In India, and in several other parts of the world too, a career in dance is associated with financial insecurity. It is certainly not true of the world of dance alone. Indeed, other artists also truly fall prey to the stereotype of ‘the impoverished artist’. But young dancers in India, have a particularly hard time finding the balance between investing in dance full-time and making ends meet financially.

Why is it particularly difficult for young dancers? It could be argued that musicians and visual artists too, need to find this balance between creating art and staying financially afloat. It is not the intention of this article to belittle the struggles of other artists. It is certainly true that many musicians have to hold full-time jobs along with their musical practice. Visual artists too, need time to create works of art, which a full time job may take them away from. But why dance is still a little different from the other arts in the manner of finding this balance will hopefully be clear shortly.

Classical musicians in India usually perform solo and in that, their struggles are similar to that of dancers. But they also perform quite often as accompanists to classical dancers. In that, they do not incur any costs of performing. These are all borne by the dancer. Additionally, the dancer also pays them for their accompaniment. A dancer, however, does not perform for a fee at a musician’s concert. In that very simplistic sense alone, a classical musician’s struggle differs from that of a classical dancer.

A music group or band also differently manages finances from a dancer in India. They are often invited to perform at venues such as bars or festivals where owners of these bars or sponsors of alcohol companies get to make huge profits from selling their product at the venues, and therefore payments to bands are usually enough to sustain, at least the band as a whole, if not the band members individually. Of course, this is not always the case, but it is almost never the case with dance. Dance organizers often invite dancers on the premise that the dancers will have to bear the costs of their own travel, stay, and the payment to their musicians, due to poor or no sponsorship.

Bands also sell merchandise like t-shirts, badges, CDs that additionally support the bands financially. A dancer certainly cannot sell t-shirts bearing photographs or logos of himself or herself, nor is making a profit by selling DVDs of their work a regular practice.

Visual artists are a whole different story altogether. They create art, and then they sell it. Many painters and sculptors make a lot of money by selling their work at exhibitions. They are able to sell their art in a way that dancers and musicians perhaps cannot.

So, while their struggles are all legitimate and valid, the struggles of artists are often distinct and unique. Whatever their struggles are, each artist dreams of a world where they can focus fully on their art, without worrying about how to pay the rent, and support their families, their interests and most importantly, their art financially.

Teaching a Kalaripayattu move at a school in Delhi

It is this dream of being able to fully focus on their art that leads artists to other avenues for a stable income. Financial stability is needed to support art. But the time and effort art requires does not always leave room for a second job. This creates some turbulence in the career of artists, and dancers. Many dancers have been through this turbulence in their dance careers, including myself.

A year or two ago, I turned to a job for a stable income, and have returned to full-time dancing very recently. For as long as dancers can, they work and perform in a freelance manner, managing themselves as their own agents, and negotiating with organizers for payment. They also simultaneously build relationships with dancers, dance scholars, critics and musicians; and teach dance for some income. But like I was, all are used to the fact that being a dancers meant that there would be times when there is no money and there will be times when there’s enough.

At first, I too freelanced. I took up projects that interested me, I performed, and I taught dance. I, too, didn’t worry about financial stability or saving money for the future. Dancers can’t afford to think about the future, because there is too much happening in the present. You could lose an opportunity in the blink of an eye! But not worrying about finances, after a certain point, becomes an impossibility. Dancers, like everyone else, live in the real world in which money matters. One cannot dance one’s way out of paying rent, or electricity bills or buying food.

No one truly gets used to the uneasiness of financial uncertainty. So when the opportunity to teach dance at a well-reputed school presented itself to me, I seized it. After all, there are many stories out there of dancers who are engineers at IT companies by day, and dancers by night. And many stories of musicians who are digital media consultants by day, and musicians by night. The struggle between financial security and artistic creativity is legendary and historic.

But now that I look back at the last year or two of teaching, I realize that I had unwittingly paused my dance career by taking up a ‘job’. Adjustments that I thought were little, and plans that I thought could be postponed, turned out to be big adjustments and lost opportunities.

