1 | An Indo-Dutch cultural venture
In November 2022 one of our Kattaikkuttu Sangam’s Goodwill Ambassadors and former Chief Representative of the Netherlands Business Support Centre in Chennai alerted me to a call from the Dutch Embassy in New Delhi. The call invited Indian and Dutch cultural organizations to submit proposals for a collaborative cultural project. The objective of the call was ‘to give arts and culture the support they need to play a more active role as vehicles for cultural development.’
With November-end as the deadline for submission, little time was left to find a Dutch collaborator. I suddenly remembered a conversation I had with Lin van Ellinckhuijsen, a friend of mine working at the Dutch National Ballet (DNB), about the contextualization of La Bayadère produced by DNB in 2016. Choreographed by Marius Pepita and set to music by Ludwig Minkus this classical romantic ballet originally premiered in St. Petersburg in Russia in 1877. The principal character of the ballet is a bayadère or a female Indian dancer.
While speaking to Lin on the phone from India, she put me on to Ted Brandsen, the artistic director of DNB, who happened to walk by. Long story short, it turned out that DNB was thinking of retaking La Bayadère in 2026. Yet, the artistic management was struggling with the fact that today it has become increasingly controversial to perform the ballet, because of its colonial-oriental and patriarchal content. As the colonizer of the East, the West got away with this unquestioned. Today that is no longer the case and performing La Bayadère has become complicated and controversial. Contemporary productions of well-known dance companies have been criticised for their (mis)representation of the Orient, including the persona of the bayadère. Such criticism has brought some productions to a stand-still, even when honest attempts had been made to make the ballet more ‘authentic’ and politically correct (Carman 2020; Gendron 2020).
I was extremely lucky to find a receptive discussion partner in Rachel Beaujean, a well-known former dancer and now the assistant artistic director of DNB. She emphasized the fact that for her it was important to transmit La Bayadère, its inherited choreographies and its performance practices, to future generations of dancers. As people intimately engaged in the transmission of Kattaikkuttu’s complex and multi-media knowledge this was something Rajagopal and I could immediately relate to. In the case of La Bayadère a retake poses the challenge as to how the ballet’s storyline can be adapted and actualized without violating its artistic essence, so that the narrative and its visualization make sense for – and are not offensive to – contemporary audiences.
Several Zoom talks and email exchanges later, I was able to formulate a project proposal. One goal of the project was to look into the portrayal of the figure of the oriental female performer and the elements that provide her and the ballet with its ‘Indian-ness’ in the hope that his could contribute to a more sensitive contextualization of the ballet. The figure of the oriental female dancer appealed to 19th century Western elite audiences while the portrayal of her ‘oriental’ sensuality must have tickled the male gaze. However, she appears to have had no specific geographical location. In La Bayadère she remains an unattainable figure, poisoned by powerful opponents, dying a ‘romantic’ death on the stage, her love unfulfilled. So what is the bayadère’s agency in this story situated in India, if any? And how does a Western ballerina approach this role?
A second important goal of the proposal is the development of a new Tamil play-script grounded in the characteristic presentational style of Kattaikkuttu theatre, yet inspired by La Bayadère and its portrayal of the oriental female performer. This emblematic figure is generally equated with a devadasi, a female temple dancer whose performance rights were transmitted through the female line and whose complex artistic, historical and political heritage has left a stigma on all women performers in India, also today. The devadasi’s professional skills and lifestyle, possibly involving multiple partners in spite of being married to a deity, challenged colonial/Christian perceptions, patriarchy and morality not only of the British administrators but also of the Western educated Indian elite. Because of the politicization of her role and persona, the traditional devadasi has disappeared from the contemporary Indian stage and her performative heritage has been ‘sanitized’ and taken over by a different group of (high) caste practitioners (de Bruin 2007; Soneji 2011;Srinivasan 1985).
In the proposed play we intend to turn around the gaze by looking at 19th century South India through the eyes of a professional Indian woman performer. What is her life like as an artist? How does she see her world, invaded by white people, at the time La Bayadère premieres in St. Petersburg in 1877? Kattaikkuttu has only recently admitted women performers on its stage. Therefore, the figure of the oriental actress/dancer gives rise to yet another set of questions involving artistic agency, respect and representation.
As part of the collaboration we envisage a visit by DNB’s (assistant) artistic director and a principal dancer to India. After obtaining the consent of DNB, the Sangam submits the proposal to the Netherlands Embassy in New Delhi. And then we wait.
References
Bruin, Hanne M de (2007),“Devadasis and Village Goddesses of North Tamil Nadu.” Heidrun Brückner, Elisabeth Schömbucher and Phillip B. Zarrilli (Eds.), The Power of Performance: Actors, Audiences and Observers of Cultural Performances in India, New Delhi: Manohar, 53-83.
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/?rebelltitem=1#]
Davesh, Soneji (2011), Unfinished gestures: Devadāsīs, Memory and Modernity in South India. University of Chicago Press.
Gendron, Pamela (2020), “De-Orientalizing Classical Ballet in the Twenty-First Century”, M.A. thesis Sotheby's Institute of Art.
Srinivasan, Amrit (1985), “Reform and Revival: The Devadasi and her Dance”, Economic and Political Weekly Vol XX, No. 14 (November 2), pp. 1869-1876.