{"id":58618,"date":"2021-06-03T09:45:53","date_gmt":"2021-06-03T15:45:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=58618"},"modified":"2021-06-06T10:05:35","modified_gmt":"2021-06-06T16:05:35","slug":"a-conversation-with-chitrakaavya-guest-choreographer-bijayini-satpathy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/a-conversation-with-chitrakaavya-guest-choreographer-bijayini-satpathy\/","title":{"rendered":"A Conversation with Chitrakaavya Guest Choreographer Bijayini Satpathy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week I had the pleasure of sitting down over Zoom with Bijayini Satpathy, a dance artist from India, who recently finished staging a new show, Pranati, An Obeisance, commisioned by Utah\u2019s Chitrakaavya Dance, whose artistic director Srilatha Singh is a frequent contributor to loveDANCEmore.<\/em><\/p>\n

Satpathy has been called, \u201ca performer of exquisite grace,\u201d by the New Yorker. She was a principal dancer and soloist with Nrityagram Dance Ensemble for over twenty years and has performed, taught and choreographed all over the world.<\/em><\/p>\n

Pranati was an incredible experience. It\u2019s certainly among my favorite viewing experiences of the last year or so. Despite my lack of deep knowledge of Indian classical dance in general and Odissi in particular, there was much to appreciate\u2014 movement that marries abstraction, narrative and technical rigor, excellent music, and innovative ways of using the camera to simulate and even interrogate the vicissitudes of a live viewing experience. My conversation with Satpathy (which has been edited for clarity) only deepened my appreciation.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Bijayini Satpathy in a photo by Mahesh Bhat<\/p><\/div>\n

Bijayini Satpathy: <\/strong>I was in Utah in August, 2019, to present my solo performance, Kalpana, the realm of the imagination. Malavika Singh, from Utah, used to learn ballet at Ballet West; together we did a presentation and a master class there, in August 2019. She joined the school in India in 2016 where I was teacher, principal dancer and also director for training. She\u2019s been coming in summers and winters. In 2020 June, she started training with me online.<\/p>\n

Samuel Hanson: <\/strong>How does that work?<\/p>\n

Bijayini:<\/strong> You know, even I was a little snobbish about learning from a medium that is not in-person, not having the teacher in front of you. But actually, in 2019, I was doing a workshop in Atlanta, Georgia, and in my class, I had this dancer. He came from the Bahamas, and, he \u2014 oh my God \u2014 moved so beautifully. He said that he had learned a little bit of Odissi before. So I asked who he learned from and he said, \u201cI don\u2019t know who to call my teacher because it\u2019s mostly from YouTube … and then I realized he\u2019d learned two forms \u2014 I went and looked him up and I found that he was dancing Bharatanatyam and Odissi. And both very distinctly \u2014 with their very specific elements, so, from that day I changed my mind. He was my turning point.<\/p>\n

I find I teach very differently online. I don\u2019t teach on Zoom, that\u2019s a necessity because I live in the very rural outskirts of Bangalore where the internet is really poor. I can\u2019t hold a five-minute Zoom conversation.<\/p>\n

But a lot of students were interested in learning [during COVID] and so I thought very hard. Also, I had separated from the school I was working with for twenty-five years. I was practicing alone without community and eyes on me for the very first time and I was very nervous about what my body was doing. And then I found a way to look at myself. I was videoing myself constantly. From that came the idea, oh, why don\u2019t I video myself doing the basics, everything, the conditioning, everything that is in the training? So I took two months and just recorded my practice and then I devised a method of planning lessons with excerpts from my own practice. Basically I sent a few videos to students as one lesson, along with a very detailed PDF supporting the learning. And then I let them learn \u2014 study and imitate digitally, cross-checking with the PDF \u2014 and I\u2019ve realized that it\u2019s actually a much better way of teaching. I feel like the students are very invested and they\u2019re investigating the movements and discovering for themselves the intricacies. In Zoom, I don\u2019t know how it works. I feel a limit to the quantity that can be learned in an hour \u2014 in the way I want to explain all the details \u2014 it would take a lot of time. So, in this video transmission method, I find that if the student takes one week to ten days \u2014 investigates, learns, practices and then submits to me \u2014 I find a lot of learning has already taken place. Dance learning is embodied. What they learn from one class in this method they can never forget. They\u2019ve put their mind, body, and practice into it before they submit, and so they always remember it. The mind will always retain this.<\/p>\n