When commited to a job, a dancer may have to make a number of compromises. The number of times a performance opportunity has to be declined because it is during a working week, or how many times a dance workshop or a dance residency is missed because it clashes with work hours inevitably starts to weigh heavily on a dancer.

Dance is also a very physical practice. Arguably more physically exertive than some of the other arts. It requires a certain time of warm up before a rehearsal can even start. And it requires hours of practice. A ‘cool down’ is also necessary in order to avoid injury or strain to the joints, muscles and tissues. All this is, besides being physically exhausting, also incredibly time consuming. With a full-time job that leaves you physically and/or mentally exhausted, to then go into a physically demanding multiple hour rehearsal seems like an impossible task. To dance, one needs time and space. Not just physical space, but mental head space as well.

Too much time on the job, and too much time away from dance, is devastating for a dancer. It can quite easily lead to an identity crisis. I am a dancer, but I am not dancing! What does that make me? What emerges is a very real worry that after all those years of dedicated training, performing and building relationships, he or she would slowly fade away from the memories of rasikas and dancers. This worry began to plague me too. I decided to leave my job as a ‘dance teacher’ and get back to being the ‘dancer’ that I had always been. But this decision is not an easy one for anyone to make.

Performing in Anusha Lall’s ‘Tilt’

Dancers’ financial troubles magnify when they choose to dedicate themselves fully to dance. So before we ask ourselves why dancers take up other vocations in order to support themselves, it is important to remember that. Without a stable income, she or he cannot even support or sustain the dancing, leave alone survive materially in this world. Like everyone else, they yearn for financial independence and stability through what they professionally chose to do, which a career in dance doesn’t always provide. A doctor, for instance, trains tirelessly for many years, and struggles, I’m sure, to pay for that medical education. But once a medical student becomes a doctor, and starts his or her practice, he or she can financially sustain himself or herself through what he or she trained for so long to become. And a doctor can do this without taking an evening job as a tutor or something completely unrelated to his practice, like a gym coach.

A dancer, more often than not, has to either teach or do some other job unrelated to dance to be financially secure. In today’s relentless capitalist world, the arts do suffer. Dance does suffer. It doesn’t make financial ends meet, and it does require full-time attention. It then also suffers in another way – because parents don’t want their children to get embroiled in this kind of work. I have even heard dancers discouraging their sons and daughters from following in their footsteps, saying ‘its too hard’. With parents not wanting their children to take up dancing professionally, they often don’t send them for training regularly either, and this in turn, also adversely affects a dancer’s income who may be trying to support himself or herself through teaching dance. It’s a vicious circle deeply embedded in today’s income-driven world.

Looking back at the era of the devadasis, it is peculiar that some look at that era as purely an era of shame, something that shouldn’t or needn’t be addressed or talked about when discussing the history of dance. Yes, the devadasi system underwent a period of decline, thanks to colonialism and a post-colonial need for an ultimately misguided sense of nationalist pride. And admittedly, despite its positives, it was still a patriarchal system controlled by a male guru, patron and priest. But the system itself was fiercely supportive of dance and its female dancers. Devadasis were educated, very well-respected and received extensive patronage. They were given so much support from their patrons – in terms of land grants, support for their offspring, shelter and so on. They were encouraged and were able to train in their art form for several hours in a day. It was their job to train, improve, invest and engage with their dance as much as they possibly could in a day, every day till they were physically able to do so. And they did.

It could be appropriately argued that the patrons were so generous because of the benefits to them. It is true that devadasis often had sexual alliances with these men, but more often they became life partners out of wedlock, rather than a one-time affair. And reading into the way things worked at that time, it appears that the patrons were not as concerned with sexual gratification by the Devadasis than they were with the promotion and support of their art.

Of course, things are different today. And in many ways, thank god for that. Dancers are not systemically obliged to perform sexual favours for patronage and support. Nor are they under the control of a potentially exploitative system, which the devadasi system could be. Without a doubt, the nature of support has changed. Patronage has also taken a different meaning in contemporary society. But in some ways, the support for dance has diminished from that time to now. Where temples and kings used to provide complete support, now government institutions and patrons do not. Dancers can rely on their families and friends for some support, but there are only a handful of dancers who have the financial support of their families, and many of them understandably take that support.

