Dance: Bring on the Boys

After decades of neglect, male dancers in India have started regaining lost space by repackaging traditional concepts with a new androgynous angst.

They emerged from Delhi's Kamani Auditorium in an awkward silence. "Rather bold, don't you think," remarked the wife. All her husband, a highly placed bureaucrat, could say in reply was a ponderous "Hmm". They had just walked out after uncomfortably sitting through the first half hour of Raga: in search of femininity, the latest sensational dance theatre choreographed by Chandralekha (see box). The production had elaborate and extensive scenes of two men making love.

The same evening at the designer home of a celebrity gay couple, Navtej Singh Johar, the Sikh exponent of Bharatnatyam, drew ecstatic applause from the socialite guests for his deeply emotive rendering of a Tamil padam (love song). With the flutter of an eyelid, a flick of the wrist, for the length of the padam, the bearded face of the Sikh dancer transformed into that of an anxious damsel, a nayika, pining for union with her lord and lover.

The two experiences are not quite what the culture-crowd in Delhi is habitually used to. In fact, after being weaned on the staple diet of "seductive" women dancers from Yamini Krishnamurti to Malavika Sarrukkai for decades, metropolitan audiences are now experimenting with a healthy and liberal attitude towards what they would like to believe are the "alternate arts".

After decades of ignominy and degradation, the male dancer is back on the classical and modern dance scene with aplomb. On the popular street too, he has been cutting a dashing figure ever since Govinda and Prabhu Deva metamorphosed their Kathak and Bharatnatyam antecedents and brought a nimble swagger to the silver screen. Astad Debu, the only modern male dancer to be recognised by the Sangeet Natak Akademi, has been so busy in the past months that e-mails on his lap-top are the only way to get in touch with him. And just last month, Rajendra Gangani's scintillating and dynamic performance of the Jaipur kathak tradition at a dance festival in Delhi led to a chain of performances abroad. "The male body is so dynamic and expressive and that much more exciting to watch," gushes Monika Gulati, a trained dancer who has just returned from New York to set up a boutique in Mumbai's Cuffe Parade. Her outlet will specialise in men's "splendour wear", including ghungroos (ankle bells) and dance costumes. So the male figure has not only become the toast of the fashion circuit in the metros, it is actually on the way to becoming a marketable commodity.

Nor is the phenomenon limited to the big cosmopolitan cities. "In Kerala Kathakali clubs with all-male casts are again very busy and some of the koothambalams (temple theatres) which had been shut for years have opened due to a resurgence in Koodiattam," informs Jayant Kastuar, assistant secretary, dance, at the Sangeet Natak Akademi. According to him, after a sharp decline during the '70s and '80s young men are again taking to dance professionally in places which had a strong dance tradition like Mayurbhanj and Bhubaneswar in Orissa, Kuchipudi in Andhra Pradesh, Imphal in Manipur and Kancheepuram in Tamil Nadu.

A combination of factors like more liberal social attitude, decline in white collar jobs and growing professional opportunities in local vernacular theatres like jatra and Ramlila to films and international modern dance theatre seem to have restored self-confidence in that ambivalent species which was definitely on its way to extinction after the generation of Kelucharan Mohapatra and Birju Maharaj.

"As a boy when I saw Padmini dance in a Tamil film I wanted so deeply to be like her that I ran away from home to learn dancing," recalls V. Krishnamoorthy, one of Delhi's most well-trained teachers of Bharatnatyam and Kuchipudi. Through the mid-'70s Krishnamoorthy used to don the wig and the sari to make a winsome lass but there were no takers for either his stree-vesham (female role) or his straight numbers. "The only way out was to start teaching and conducting programmes for daughters of rich and powerful parents because they always managed to get paid shows," says Krishnamoorthy, who also routinely conducted the recitals for established stars like Yamini and Swapnasundari. "Even when I did get the odd programme the organisers would insist I get a 'real' girl along for a duet. There was no space for the solo male dancer," sighs Krishnamoorthy, adding, "Many of my contemporaries just went to pieces. Where is Rohington Cama today? He was such an electrifying presence on the stage, but sheer lack of programmes has made him a recluse in Mumbai."

Indeed, the few dancers who did survive through those years were those who took the stage as duos with their dancer wives like Rukmini Devi's favourite male student Dhananjayan and his wife Shanta or Raja Reddy and his wife Radha. Birju Maharaj, too, had his female disciples partner him regularly. Not all dance couples survived the test of time though, at least one well-known pair has separated recently after the male partner decided to live with his boyfriend. Not all male dancers are gay. Perish the thought, some have actually had more than one wife or woman in their lives.