Sam: <\/strong>Wow, that\u2019s inspiring\u2026<\/p>\n

Bijayini: <\/strong>I enjoy it because it brings me as close to the experience as I get when I teach. I have been teaching very very intensively for a long time \u2014 twenty-five years \u2014 I\u2019ve had residential students who dedicate their lives to learning our art form. So there is a way of teaching that I\u2019ve been used to and this comes very close.<\/p>\n

Sam:<\/strong> So you were never in Utah for this process at all?<\/p>\n

Bijayini:<\/strong> No, absolutely not. The two dancers [Prithvi Nayak and Akshiti Roychowdhury, seen below] who do the duets, they have trained some with me. But all three of their pieces [in Pranati] have been in lockdown time.<\/p>\n

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Sam:<\/strong> Yes, these are the two dancers in India. [The show was shot there and in Salt Lake City.]<\/p>\n

Bijayini: <\/strong>Their training has been both online and in-person when for a little while last year things were open. The commute is also difficult. They have to come a long way to me in the outskirts \u2014 fifty kilometers. But a lot of the training is online. Even for their final rehearsals, they were going to a studio in Bangalore city and sending videos to me every day.<\/p>\n

Sam: <\/strong>That\u2019s amazing. So did you find that stressful?<\/p>\n

Bijayini: <\/strong>Stressful, very stressful in a way. Stressful because I don\u2019t know this way of creating work. But at the same time, it was a relief that this was going to be on a screen. I was seeing the medium we were going to be presenting it in. So, you know the editing process was in that dimension. Sometimes what we see on video doesn\u2019t work live and what you see in-person doesn\u2019t work for the screen. But because these rehearsal and development processes were on screen, I could say, \u201cOh, this doesn\u2019t work for the screen.\u201d It\u2019s in my head, the pattern works there, and maybe when I am watching these two dancers in front of me it might work, but not on the screen. So that also helped. But, I\u2019ve never worked without seeing the dancers in front of me. That was nerve-wracking for me.<\/p>\n

Sam: <\/strong>Tell me about the music.<\/p>\n

Bijayini: <\/strong>The music was composed fifty or sixty years ago. These are traditional pieces. When Odissi developed into becoming a classical dance about seventy years ago, the guru whose lineage I am, Guru Kelucharan Mahapatra, created a whole body of work. So, he created the music with the composer then. But the music for this performance, I commissioned a group of musicians in Orissa and I went and recorded them there. Chitrakaavya’s commission funded it.<\/p>\n

Sam: <\/strong>So these are dances that you learned from your teacher, and you performed them \u2026<\/p>\n

Bijayini: <\/strong>Yes, when I was a child I learned them within maybe four or five years. Students learn them. I don\u2019t know how to give you a parallel in terms of say, ballet \u2014 maybe it\u2019s something like Swan Lake?<\/p>\n

All dancers of this lineage learn these as solo choreography. My students will teach it when they become teachers \u2014 it\u2019s just a way of understanding how technique is applied in choreography in various flavors. One is a devotional dance, an invocation. The solo that Malavika Singh did, kind of embodies this idea of sculptures coming together to create movement vocabulary. That was the process of reconstruction of Odissi dance seventy years ago. The third piece explores how dance is subservient to melody. The fourth dance explores how dance develops in storytelling. How do you bring technique together with movement and facial expressions? What does it do to the body when you try to tell stories that are dramatic and epic in scope? Everyone learns these. In solo, they have a different flavor. When you bring it together in a duet \u2014 I have only gone so far as a duet in this choreography \u2014 it shifts. Also, when Mala does the solo, I have taken liberty to make the piece more interesting to the eye as a solo.<\/p>\n

Sam: <\/strong>So, these dances had to be remembered from the sculptures, seventy or so years ago?<\/p>\n