However, there are also scores of dancers who cannot afford to do that. They have bills to pay, and have to support families themselves. There are also dancers who have the option of taking that support, but don’t want to. Many dancers have embraced contemporary society’s need to be financially independent, self-reliant and proactive. And why shouldn’t they?

It is this need to be financially independent and self-reliant that leads dancers to intermittently put a pause to their dreams of dancing full-time. And I believe it is the love for dance, its magnetic pull and its utter ‘irresistibility’ that makes dancers also repeatedly release that pause button, for their own sake and for dance.

(This article is to appear in ‘Attendance’ journal shortly)

I moved to Bangalore in the winter of 2011. In terms of my career, the move was simultaneously easy and difficult. Easy because as a solo Bharatanatyam dancer, I was not tied down to any particular city to help my career flourish. But it was also difficult because in this new city, I was not known at all. I had laboriously built a small reputation for myself in the Delhi dance circuit. Delhi audiences had at least seen me dance every now and then for a decade since my Arangetram in 2001. I had also built relationships – with other dancers, with dance scholars, dance critics and crucially with the brilliant musicians who would perform with me. Moving to a new city meant rebuilding all of that here.

At first, I freelanced. I took up projects that interested me, that I’d heard about through word of mouth, I performed with them, I performed my Bharatanatyam at all the festivals I could possibly find in Bangalore regardless of how much (or how little) they paid, and I continued to travel to Delhi and abroad to perform. I also taught Bharatanatyam at home, and taught yoga at other people’s homes as a personal instructor. That whole first year, I didn’t worry about financial stability or saving money for the future…I was used to the fact that being a dancer meant that sometimes you would have financial security and other times you wouldn’t.

But really, no one truly gets used to the uneasiness of financial uncertainty. So when the opportunity to teach dance at a well-reputed school presented itself to me, I seized it. The way I looked at it, I would go to work during the day, and rehearse in the evenings and on the weekends. I would also be able to accumulate some savings for a secure full-time dancing career in the future.

At first, it seemed to have worked out perfectly. A few days after I joined, I was gone on a dance project to Trivandrum to work with Daksha Sheth. When the summer holidays at school arrived, I did my performances and I had time to arrange a few performances in Delhi. And over the course of the year, I didn’t have to worry at all about finances.

But now that I look back at the last year or two, I realize that I had unwittingly paused my performing career. Adjustments that I thought were little, and plans that I thought could be postponed, turned out to be big adjustments and lost opportunities. The number of times I said no to a performance opportunity because it was during a working week, or how many times I missed Bragha akka’s Bharatanatyam workshops in Bangalore because it clashed with my work hours started to weigh heavily on me. I was suddenly aware of how tired I was during rehearsals for my own project – that the dancers who wanted to work with me on the project were more aware, awake and alive – than I was, after I came home from work. I found myself missing out on dance events because after a long day at work, the prospect of driving for an hour across the city to watch a performance or attend a workshop seemed like an impossible task. As for my performing, I went from performing several times in 2012, to performing twice (only once in India) in 2014.

Before I knew it, I was in the midst of an identity crisis. I am a dancer, but I was not dancing! What did that make me? I worried that after all those years of dedicated training, performing and building relationships, I would slowly fade away from the memories of rasikas and dancers. That I would slowly become invisible in the world of dance. After all, to be remembered in the dance world requires visibility. And dance, like any other skilled activity, requires a lot of practice. It also requires thinking space through which innovative ideas develop during practice. I was slowly losing all – visibility, regular practice and creative head space.

I decided to leave my job as a ‘dance teacher’ and get back to being the ‘dancer’ that I had always been. Last Friday was my last working day. The goodbyes were sad. I will definitely miss the school I taught at, and all the people in it. I am yet to figure out how I’m going to manage the financial part of reliving the life of a full-time dancer, and I’m sure I’ll miss the financial security. But then I tell myself, at least I won’t miss dance.

When it was suggested to me that I write about this experience, I realized that this would be a very personal and biographical article. But while writing, it has become clear that the article is not just about me. This must be the story of many dancers in India.

