I have been increasingly taken with the decisions around aesthetics in the performance and presentation of dance. Why do we dance the way we do, why do different cultures dance so differently, how do the spaces we inhabit dictate the way our body makes its decisions to move, what kind of bodies are allowed to dance in particular ways and why? It is with these questions, among others, rattling in my research student brain, not quieting down even after I had announced Friday, that I happened to watch two movies over one weekend. In relatively quick succession, Eeb Allay Ooo! and The Great Indian Kitchen played across my laptop screen. Both had received tremendous adulation on my social media feeds, and as always, I was significantly late to the party, but excited to see what had prompted the enthusiasm for both movies. Since this article analyses the last dance sequence of both these films, it may contain spoilers for those unacquainted with the two movies.
It was partly the fact that I was unable to switch off from my research and partly because a friend pointed out later that he found the dance sequence at the end of The Great Indian Kitchen very ‘extra’ as a metaphor, that I once again began evaluating the aesthetic choices involved in a dance, and what they communicated. The next day, watching as Eeb Allay Ooo! neared its completion, I was struck by the fact that this movie too ended with a dance sequence. While in isolation, this is not much to write home about, since many Indian films have taken the route of having a celebratory or ‘item’ song come on as the end credits roll out, the dance sequences in both these films were incorporated into the actual run-time of the movie. The two sequences could not have been more different in tone and tenor from the other. Seeing how both movies placed themselves within strictly gendered as well as class-inflected spaces, I wondered how the choice of dance related to the intersection between gender and class, and what it attempted to communicate about gendered identities. The location of the dance sequences communicated in either movie also becomes equally reflective of class-informed gendered roles.
The Great Indian Kitchen foregrounds the kitchen as a gendered site of unacknowledged labour which goes as unnoticed and silenced as the female voice within the patriarchal framework. Eeb Allay Ooo! shines light on the peripheral networks of labour which keep the centre afloat, and the literal dehumanisation which renders some bodies illegible and their labour invisible eve
n as they are placed squarely within the public eye. Palpable in both the films is the humming undercurrent of visceral rage which threatens to spill over at every minute. Moreover, the dance seems to visualise the culmination of this rage and the subsequent move to freedom demonstrated by the central protagonists of either movie. But does the choice of dance reflect and amplify these themes of the movie, but equally how and why does the movie make this choice of the aesthetic and locale of the dance?
The Great Indian Kitchen’s dance sequence is inhabited entirely by female bodies placed within the interior location of a school assembly hall. It is a dress rehearsal for a school competition, and the movements and music used convey a style which borrows from what can be seen as the ‘classical’ dance aesthetic. If dance is an embodiment of the freedom which the wife has claimed for her own, it seems to be a freedom that continues to be circumscribed by the inside/outside binary, where the outside space is a masculine one, while the inside space, enclosed and protected is the only one made available for the rehearsal of this freedom. Similarly, the classical aesthetic used, when read in conjunction with the history of Indian classical dance as one that furthered the conception of chaste womanhood — which does not threaten the familial order and social landscape of the middle-class Indian identity — seems to suggest a required complicity to patriarchal order, even after breaking away from the family unit, perhaps in the continuing role as the teacher-nurturer. Inherent in meticulously choreographed pieces, which this dance sequence conveys, are ideas of discipline and obedience, as well as the provision of pre-assigned movement patterns. When read in this light, the freedom afforded to the female body, its allowed modicum of rage becomes one that must be reined in and expressed with clarity and coherence. The extent of the circulation of this rage is given by its choreography, and it must constantly rehearse before it performs itself as freedom. This reading of the dance is offset by the fact that the husband, cosily ensconced in his second marriage, calls his first marriage a ‘rehearsal’ for the second, leaving his empty morning teacup in the same place as before for his new wife to wash. If his has been a rehearsal for patriarchal entrapment, his ex-wife’s becomes the well-choreographed rehearsal towards a feminist freedom. But that freedom arrives seemingly shackled once more by gendered expectations.
Eeb Allay Ooo! by contrast is a frenzied descent into dance by Anjani, its central protagonist. Right at the end of the film, having divested himself of the langur costume and the gun at a costume shop he finds himself square in the middle of a Hindu religious procession. The public site of the road is inhabited almost entirely by male bodies, with the sole exception being a shot of a woman dressed as Bharat Mata holding the tricolour aloft on a float. A person dressed as Hanuman appears, followed by other men dressed as monkeys, the vanar sena of Ram, and begin to surround Anjani. They poke and prod him and Anjani initially resists this intrusion. Suddenly he begins to convulse to the beats of the drums playing around him, embodying and establishing the kinship he develops towards the monkeys over the course of the film. Here there is no choreography, it is simply a letting go of the body, as well as play-acting the behaviour of the monkeys. Anjani establishes his outsider status acknowledging how both he and the monkeys are unwanted by the city in themselves. While the monkeys are encouraged by citizens as embodiments of Hanuman, they are chased away or considered a nuisance the minute they show hostility towards humans. Anjani is also seen only when he inhabits the role of the monkey-catcher, however his life of strife as a newly arrived migrant labourer is of no consequence to those who require his services. Anjani’s frenzy, his limbs lashing out, as well as the site of this enactment calls to mind Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the carnival where the social order is upturned, even if only momentarily. For one splendid moment, Anjani-as-monkey rules the streets, and no one can oppose him. The public and male space of the road is his for the taking, a space that is ordinarily hostile to him due to his class location, even though his gender allows him easy access to it.
The two movies then can be read as using dance to communicate the limits of the freedom allowed in gendered and class-coloured spaces, and how the intersection of class and gender identity navigate access to these spaces. This equally reminds us how one imagines certain dances or ways of dancing on particular bodies. If Anjani performed a classically-informed dance, it would undoubtedly raise eyebrows. If the wife, as a dance teacher, asked her students to convulse around the stage, it would be unable to drive home the same message. Which is not to say that the reading I have provided is the only explanation possible. What I attempt to drive home, is how much the aesthetic choices one makes within dance can and are often driven by our visual profiling of both gender and class. Dance then becomes a way of meaning-making within films whose ramifications remain relatively under-explored and underdeveloped.
Ranjini Nair is a Kuchipudi practitioner and PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge
from Firstpost Bollywood Latest News https://ift.tt/2Om5wjX
via IFTTT
