just dance

{ January 7, 2010 @ 5:00 pm } · { Uncategorized }

Show’n’tell time.  The Amrita kids show off their stuff.

KS says it’s the first time he’s seen them go through their warm-ups in a large group – usually it’s just one by one.  We’re doing this ‘cos they described how they play the monkey role, the male role, the female role in court dance, folklore dance in their intros.  Us ignorant barbarians have little idea what this means.

In the midst of rising and falling and stretching and chanting ting-tong-ching, the students describe their experiences: how teachers would rise and strike them with sticks if they wobbled while balanced on one foot.

Then Hafiz stages an intervention: he rolls across the floor in a continuous circle. Later he explains that it’s because he didn’t want the kids to feel alone on stage: they’re all in this together, faced with the stress of having to expose themselves.

And of course, Sopheap (a student at Amrita) stages an intervention to the intervention.

He’s a Ramayana monkey, scratching himself and puzzling over the horizontal giant. Together, they make something… abstract.

Afterwards, a brief discussion breaks out about gender: in contemporary practice of traditional dance, males and females are almost completely segregated – there are all-male masked Ramayanas which have quite different conventions from all-female masked Ramayanas.  Often with youth troupes, both Rama and Sita are played by girls, but Hanuman and the rest of his monkey army are played by boys (though in the older days, even women played the monkey roles). Belle, one of the students, was actually switched from female to male roles once she grew too tall to be paired with any other girls.  Once, they tried to stage a Ramayana with a female Sita and a male Rama.  Riots nearly broke out.

Fred, the head of Amrita, explains that this is one of the reasons contemporary dance is sought after: it gives the young men and women a space where they can perform together.

But there are no contemporary dance companies here, only freelance projects so far, he tells us.  Hopefully, we can set the foundations to change that.