Why do dancers sometimes have to give up dancing ‘full-time’? Because they yearn for financial independence and stability, which a career in dance doesn’t always provide. A dancer, more often than not, has to either teach or do some other job to be financially secure. There are only a handful of dancers who have the financial support of their families, and many of them understandably take that support. But there are also scores of dancers who cannot afford to do that. They have bills to pay, and families to support. There are also dancers who have the option of taking that support, but don’t want to. Like me. And so, dancers have to sometimes put a pause to their dreams of dancing full-time. And hopefully, at some point, also release that pause button, for their own sake and for dance.

There was a time when ‘Indian dance’ was synonymous with ‘solo’ performances. With classical dance branching out into group choreography, and with the advent of ‘Indian contemporary dance’, this is no longer the case. In both the classical and contemporary dance scenarios in India, dance troupes and companies are coming into being and expanding; and far less frequently, but silently coming into existence – are egalitarian and democratic artistic collaborations.

Every young dancer who steps into the professional realm of collaborative dance – whether it is joining a dance company where there is quite a gap, hierarchically, between the artistic director and dancer; or if it is doing a project with other artists as ‘equals’ –is faced with the question of where to draw the line.

Before I explain what I mean to say by ‘drawing the line’, I must confess that I do not have the answers to the questions I invoke in this essay. I do not claim to know where to draw the line. But given how several young dancers give up on their aesthetic beliefs and values without blinking, naively believing that agreeing to do anything and everything asked of them makes them ‘open minded’, I thought the question of where to draw the line is worthy of being thrown out in the open.

Let me try and explain what I mean when I talk about ‘drawing the line’. Ideally, a great dancer, after years of rigorous training, develops his or her personal aesthetic and style. Whether he or she remains profusely loyal to a technique, or decides to rebel against it – a dancer becomes known for his or her individualism within the generic ‘style’ or ‘form’ of dance. Therein, at least I believe so, lies the excitement and uniqueness. But therein also lies the complication during collaborations with regard to the question of ‘drawing the line’.

When two or more artists with their individual artistic convictions and aesthetic perceptions enter a common space, there is often a clash of individual identities in the form of aesthetic and artistic disagreements. In an egalitarian collaboration, whose individual vision will prevail and who compromises depends on how the artists negotiate their creative terms. The artists, together in a democratic space, may be able to work out to what extent they are willing to compromise on their aesthetic values before they draw the line.

But what happens in a situation where a young dancer is working undera well-known choreographer, or a young student joins his or her teacher’s dance troupe/company? In other words, what happens when the situation is not equal? When hierarchically, the artists in question are not on the same ‘level’? Does the willingness of a dancer to work under unequal conditions imply a willingness to compromise on artistic values?

It is a well-argued and justified defense that a dancer has the choice to work with one choreographer and not another. On researching the two choreographers, a dancer can make an informed guess at which choreographer is less likely to clash with his or her aesthetic choices. But hypothetically, if a dancer finds himself or herself in a situation where he or she is being forced to dance in a manner that clashes with their artistic and aesthetic values, where can a dancer draw the line? Has a dancer been able to draw the line? Or has the answer so far lied in the extremes – silently compromise whatever needs to be compromised or be forced to abandon the collaboration?

Recently, there has been some talk amongst the Indian rock and metal crowd about musicians having to ‘pay to play’. This means that instead of artists getting remuneration for performing, they pay a fee to enter the festival as performers. Some musicians have been voicing concerns about it, calling it a dangerous trend. Others nonchalantly stated that this has been the case in a lot of music festivals the world over for many years. None the less, it reminded me of the similar situation that exists in the dance world in India.

Certain festivals or platforms for dance in India have been following this system for several years. It is said that many artists pay large sums to be able to perform in these prestigious festivals. Other festivals may not have this policy of paying to perform, but they offer such inadequate remuneration that an artist does end up ‘paying to play’ in some form or another.

As was the case with the music crowd, dancers are also divided in their opinions about having to pay to perform. Some are vociferously fighting the trend, while others have resigned to adopting the same nonchalance expressed by some in the music world.