In a country that prays to the image of the Nataraj and where cross-dressing goes back to the time when Vishnu donned the drag to emerge as Mohini, the boycott of the male dancer could not have continued for long. Our bhakti traditions (of which singing and dancing were an inseparable part) held that all devotees were but women (prakriti) and the deity was the only male (purush). From the Kuchipudi Brahmins in the south to the Kathaks in the north there have been families of dancers going back hundreds of years who specialised in female roles. Thus when a balding, hairy-chested Vedantam Satyanarayana Sarma spends hours making himself up into a bewitching Satyabhama he enters the imaginary spiritual zone in which he actually becomes Krishna's consort, recalling in minute detail all their love-play. So deep is the conviction of some of these traditional female impersonators that the late Mani Madhava Chakyar, the doyen of Koodiattam actors, once confided that whenever he played the role of Yashoda or Putana from the Mahabharata, "My left breast (the left half of the male body is considered female in the ardhanari concept of Hinduism) actually starts lactating!"

When patronage of these arts shifted from the hands of the traditional cognoscenti to the western-educated cultural bureaucracy in the metros after Independence, the new elite found such gender transformations too crass to appreciate. Soon, women dancers started to learn the art of the male Brahmin dancers to take these erotic dances to new patrons. "I think by the '80s the space of the male dancer had been completely encroached upon by women," says Leela Venkatraman, dance critic for The Hindu. "This was very unfortunate as the pressures on these men when compared to women were far greater. They had to earn to support their families through a profession which society no longer had any respect for."

However, all that might be changing. Prompted once again by international trends and patronage, Indian society is taking a second look at the male dancer with new-found interest. Recalls Johar: "When I first went to Kalakshetra in the '80s I was the only man in my class, but when I returned in '92 there were four or five other boys learning the steps." In Delhi's Kathak Kendra too the number of male students has increased. "Given the growing liberalisation of attitudes and the diverse application of choreography from dance proper to fashion shows and music videos in the metros at least the number of men taking to dance will only increase," says Kastuar.

Although it is still difficult for men to live only by performance alone, at least they are now getting sponsorships and production grants from corporate multinationals and foreign missions here like the Max Mueller Bhavan and the British Council. The costs range from a few thousand rupees to tens of thousand dollars as in the case of Chandralekha.

Besides, the male dancer has an energetic physicality that even successful female dancers seem to find difficult to resist. Already some of our female choreographers like Daksha Seth and the Italian born (but Cuttack bred) Illeana Citaristi tend to include a darkly muscular Malayali Kalari artiste or a lithe Chhau dancer in their works to bring that element of raw eroticism.

But such sexual stereotypes disturb Johar: "Dance is not about gender. Dance springs from a deeper human need. The '70s and '80s over glamorised the female dancer and she has now become a victim of her own image. Today we have grown out of that fetishised femininity. Despite my gender, playing the woman for me is to be able to reach out to something very vulnerable and essential in me. It is a very fulfilling experience." Hopefully, it will translate to full houses as well.

GAY KAMASUTRA

Last week, Chandralekha premièred what is bound to be at once her most damned and her most celebrated production yet. Raga: in search of femininity claims to explore the tantalising subject of "erotica ... and desires where the surge of the body defies the restraints of mind" and "seeks to touch human sexuality, transcending the gender divides through subtle shifts that vibrate, vacillate, jerk, thrust, between seams of pleasure and pain." Ahem! Fine, actually. Only, she tries to link it -- rather unnecessarily -- to classical Indian concepts of Ardhanareeshvara (half-man half-woman form of Shiva) and the stree-bhava in the bhakti tradition.

What went on stage was over 50 minutes of extended and repetitive homosexual coitus between two puppet-like, expressionless men. This after-a-point boring exposition of Kamasutric positions was punctuated by entries, exits and formations of five women in varying combinations. Yes, all the standard Chandra signatures were there: the clever patterns formed by the dancers, the symmetry and the mirror image device, the de-contextualised Bharatnatyam steps and mnemonics, the yogic asanas and the martial Kalari, the lighting by Sadanand Menon and stage design by Dashrath Patel. But yawn!

The problems lies both with her choreographic self-indulgence and her over-stating the theme. By portraying tenderness and vulnerability as "feminine" and aggression and malevolence as "masculine", she falls into stereotypes herself. Besides, two men exploring sex does not constitute stree bhava either. As for "in-betweeness" we'll need a theorist of gender issues to clarify that. As a veteran critic put it, "Chandra very cunningly picks up strong classical concepts only to bowdlerise them."

However, as this show is primarily targeted at the West, beginning with the New Wave festival, New York, all its exotic elements are sure to keep Chandra touring the festival circuit for some time.