately get access to the gestures. I think that's the difference in communication between this project and if I were to do, say, a traditional Bharatanatyam show.
Preeti Vasudevan "Stories By Hand" photo by Peter Cunningham
What are your thoughts on bringing Bharatanatyam off the proscenium stage and onto more commercial platforms?
When it came out of the temple for the proscenium stage it was a statement -- a nationalistic statement at the time of the independence of India. But now it's been more than 70 years and we're still doing the same thing. I have a big problem about the spaces which Bharatanatyam inhabits. I think it affects the way the dancer responds viscerally to her or his own body. The projection of what they do becomes a performance and then their inner narrative goes away.
Stories By Hand runs November 2-4 at New York Live Arts.
Although she constantly pushes the level of risk in her work, Streb Extreme Action Company artistic director Elizabeth Streb surprisingly looks for more than just a passion for physicality when recruiting dancers action heroes. We went to S.L.A.M (Streb Lab for Action Mechanics) to get an inside look at a rehearsal, and quickly learned that though she may have an addiction to danger, Streb isn't quite as tough as she seems.
A sense of teamwork is really clear amongst your dancers when they are working. How is that something you have tried to instill in your company environment?
You have to be a team in this work or you are in big trouble. It certainly wasn't like that in the beginning. So this was an end game for a very incremental process. I figured out how to have people who love people in the room. It's a very pacific concept but it's a humane concept. And as we went along we realized it's our job to be socially kind and interested in anyone who walks in the room.
Speaking of which, your rehearsals are all open to the public. Is that something you have always been interested in doing?
When we moved from the Canal Street studio to garages in Williamsburg they were all on the ground floor, so we started practicing what it meant to invite the community in and let people who walk by and don't know Streb come in and be interested in watching us. And that's changed my set of questions and has changed who I'd like our public to be.
Photo by Teresa Wood
The level of risk in your work heightens each year. How do you visualize that risk in the beginning stages of a new work?
There's this great quote from Tim Cahill that says "the explorer is the person who is lost," so I don't pretend to know what I'm doing. I have an idea—is it the spinning ladder idea? Is it the high speed windshield idea? In any of those circumstances where we try to create a sense on unfamiliarity in the space, I don't really pre-amp ideas. If I know before I see it then it's happened before.