As a dancer and a writer, I am entitled to my opinion about this system of paying to perform, but more illuminating than my opinion was an analysis of what happens to art when this system is applied to it. This is not to trivialize what it does to artists – such as the fact that the pockets of artists are hemorrhaging money every time they want to showcase their work, and that artists cannot give their full attention to their art because they must have a steady job to pay the bills – but I have written about this in an earlier article on performance ethics.

The ‘pay to play’ syndrome does contribute to the above mentioned issues for artists, but it also highlights a very specific reality.  In this scenario, there is no room for artists who are gifted and talented, but cannot afford to pay. It forces art into the hands of the relatively more affluent, and snatches it away from the less affluent and the poor.

And yet, rather paradoxically, throughout history and in literature, art has belonged in the realm of the common man, not the elite. Sure, the people that patronized the arts have been royalty and the affluent but the artists and practitioners have not. The devadasis in India were wealthy by patronage, but they certainly did not come from affluent backgrounds. The famous painter and sculptor, Michaelangelo also lived the life of a common man. The birth of jazz and the blues, was amidst poverty. And our very own M.F.Husain walked all over Bombay barefoot, paintbrush in hand, painting billboards.

My intention is not to romanticize the poverty of artists, or to say that artists have always been and will always be poor. That certainly should not be the case. Every artist hopes that he or she will be able to survive and thrive through their art. However, art is not something that can or should be taken away from the common man or the poor.

This syndrome almost declares art to be something like a luxury that only the affluent elite can afford to practice. If an artist cannot pay out of his or her own pocket, they don’t get to show their work. The ‘pay to perform’ scenario is as bluntly simple as that. If you don’t have substantial amounts of money that you can spare every time you want to show your work, then you simply don’t show your work. Then, is the message that is being sent out by the syndrome this – pick up a paintbrush, a musical instrument or a set of ghungroos only if you are wealthy? That, in turn, begs for introspection about a crucial question – is the practice and performance of art only for the affluent, or is it for everyone?

In the dance classroom, particularly in classical dance classrooms, classmates share a long term relationship. Many of them join their teacher when they’re very young and stay with them for several years. This not only makes the bond between the teacher and student a crucial one, but it also binds the students together. “My senior”, “my junior” and “my classmate” identify and label students of dance for the years they study together and even after they have launched their individual careers.

One would imagine that these seniors, juniors and classmates are great friends largely due to the fact that they are thrown into the same room week after week, year after year. They share the same teacher, the same learning material and the same triumphs and anxieties. While it is true that some become and remain friends, it is not always the case.

In the competitive world of dance, classmates do not always look out for each other. They exploit each other, tell on each other to the teacher, and are subtly nasty to one another – fighting for the spot of the favourite student. In reality, this relationship can be very cruel indeed. Of course, not all classroom dynamics in dance are like this, but the grim side of it does exist and it is worth examining.

Some students do fall victim to this cruel relationship. In these situations, at best, some students privately celebrate the failure of their peers, and give bad advice disguised as guidance that will unfavour the student with the teacher. At worst, they lie about each other to the teachers or publicly discredit each other’s talent. The insecurity that drives the competitive atmosphere in the classroom is further fuelled by favouritism on the part of the teacher. Having a favourite student is not wrong, maybe its even natural to be drawn to talent. But blatantly displaying the favouritism can lead to such unpleasant relationships between the students.

Some might argue that competition is healthy and that every classroom – be it an academic one, or an artistic class – has some amount of competitiveness that drives the students to excel. Moreover, some may contend that the will to one day be the ‘star student’ inspires each student to do their very best at all times. But underneath this all, what happens in some situations is a slow sedimentation of an attitude that becomes so deep-set in the minds of the students that it does not leave them even as they leave the classrooms.

As some of these students mature, and step into the professional world – becoming dancers, performers, teachers and/or critics, this attitude wears on. Peers do not have any nice things to say about one another, they do not wish to work together. Not always scrutinized by the gaze of the guru anymore, they put each other down in order to rise high enough above the rest to catch the eye of the public now. Just as they had done previously in the classrooms with their gurus or teachers. One hears and sees that dancers are reluctant to praise their contemporaries, subtly and sweetly criticizing one another. Two dancers cannot work with each other because one dancer is threatened by another’s youth or slim figure. These are signs of disturbing trends, the roots of which may lie in their earlier years of training.

