Bijayini: Please watch, please watch it! Israel Galván’s Maestro de barra… It’s stunning.
Sam: That’s a great recommendation. What else have you been watching that you recommend?
Bijayini: Some people are really making dance films. Basically this performance is dance, recorded. But some people are saying — and I agree to an extent — that it just doesn’t do it justice, recording it. So they instead are making films with dance. Some of the films by Aditi Mangaldas are very interesting if you want to watch her. She’s premiering a work tonight called Lost in the Forest. I’d love to see how she does it. She’s a Kathak dancer from India. Mark Morris is using his dancers in their own homes — he says something very interesting, he says, “I can’t separate the dancer from the background, which means, somebody has a certain colored couch, or drapes, you know, I can see the door behind and sometimes I ask, what’s behind that...” So, the way he uses those elements are also very interesting to me. I don’t know whether I would do it, but it becomes much more filmmaking with dance than a dance video. It’s a different concept, but I admire looking at it.
Sam: Yeah, I do too. I have one last question for you, I was wondering if you wanted to share some of the stories in these dances. For me, I guess, the last one was the most evidently narrative —
Bijayini: Dramatic!
Sam: Yes! There’s one moment where one of the dancers stops on a dime and her foot is out after a very swift kick. She just stops there all of a sudden there and it’s very striking.
Bijayini: Oh yes, that one is the fourth [and final piece in the show] — it could be a whole volume of stories. This one’s about the ten incarnations of Lord Vishnu, his avatars. We believe Lord Vishnu is one of the holy trinity — there’s a creator, a preserver and a destroyer. And Lord Vishnu is the preserver. How does he preserve? When things go awry, when they go out of balance, the balance between good and evil — at least in a simplistic way we see it that way — Vishnu the preserver comes to set the balance right. So it is believed that until today, Vishnu has taken ten incarnations and come to save the world. The way I look at it, these reflect the evolution of life, the first incarnation is a fish, the second a tortoise, third is a wild boar, fourth is a dwarf, fifth is a half-lion half-man — that’s the balanced image of the dancer you are talking about — then comes a sage, but he also turns into a slayer, and then comes a nobleman, a noble king. Then comes a farmer, an agriculturist, then an enlightened soul — the buddha — and the last they say is yet to come, but it comes as a comet from the sky, on a white horse with double swords. Two swords in his hands and he destroys everything in his path. And for each of these incarnations — why did Vishnu come as this form? — there is a story. For me, it’s also a teaching about the way we have treated the environment... I mean, these are just stories, myths, why did someone feel a need to say God is in the fish? Or that God is in the tortoise? Or the boar? And then God is in a dwarf, a strange looking figure. These stories are asking us to treat everyone with equal respect. That’s my take. In a way I feel the ancestors, through these legends, have tried to teach us to treat the entire creation with kindness and respect, with each episode we are reenacting the stories of why Vishnu came. So, in the case of Meena the fish — in that age, there is a demon — there’s always a bad guy! The demon steals the Vedas — the holy books of knowledge. So, we’re talking about how knowledge is for everyone, it can’t be taken away into the hands of evil... It’s the same thing with these holy books, the Vedas, the secrets of how creation began. This one demon, who becomes extremely powerful, steals the books and hides them in the depths of the oceans. And so when something is in the depth of the ocean, you have to become a creature of the ocean to vanquish it. So Vishnu becomes a huge whale, and destroys and kills the demon and restores the books of knowledge.
Similarly, in the second one with the tortoise — and I won’t tell you all the stories — it begins with the Gods and demons churning the oceans of life — it’s about man’s curiosity — we are still working to become immortal, and also finding our way to the moon and Mars, expanding ourselves to the whole universe. So here, the Gods and demons have a sense that if they churn the ocean, magical objects will come out of the ocean, one of which will be the nectar of immortality. So they use a huge snake as the churning rope — this is physical churning, not mechanical churning. Gods on one side, demons on the other, they use a mountain as the churning rod, and in the middle of the milky ocean, as they are churning, the mountain begins to sink into the depths of the earth. But for the process to complete, the churning must go on. So Vishnu comes as a giant tortoise and holds on his back shell the whole mountain, so that the work can be completed. They say the octagons on the tortoise shell are from the churning — that’s the legend.
And then the one you noticed — half-man, half-lion. It’s talking about religious equality. The father does not believe in a certain deity and the son worships that deity. It’s akin to asking, “If my father is Muslim can I worship Jesus?” can that freedom and integration happen? That is still relevant today. So, the father doesn’t accept the son’s deity and asks “who is this God you worship, where is he?” And the son replies, “My God lives everywhere.” And so the father says, “Does he also live in this pillar, this inanimate pillar?" And he says, “yeah, of course, He lives everywhere.” So the demon-father breaks open the pillar and out comes Vishnu as half-man, half-lion. The father — demon though he is — has obtained a boon that he can’t be killed by bare hands or weapons, he can be killed neither indoors nor outdoors, by neither animal nor man, neither in the day nor at night. So Vishnu comes out at twilight, as half-man, half-lion, he holds the demon on his lap at the threshold — neither outside nor inside — and tears his stomach out with his nails — neither weapon nor bare hand. It is in this manner that he is destroyed.
Sam: Wow…
Bijayini: And in the dance, it’s very quick, a minute or a half minute per story. So it’s very important for the dancers to understand the context and how we’re interpreting the stories... I find the relevance of these stories — they were simply told as Grandma stories to us — in finding respect for the creation, for the universe. Retelling these stories from our perspective is very very important. The dancers need to understand them, everything they learn is technique — they have to practice for years to get comfortable — to be convincing. To emerge as this fierce being, the superhero, we don’t know what this being might feel like with a half-lion human body — just to embody that. It goes on. It would be a long session if I told you all of these stories...
Sam: Well, I appreciate hearing them. They add to my appreciation of the dances. In that last piece I almost felt like I was watching a song or a ballad, with choruses that repeated certain elements and verses that told different stories…
Bijayini: You’re right, there is a chorus, it comes back to saying “Praise of Lord Vishnu...” and in rhythmic punctuation between the stories the dancers continue the theme of the prior story. So, if it was the half-man half lion, the dance that follows carries the resonance of that narrative... and then it transitions to the next incarnation and the next and the next.
Sam: Thank you so much. I hope we get to talk again. I learned so much.
Bijayini: Thank you, thank you for taking the time.
The show we discussed above, Pranati, closed May 21 — although we are told by artistic director Srilatha Singh that the company may reopen the viewing experience at a later date. To donate to the company’s COVID relief effort in India, click here. Chitrakaavya also performed recently at the opening of the Mid-Valley Performing Arts Center, which is worth checking out in and of itself.
