The sixth edition of March Dance has a plethora of performances lined up this weekend. This edition of the festival seeks to make the questions around dance and the body more pertinent to how we engage innovatively with the question of contemporaneity in dance by responding to context, history and inter-disciplinarity. “This year’s March Dance has a special and new component by way of a residency that we were able to offer to two young artistes to be in Chennai for a month and interact with the community of professionals and academics to deepen their research. It has been possible because of the support of the Alliance Française of Madras and the India Foundation for the Arts. The edition is also strong in the performances that we have been able to invite, each of which is critical, interdisciplinary and reflective of the larger concerns of identity and human empathy,” Preethi Athreya, one of the curators of the festival, tells us.
Kick-starting the festival is Betwixt & Between by Ainesh Madan (from Bengaluru), who is an expert practitioner and teacher of Alexander Technique. Betwixt & Between is a site-specific dance work that explores liminality through the anthropological, as well as spatial, perspective. The work is inspired by Arnold Van Gennep’s definition of liminality as well as by the images of The Backrooms that became popular in 2019. An improvised work, it employs a score to guide the performer through a ritualistic journey.
In Stone, Dileep Chilanka (from Kerala), a theatre and movement artiste, contemporary dancer and choreographer, documents his body’s response to the weight and sound of pebbles he collected during an impulsive riverside practice. Through the month-long residency at March Dance, he expands on his research to develop a series of propositions that draw on ideas ranging from childhood games to symbolic ritual.
In Tanzanweisungen, choreographer Moritz Ostruchnjak (from Germany) proposes a 30-minute solo with an extremely diverse canon of movement from ballet to stylised masculinity, to ballroom dancing and sport, in a bid to playfully frame our existence in an increasingly insensitive and dark world.
‘It won’t be like this forever’ — this is what the sign that Moritz carries across the stage says, while dancer Daniel Conant performs a Schuhplattler. The 30-minute solo, Tanzanweisungen (dance instructions), is full of self-reflective and ironic references that defy any specific definition. Moritz remains true to the eclectic style of his latest productions and allows his soloist to transition effortlessly from a Schuhplattler to a grand jeté, from boxing footwork to break dance moves and from a référence to the jump rope; the common element is the sound, the pounding, clapping, breathing, jumping, bouncing that fills the space as a consistent rhythm. The piece ends with D.A.F’s provocative song Der Mussolini.
In her solo, The Chinky Express Comes to Town, Aseng Borang (from Arunachal Pradesh) exposes the prejudice and unsteadiness of society in the question of identity and place. Explaining the concept, she says, “The presence of a race that is not generally considered ‘Indian’ in mainland Indian spaces often conjures up micro-aggressions (which are often prejudiced) in the majority and which progresses into a superiority complex, and thus, it further alienates the minority, almost as if, the minority has to fit in a certain ‘box’ to exist in these kind of spaces.”
Pat Toh Ling’s Off the Chart is a living measurement of body proportion to mark out a pattern of symmetrical squares and circles. Pat (from Singapore), is an artiste working on, with and about the body. In Off the Chart, going around the grid, a corporeal notation of overlapping circles is drawn to reveal repetitive geometrical shapes. Working with her body, Pat calculates and notates the length of her feet to the knee, torso, head, arms and hands in relation to the parameter of the space. In the measurement of self, in the charting of movement and drawing of lines, the body functions as a ruler always in absolute precision in the placing, aligning and marking of each point, line and angle.
Featuring tap artiste Travis Knights (from Canada), Ephemeral Artifacts is a non-linear journey through the evolution of jazz and tap, celebrating the body as a space of transmission and dance as a defiant act of creating knowledge. The piece integrates music, video and storytelling, unravelling the body as a site of consequence and celebrates the act of dancing as a form of resistance.
Apart from the varied performances, the festival will also host workshops with veteran performer Maya Krishna Rao, who will be sharing her unique modes of building a language of the body that is subversive and strong.
Mark your calendar
Betwixt & Between: March 15, 7 pm, Alliance Française of Madras, Nungambakkam
Stone: March 15, 7 pm, AFM
Conversation: Maya Krishna Rao with Shanti Pillai
March 16, 5:30pm, Goethe-Institut Chennai, Nungambakkam
Tanzanweisungen: March 16, 7 pm, Goethe-Institut Chennai
Creativity: A workshop with Maya Krishna Rao
March 16 to 22, Goethe-Institut Chennai
The Chinky Express Comes to Town:
March 17, 7 pm, Goethe-Institut Chennai
Performance showcase:
March 22, 7 pm, Goethe-Institut Chennai
Off the Chart: March 23, 7 pm, Goethe-Institut Chennai
Ephemeral Artifacts: March 24, 7 pm, Goethe-Institut Chennai
Entry free.
Email: rupam@newindianexpress.com
X: @rupsjain