The point I’m driving at is this – it all begins in the classrooms. The professional world of dance will not elevate itself from the petty, backstabbing state that it partially (not entirely) exists in, unless teachers and students nip the problem in the bud.

Learning to Teach

A relationship of a shishya or student with his or her guru or dance teacher is a strong one on many levels. Students turn to their teachers for guidance consciously, subconsciously and even unconsciously.

Indeed, this puts a whole lot of responsibility on the shoulders of those who consider themselves ‘dance teachers’ or call themselves ‘gurus’. The awareness of this responsibility led me to examine just what kind of teachers are we today. It dawned upon me that before we talk about the proper or correct method of training students, there needs to be some reflection on the ways in which we teach dance. Teachers need to ask themselves – Are we trained or training ourselves to be educators? Do we see ‘dance teaching’ as a ‘side-job’ or an actual education? What do we consider to be a dance education?

The first question begs further questions to be answered such as – Is knowing how to dance well, enough to be a good dance teacher? If not, what involves training to become a teacher of dance? These questions need to be addressed and their answers sought out before one even begins to think of becoming a dance teacher.

Moreover, why one teaches dance also becomes an important question to ask. There are several performers who teach ad hoc in various schools and dance institutions. I can say, with almost complete certainty, that one of the reasons for performers drifting into the pedagogical world of dance is because that is where they can earn a steady income. But is that a good enough reason? Teaching to earn a stable income is one thing, and given the abysmal conditions of performing opportunities and financial support for dancers, it is a justified reason for stepping into the world of dance pedagogy. After all, dancers have to make a living somewhere! But is that one reason, reason enough? Where does income measure up to the passion of passing on knowledge and transmitting skill? Is dance teaching more than a ‘side job’? Is your training a bland and robotic handover of information or an actual education for your students?

The string of questions leads to yet another one. An important question – what do we consider to be a dance education? Is teaching steps through imitation and repetition enough? If it is enough, then perhaps DVDs of steps, dance sequences and dance pieces should replace us as teachers. If it isn’t enough, then what else goes into dance education? In my view, dance education would involve an instruction in understanding rhythm, cultivating musicality, encouraging creativity, guiding students to research into dance history and theory.

A Bharatanatyam student is not educated if he or she learns an entire margam without knowing names of the adavus or the talas and ragas of the Bharatanatyam pieces they perform. A contemporary dancer who trains in the Graham technique is not educated if he or she does not understand the life and philosophy of Martha Graham, and a hip-hop student who is not aware of the social and political surroundings from which hip-hop was born has not had a complete education of the form. In order for our students to be educated in dance, our teachers must value dance education, be educated and constantly re-educate themselves too.

Keeping Dance Scholarship alive

Many dancers in India are considered, by others and even themselves sometimes, to be exclusively performers. People who work on dance in spheres other than performance are wrongly but commonly construed as having first failed as a performer. I’m not sure if this is an ignorant assumption or a sad truth, or a bit of both.

I say a bit of both because it might be true that some people who work on dance today were first desperately trying, and failing to be performers. But loving dance and all it encapsulates too much to let it go, they ‘resorted’ to becoming public critical spectators, dance critics, writers or dance scholars. But it may also true that some dancers recognize the importance of theorizing about dance, academically engaging with it along with performing it. Moreover, there are a handful of people in India who do not dance and are dance scholars and thinkers of great repute, and have attempted to give dance scholarship a position that is equal and not subordinate to the performance of dance.

I do not know for certain which of these scenarios is more prevalent. But as I said, one does often hear of young aspiring scholars and critics that they first ‘tried their hand at dancing’. If this is the impression of dance research and scholarship in India, then it is problematic on many levels.

First, it builds a mythical and harmful hierarchy where the performer is at the pinnacle, and the researcher, critic or spectator is below the performer. This not only disturbs the equilibrium of the dance world but invents power relationships (between performer and audience, performer and student, performer and critic – which I have written about in previous articles) that are distorted and harmful.

