7| The two Annas
As part of the collaborative project between the Dutch National Ballet and Kattaikkuttu Sangam we wanted to know more about the role of Nikiya in La Bayadère: How is Nikiya’s ‘Indian-ness’ achieved in and through the ballet’s visual vocabulary? Are there specific movements, gestures or any other body language that define Indian-ness and is this language prescribed by the choreography or left to the interpretation of the ballerina? Rachel Beaujean offers to interview the two principal ballerinas of the Dutch National Ballet, Anna Tsygankova and Anna Ol, who have danced the role of the bayadère many times. Both these dancers had their ballet training in Russia and performed there before joining the Dutch National Ballet.
Anna Ol says that for her the bayadère is one of the most desirable roles. It is ‘a dramatic role where you can act and not just do classical steps.’ She adds that it gives you ‘the freedom to express yourself in many different ways and build the role in different directions’. Interestingly she narrows down the ballerina’s freedom of movement in the first act as ‘legs still do the classical movements but the upper body is very free. It is not set.’ Watching the video of DNB 2016 production of La Bayadère, Rajagopal and I are spellbound by Nikiya’s dance movements in this act. Her hands intertwined high above her head as if to symbolize a snake, she bends the upperpart of her body at times far backward while preserving her precarious balance on points. Fascinating, but the dancer’s heavenly movements seem to be far removed from an artistic Indian movement vocabulary that tends to be directed towards the earth.
Comparing the first and second act of La Bayadère Anna Ol feels that their contrast allows the ballerina to show two entirely different sides of herself: that of a dramatic artist and a highly-skilled classical dancer. La Bayadère’s second act is the famous Forest of Shades, an abstract, geometrical piece of beauty performed by 32 identical ballerinas or ‘shades’ dressed in white tutus, white stockings and en pointe without any scope for acting and devoid of any oriental references.
Both Annas single out characteristic gestures of greeting and port de bras as defining Nikiya’s Indian movement register. In retakes of La Bayadère by contemporary ballet companies, experts such as Pallabi Chakravorty have been called upon to assist in contextualizing La Bayadère from an Indian perspective. While offering different kind of gestures reflecting salutations from Islamic and Hindu modes of greetings or worship to make the ballet more ‘authentic Indian’, Chakravorty concludes that these are just a shift in accents that do not remove the general misconceptions about the bayadère (Chakraborty 2020; Carman 2020).
Both Annas feel that the bayadère is a product of the imagination and has been appropriated by the West. The role does not reflect the reality and dance of the devadasi, but they also emphasize that Pepita, who never visited India, had to work with the knowledge available to him at that time. The fact that today so more information is about India and Indian dance is accessible through Internet and travel offers scope for amendments and more sensitive reinterpretations.
Shobana Jeyasingh’s Bayadère – The Ninth Life is such a radical reimagining of Marius Petipa’s legendary ballet La Bayadère. Though not available to us for viewing, her work examines the Oriental trope of the temple dancer by focusing on 18-year old Ammani, one of the devadasis who travelled to Europe in 1838. According to Jeyasingh, her retelling searches for the roots of the bayadère temple dancer herself, and the allure she exerted in Europe over the centuries. The group of devadasis brought to Europe by an enterprising French impresario in 1838 perfectly fitted the cultural atmosphere of bohemian Paris. According to Joep Bor, Paris at that time was in the grip of an ‘oriental vogue’ having witnessed ballet dancer Marie Taglioni attain fame as the Indian temple dancer in Le Dieu et la Bayadère (Bor 2010, 27).
Writing about the novelty of the visiting devadasis, the French press describes their dances as ‘nothing we have seen, or that can be imagined’. The compare the devadasis and their performances to that by European ballerinas: ‘The dancers of all Europe dance with their feet, but that is all…. The body rests cold and constraint while the feet move. The movement of the arms is proverbially graceless. The head obeys with a mechanical precision, and the mouth wears an eternal smile…’ (Bor 2010, 29-30 quoting an article in Journal des débats). French poet novelist and dance critic Théophile Gautier, who is also the librettist of Giselle, was mesmerized by the delicate beauty and dance of Ammani, the principal devadasi dancer. In contrast to Jacob Haafner, who had a passionate love affair with Mamia, Gautier idealizes Ammani as a distant dream, mysterious, pure, wild, sensual, but not to be had (Bor 2010, 30). Who Ammani really was we will never know as her emotions and experiences find no place in the European accounts of those days even though there is a suspicion that she may have committed suicide by hanging herself (Bor 2020, 48 n. 125).
Under the influence of misconceptions and Victorian morals, the artistic heritage of the devadasis and their life styles came in for criticism in India already during the end of the 19th century. In the early 20th century, they became the focus of a political controversy. Immediately after India’s Independence in 1947 the practice of dedicating young girls to temple deities and their public performances were legally forbidden leaving the devadasis bereft of income and respect. However, their artistic heritage transited into the hands of Brahmin practitioners who sanitized, codified and modernized the tradition that now came to be called Bharata Natyam. Like the European ballet, Bharata Natyam is considered a classical, and therefore, elite and basically urban art form inaccessible to ordinary rural people, such as Kamaladevi, the villagers and coolies in Pārvai would they have lived today.
References
Bor, Joep (2010), ‘Mamia, Ammani and other Bayadères” Europe’s Portrayal of India’s Temple Dancers’, Soneji, Davesh (ed.), Bharata Natyam: A Reader, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 13-49.
Carman, Joseph (2020), ‘A "La Bayadère" for the 21st Century: How Companies are Confronting the Ballet’s Orientalist Stereotypes’, Pointe Magazine [https://pointemagazine.com/la-bayadere-orientalist-stereotypes/]
Chakraborty, Pallavi (2020), ‘La Bayadère and the Footprint of the Indian Temple Dancer’, The Dance Journal (Philadelphia), 15 March 2020 [https://philadelphiadance.org/dancejournal/2020/03/15/la-bayadere-and-the-footprint-of-the-indian-temple-dancer/, accessed on 08 November 2022].
Interview with Anna Tsygankova interviewed by Rachel Beaujean, 7 September 2023, DNB
Interview with Anno Ol interviewed by Rachel Beaujean, 21 September 2023, DNB.