The arts both connect & comfort us through difficult times

IMAGINE a time somewhere in the near future. You step out to meet a friend. There’s the corner chai shop. You spot them and smile, and they rush over and you hug. Chai and conversation happens. No one is wearing a mask.

See what I did just there? I told you a story, and for a moment, it tugged you to a less fraught time where we could hug and hold our friends without worry. Imagination has that power; the arts wield that power to give us comfort and calm, especially when things are not going fine.

Through this year of restriction, the arts – television, films, books, virtual dance performances, the radio, music shared with the neighbourhood via a loudspeaker – offered us a chance to be transported. We moved around freely in fictional worlds.

Usually, the arts connect us to the impossible but in our current context, they connect us to a world where anything is possible.

Let me tell you a bit about my journey into the arts. I grew up in a small town in Madhya Pradesh. I moved to New Delhi to finish High School, a small-town girl with big dreams. I was fortunate – my parents were liberal, the arts a significant part of our lives and we were encouraged and supported to walk whatever path we chose. 

So while I tried my hand at Psychology and then travel, I continued to be involved in Theatre (more specifically Lighting). A serendipitous meeting in 1991 with a crazy dreamer, Protima Gauri, swept me into the magical world of the arts. 

Protima Gauri’s own story demonstrates most dramatically the transformative power of the arts – a ’60s flower child who wandered into the wrong theatre in her late 20s and watched an Odissi dance performance that would change her life forever. She convinced a conservative guru, the great Guru Kelucharan Mahapatra, to teach her dance, gave her total attention to learning and, as a mark of gratitude and to provide others the same opportunity to transform, she built Nrityagram. 

Nrityagram, which literally means dance village, is a community of dancers located outside Bangalore in rural Karnataka, devoted to the practice of a 2,000-year-old dance tradition Odissi, to the exclusion of everything else. We have a gorgeous 10-acre campus which houses a School with a dance pedagogy inspired by the ancient Gurukula system and the Nrityagram Dance Ensemble, regarded as one of the foremost dance companies in the world.

What is special about Nrityagram is that usually such small communities are bound by blood or religion. For us it is dance. 

When the Covid-19 crisis hit in 2020, it caused our very means of livelihood to come to a standstill. Our performances were cancelled for one year, all workshops suspended and our teaching and practice were compromised. While sweeping cancellations of our regular activities resulted in significant financial losses, we were committed to supporting our immediate circle of teachers, students, performers and staff, and our global community, through this difficult time. 

Dancers who remained in residence (four from the ensemble plus a young one), continued with their usual practice, blessed by the fact that they lived together as a family. Nrityagram was perhaps the only dance company in the world where in-person rehearsal continued through the lockdown. We searched for ways to teach, create and perform, and to work with the wondrous reach that technology has given us. 

In April 2020 we started online classes for our registered students so they were able to stay fit, train and rehearse choreography. In October 2020, we expanded our reach to unregistered / new students. For our community spread across the globe, we made digital content available so they could stay connected with us, since we were unable to go to a Theatre nearby. 

What we at Nrityagram did, isn’t at all unusual. The same was true for thousands, nay millions of arts practitioners from across the globe. Each one reached out and ended up holding hands with the universe. Like others before us, have done over the centuries.

Around 45 kilometers from the capital of my home state, Madhya Pradesh, is Bhimbetka. Spread over seven hills and rock shelters, it was first occupied 100,000 years ago. Our ancestors the Homo Sapiens lived there, and the rock shelters are filled with paintings, including some of people dancing to drum song.