More importantly, it creates the wrong impression that performance is more important than scholarship and research on dance. This hierarchy might be the reason why a comprehensive conference or seminar on dance is not possible in India without the presence of at least some international dance scholars. Perhaps performers in India shy away from scholarship and research because they will be seen as having ‘resorted’ to it because they failed at what they ‘really’ wanted to do.

Finally, if it is true that dance scholarship was a ‘last resort’ to staying within the realms of the dance world, then young scholars and critics are likely to be resentful and not appreciative of the field they are in. Such a situation presents problems of its own – where spite, malice and envy inform their research and work, rather than academic inspiration and an intrinsic value in what they do.

This disturbance of equilibrium in the dance world further complicates ‘what dance is’ in the minds of young people, aspiring dancers, critics and scholars. It pits one aspect of learning against another. Young dancers are more keen to ‘get on stage’ than to even learn the basic theoretical aspects of dance. As a dance educator, I come young across dancers who claim to have been trained for a decade and have no knowledge of the basic theoretical tenets of dance; I stumble upon dance students who sleep through discussions on the importance of dance criticism, history and theory; I fumble to explain to a student in his or her second class that it will be a long while before he or she ‘gets on stage’; and I struggle to keep students whose parents I have told this to. Performance seems to have overridden all other aspects of dance! The ambition to be on stage, then, crushes all other learning in its path.

In such a scenario, it becomes easy to cast off research and scholarship as subsisdiary or optional aspects of the training and learning process of a dancer. And under such circumstances, dance scholarship in India will never be what it is becoming in other parts of the academic world – a serious and crucial study.

Despite what romantics might say, it is not easy to be creative. Creativity is not simply something some people are born with and some aren’t. Creativity is cultivated over many years of training, learning, and experiencing. In other words, it is not an easy task to create something good and meaningful even in the best of circumstances. However, the best of circumstances don’t always present themselves at opportune or frequent moments in time. In fact, many an artist will tell you that the revelations regarding a creative piece of work came at a decidedly inopportune or inconvenient moment!

Moreover, there are certain factors in the art world that make the creation of dance (and indeed other forms of art) even more difficult. One is undoubtedly the lack of inspiration. Inspiration can be thwarted by internal factors such as emotional distress or laziness to actually do the hard work that creativity requires, or to go out there and get exposed to other people’s work – in order to draw inspiration from it.  Inspiration can equally be diminished by external factors such as the apparent celebration of mediocrity, which may cause disheartening and discouragement; a lack of guidance in the form of a mentor, teacher or colleagues; and the economic factor – which in many ways limits creativity.

Let me explain this further. Money, I think, is the second factor worth mentioning that kills creativity. Of course, this is not unconditionally true. An art-funding body that approves funding for a choreographer’s work can be of immeasurable help to the choreographer because it helps him or her to be able to focus only on creating the work, rather than searching for funding. But there is a flipside to this as well. Work that is commissioned often has restrictions imposed on it by the organization that commissions it. Funds are released on the condition that content, concept, vocabulary and so on – will be determined and restricted – not by the choreographer, but by the person or organization funding the work. In that sense, it does kill creativity.

Restrictions are imposed in other ways too, and this particular one seems obvious as a killer of creativity – censorship. Of course, like all of the above factors, this one is also not an absolute evil. Censorship exists in an ideal world for good and important reasons. But sometimes, it does contribute to the bloodless murder of creative potential.

