Erasing Borders : IAAC Festival of Indian Dance 2013.

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eastwestinquirer.com
IAAC Takes Indian Dances Across Nationality Borders
By M.P. PRABHAKARAN

Of the numerous events the Indo-American Arts Council (IAAC) has been hosting in New York, three stand out: the New York Indian Film Festival; the Erasing Borders Exhibition of Contemporary Indian Art; and the Erasing Borders Festival of Indian Dance. All three are annual events, and have been steadily gaining in popularity among Indian-Americans and Indophiles living in New York and surrounding areas. And, in the process, the IAAC, a volunteer-driven, not-for-profit organization, has been earning plaudits for promoting India’s arts and culture in the U.S.

This year’s dance festival, sixth in the series, was notable in one more respect: the three-day event kicked off on August 15, thereby making it a simultaneous celebration of India’s Independence. Independent India became 66 years old on August 15, 2013.

By choosing Battery Park in downtown New York as the venue for the kickoff presentation, the IAAC was able to give a taste of India’s dance culture to a large number of foreigners. For foreign tourists who flock to New York, Battery Park is a favorite destination. The Statue of Liberty is only a few minutes’ boat ride away. The choice of Battery Park by the IAAC happened by the courtesy of another New York institution: the Battery Dance Company. The company made the Indian event the finale of its five-day, 32nd Annual Downtown Dance Festival.

If erasing nationality borders and spreading Indian culture beyond those borders is the goal of this annual dance festival, the IAAC could not have chosen a better venue than Battery Park and a better time than the peak of the tourist season in New York. And in making the finale of its Annual Downtown Dance Festival a festival of Indian dance, the famed Battery Dance Company of New York, under its artistic director Jonathan Hollander, did live up to its motto of “connect[ing] the world through dance.”

Erasing national borders and connecting the world through the arts was also the theme of a brief talk that the Indian Consul General in New York, Dnyaneshwar Mulay, gave at a reception he hosted at the consulate for the dancers and organizers of the festival, and for the volunteers whose selfless work made it possible. A poet by avocation, Ambassador Mulay reinforced the theme by reciting a couplet from a Hindi poem.

The erasing borders theme was very much evident in the way the two curators of the festival, Rajika Puri and Uttara Asha Coorlawala-Lalwani, selected the items for presentation. The items they selected were eclectic and reflective of the important dance traditions of different parts of India – ranging from Bharatanatyam and Mohiniyattam of the South to Kathak and Odissi of the North. And the performers they selected ranged from the not-so-famous to the famous, but all superb exponents of their chosen art forms. Four of them were flown in from India especially for the occasion.

Among the famous were Rama Vaidyanathan, whose Bharatanatyam performances have earned her praise from no less a person than Alastair Macaulay, the chief dance critic of The New York Times; Vijayalakshmi, who has taken Mohiniyattam, a dance that originated in Kerala, beyond the borders not just of Kerala but India as well; and Rani Khanam, the director of Amad-Kathak Dance Center in Delhi, whose “pioneering work in Kathak dance” has won her acclaim around the world and several awards. Ms. Khanam is also a social activist who “has espoused and made visible the causes of equality & social justice for Muslim women, women in general, [and] persons with disabilities and HIV/AIDS.”

In acknowledging the hard-earned repute and recognition of these three artists, I don’t mean to belittle the talents and contributions of the other artists who participated in the festival. Notable among them are Samarpita Bajpai, Kirstie McDermott and Krystal Bryan – all from the Gurukul Dance Company (Kuchipudi); Rahul Acharya (Odissi); Kamala Devan (Modern/Bharatanatyam); Malini Srinivasan, Kadhambari Sridhar and Umesh Sridhar (Bharatanatyam). All of them are serious practitioners of their chosen dance forms and well on their way to achieving fame.

‘I Found My Soul’ in Dance

At the end of the second day’s performance, at La MaMa theater in the East Village, curator Coorlawala held a question-and-answer session. One of the questions she put to all the day’s performers was: “What have you got from the [dance] tradition?” The answers they gave were quite revelatory of their passion for and commitment to the profession. To all of them, dance is a way of rediscovering themselves. Rani Khanam went a step further. “I found my soul” in it, she said.

It has not been easy for the IAAC to bring these precious talents to American audiences. “The truth of the matter is that money for the arts is getting increasingly more difficult to obtain,” says Aroon Shivdasani, the IAAC’s executive and artistic director. She spends “an inordinate amount of time begging,” she says.

It’s a sad commentary on the 3.8-million*-strong Indian diaspora in the U.S., which is in the top income bracket in the country, that an organization that has been doing a superb job as a cultural ambassador of India has to beg for alms for survival.

Captions to the pictures, anticlockwise from top: 1 Dancers who performed at the Indo-American Arts Council’s Sixth Annual Erasing Borders Festival of Indian Dance (August 15-17, 2013) and volunteers who made the festival possible, at a reception hosted by the Consulate General of India, New York, on the eve of the festival. Standing in the back row, fifth from left, is Consul General Dnyaneshwar Mulay. Sitting at the center, in the front row, is the IAAC’s executive and artistic director, Aroon Shivdasani. 2 Vijayalakshmi performing Mohiniyattam, on the opening day of the festival, at Battery Park, New York. 3 Rama Vaidyanathan, left, and Rani Khanam, in a Bharatanatyam-Kathak/Tillana-Tarana dance dialogue, also on the opening day. (Pictures 2 and 3 are reproduced courtesy Kabir Chopra of addictedtheseries.com)
*The figure includes U.S. citizens and permanent residents. The number of U.S. citizens of Indian origin, according to the 2010 U.S. Census, is 2,843,391.

Source: http://www.eastwestinquirer.com/

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