Chowk Productions blends Indian odissi dance and clowning in new show
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In Chowk Productions' Limbo: Few Last Words, which runs from Sept 28 to 30, six odissi-trained women dancers play six male characters.
ST PHOTO: DESMOND WEE
SINGAPORE –Chowk Productions, a dance company rooted in odissi, will blend the Indian classical form with clowning in its first collaboration with a guest director.
The two art forms might not sound like a natural pairing, but artistic director and choreographer Raka Maitra, 53, has shown an appetite for defying convention since founding Chowk in 2014.
She invited Argentinian director and actor Guillermo Angelelli, 61, who co-founded the avant-garde clown group El Clu del Claun and has taught at the Intercultural Theatre Institute (ITI) since 2012, to direct six of the company’s odissi-trained dancers in a new show.
Limbo: Few Last Words, which explores different states of being in between, is on at the Drama Centre Black Box from Sept 28 to 30.
Angelelli is centring the work on texts that dwell on the end of culture – poet T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men (1925) and novelist Henry Miller’s Tropic Of Capricorn (1939) – in a comment about a culture which has been “led by men for centuries”.
The six women dancers don suits, hoodies and denim jackets and play six men – Angelelli refers to them as “drag kings” – a choice that challenges a dance form often associated with feminine movements.
Maitra, who met Angelelli a decade ago when the director would sit in for Chowk’s rehearsals at its former Emily Hill studio, says: “I don’t think of teaching odissi to make odissi dancers. I want my dancers to have odissi as a tool to do whatever they want to do.”
In this unorthodox blend of two forms, Angelelli says he is looking for “the possibility of contamination”, a word which has positive connotations for the director, who believes that “rigidity is what is killing us, culturally and as a species”.
Instead of having the dancers learn the codified rules of the classic clown, Angelelli says his approach is to help the actors find and develop their personalities as clowns before developing the humorous gags.
Maitra explains the reason for this collaboration. Although the emotional state of hasya (Sanskrit for humour or comedy) exists in the Natya Shastra, a Sanskrit treatise on the performing arts, she always felt that hasya had not been adequately explored in dance.
But work that transgresses boundaries – genre or otherwise – has its fair share of challenges, Maitra says. “More and more, with festivals defining what dance and theatre are, what Malay is, what Indian is, it’s becoming more difficult for our company.”
Chowk’s multiracial dancers – many of whom are not ethnically Indian – have sometimes drawn criticism from audiences who, having a fixed idea of what an odissi performance should look like, said they wished there were more brown bodies.
Chowk Productions’ artistic director Raka Maitra (left) has invited Argentinian director and actor Guillermo Angelelli to work on Limbo: Few Last Words.
Arts programmers have also told Maitra that Chowk is “not like the other dance companies where we know what to expect”, a criticism she considers a compliment.
Still, she says Chowk’s audiences have grown organically over the past decade. The company’s contemporary, genre-bending pieces draw a different crowd from pure dance pieces and expand Chowk’s audience base.
Angelelli, who is an advocate of the need to reinvent tradition, says of such experimental work: “Maybe the people you are trying to reach are not the people who are closer to the tradition you are coming from.”
He adds that audiences will recognise neither odissi nor clowning in Limbo: Few Last Words. Instead, he hopes that something new will arise from this blend and contribute to a “young” Singaporean culture that still needs to “mix and mingle” to mature.
Chowk Productions in rehearsal for Limbo: Few Last Words on Aug 6.
Maitra says a young culture, too, can have its advantages for artistic experiments.
“If I tried to do this in India, it wouldn’t be possible because there are so many definitions and structures around what people define as culture. Our experiences in Singapore are so rich, and there is so much we can do.”
Book It/Limbo: Few Last Words
Where: Drama Centre Black Box, National Library Building, 100 Victoria Street
When: Sept 28 to 30, 8pm; there is also a matinee show on Sept 30 at 3pm
Admission: $35 (free seating) or $100 (premium, which includes a designated seat, a pre-show drink and a post-show meet and greet with the directors and artists)
Info: fewlastwords.peatix.com