Censorship doesn’t happen in the world of dance very publicly as it does in some other spheres of art – Kamal Haasan’s ‘Vishwaroopam’ and Salman Rushdie’s ‘Satanic Verses’ are quite openly censored by society. Dance appears to have escaped that censorship but perhaps that is only the case because the world of dance is less in the public eye than Haasan or Rushdie. Censorship does occasionally threaten to kill creativity amongst dancers. Mallika Sarabhai, a dancer and activist in Gujarat, has faced ‘censorship’ of sorts for having viewpoints that didn’t fit well with people in power. On a more ‘aam aadmi’ level, the police does now impose restrictions on dancers who wish to perform publicly. Of course, the banning of live music (which had a profoundly devastating impact on local musicians and bands) in Bangalore as well as the banning of dancing in pubs has caught quite a lot of media attention a few years ago. But even for ‘serious performers of dance’ in India, a very subtle form of censorship disguises itself as a ‘Performance license’. Amongst several things that the performer has to agree not to do, the vague statements could potentially restrict the freedom of any kind of creative expression – the performance must not have “any impropriety of language”, “indecency of dress, dance, movement or gesture”, or “anything likely to excite feelings of sedition or political discontent”. The basis on which impropriety or indecency, or in fact, the expression of political discontent is to be measured is not mentioned anywhere, potentially limiting the creative freedom of a dancer to speak, dance, or dress a certain way.

So, when the best of circumstances do not present themselves to a creative person, these killers of creativity make the creation of art an even more difficult task than it was to begin with.

When you ask dancers why they dance, they give several reasons. Some say that it’s because they are happiest when they are dancing, others say that it provides them with physical and emotional ‘release’ – an outlet for creative self expression. Still others say that it enables them to say things that words cannot express. Many also say that the mental and physical space in which one dances is a safe space – an expressive and free space. Free in the sense that it is free of ego, free of judgment and of the fear of vulnerability – essentially, a space that leaves pride and prejudice behind.

At a recent ‘Reading Group’ meeting, where a bunch of us gather to discuss issues related to art and education, the discussion led me to think about the issue of pride and prejudice in Indian (and in some instances, global) dance.

Pride is defined as a high or inordinate opinion of one’s own dignity, importance, merit or superiority, whether in the mind or as displayed in bearing or conduct. Undoubtedly, many observers of dance, dance scholars and critics do believe that at least some dancers are afflicted by this particular deadly sin. While a certain pride in your own work is a virtue, when this pride results in arrogance, dismissal of critique, and celebration of mediocrity – as it often does – then it certainly does become putrid.

Prejudice, although craftily disguised or carefully hidden, exists in the subliminal spaces of dance. Prejudice is defined as an unfavourable opinion or feeling formed beforehand or without knowledge, thought or reason. In India, and in many parts of the world, prejudice against dance and dancers of a certain kind certainly do exist.

A societal prejudice like race (or more particularly, skin colour) infiltrated into the world of dance as well. While in India, there has not been as open a prejudice against darker skin as in the west (the slave trade and subsequent racism against “blacks”); dark skinned dancers have subliminally been victims of prejudice in India as well. How many famous dancers of the previous generation do we know in India who are not ‘fair’ skinned? How come the dusky dancers didn’t quite make it as big as our fair leading ladies in dance?

Another prejudice would be sexuality. Dance is, as I’ve mentioned before, historically been misappropriated as a female form (see my Footloose article, ‘The Suppressed Male‘, Oct. 18, 2012). Male dancers face subtle and sometimes open prejudice, especially with regard to their sexual preferences. On the flipside, female dancers, because their chosen profession involves a display of their bodies, also become the subject of prejudice of another kind. Many conservative families still consider a dancing daughter or daughter-in-law to be morally dubious.

Further, young and slim dancers are favoured, whilst older and plumper dancers face prejudice. A slightly rotund dancer will have always been told by someone or another to lose weight, regardless of how well he or she manages his or her weight while dancing. And of course, youth has been a global obsession for quite some time now. One of the members of our reading group made a brutal but likely accurate statement that in many instances, “older dancers are tolerated because they are pitied”.

Many other instances of prejudice can be found within the mindsets of people who view dancers and dance in India, and the world. Prejudices do enter the outspokenly declared ‘free’ spaces of dance. Whilst these prejudices are allowed to fester in the world of dance, a false sense of pride (at not being eligible for any of the above mentioned prejudices) feeds off these prejudices as well. It is only when pride and prejudice are truly left outside of this space, can dance really be the space that the soul seeks. A space full of creation, expression, creative vulnerability, invention and experimentation – an inclusive space, that allows all people – pale skinned and people of all beautiful shades of brown; male and female and in between; fat, thin, big, small, robust, and petite; young, middle aged and old – to flourish.