Bijayini: <\/strong>Yes, not all of them. Let me say this. The piece Mala presents is actually the embodied archive of the reconstruction and revival of Odissi dance. Odissi dance has existed, according to evidence we have in scriptures and cave paintings, for 2000 years in the land of Orissa, or extended Orissa at that time. It has been lost for many reasons, many times. You lose dance for fifty years and that means you lose the blood memory. There\u2019s no trace of what the movement was like then. You have the reference of temple walls that date back to the first century AD. The temple walls are full of beautiful sculptures and reliefs \u2014 musicians, dancers and other figures in dancing postures and playing instruments.<\/p>\n

And so the revival process was looking at these sculptural forms and embodying them and creating movement vocabulary \u2014 stringing them together. Mala\u2019s solo is structured in a way that it shows that process of recovery. It becomes abstract. It\u2019s a form. It stands alone by itself.\u00a0 It has a pattern, a neuropathic way of moving. So that\u2019s how Odissi has developed, but only for seventy years, so it’s a very modern form \u2014 though it has a lot of history \u2014 but it\u2019s also a very new form.<\/p>\n

I have done a lot of research cross-referencing the scriptures we have and the dance traditions that have existed in the land of Orissa and thinking, how can we expand the boundary? Because, there is call for that. It\u2019s only existed for seventy years. We should take the liberty \u2026 the ways the neurons work in this, we start to move in this and follow the pattern. So, I have expanded the basic vocabulary based on that \u2026 Sometime sshe stops in a posture \u2014 a frieze \u2014 so you can see that.<\/p>\n

Sam:<\/strong> I love the way the camera moved in that piece, having seen so much dance online this year, this was some of the best use of the camera I\u2019ve seen \u2026<\/p>\n

Bijayini: <\/strong>Yes, this was my third recorded production. The first was created for Baryshnikov Arts Center early this year \u2026 By watching the post-production process \u2014 myself on the screen \u2014 I realized certain things I wanted to pay attention to. I guided what looks I wanted, what perspective I wished for, so the editing was to my taste … I feel like for anything online, it takes a lot more work. The energy from live interaction is absent. So what you put out there has to keep the audience\u2019s attention, I would sit at the editing table and I would get bored. But the editing has to be subservient to the melodic and kinetic transitions, otherwise it can very quickly become about showmanship of editing \u2014 it has to be logical. I supervised everything through the end. Each take is edited through maybe six times over, with minute details.<\/p>\n

Sam: <\/strong>Can you talk a little bit about the dissolves and double images? I was surprised by how I felt like those served the experience \u2026<\/p>\n

Bijayini: <\/strong>Yes, but in some places the cross-dissolves, the double images don\u2019t work … when I watch my work I feel detached from what I am doing … if I am not drawn to something, maybe it doesn\u2019t work. I am not trying to be hypercritical. I investigate why it\u2019s not holding my attention, why it\u2019s not working. So, then I give up things I would be very attached to in a live performance, like, where is the curve of the body most highlighted? Is it this angle or another? Sometimes in the camera both angles don\u2019t work. Sometimes I may want to go close to the face. I often say I only watch the eyes of the artists. I get glued to the face, even when I am watching, let\u2019s say, Martha Graham Company. I don\u2019t watch the body or the choreography \u2014 I am glued to somebody\u2019s face.<\/p>\n

So, sometimes, I thought, okay, we can zoom in on the eyes, like in the [show\u2019s final] narrative piece, but then that doesn\u2019t work. I feel like the fingertips and the toes of the dancers have to be in the frame. If they\u2019re not in the frame, I\u2019m not getting the whole picture of what the body\u2019s conveying … I am still learning. It\u2019s only my third production for online consumption, I hope that I don\u2019t have to create a whole lot more for the screen.<\/p>\n

Sam: <\/strong>Well, the good thing about it is that you get to see stuff from all over the world \u2026<\/p>\n

Bijayini: <\/strong>Yes, I just watched this delightful, amazing work by Israel Galv\u00e1n \u2014 a phenomenal flamenco artist who has broken all the traditional norms of the form. Have you watched it?<\/p>\n

Sam:<\/strong> No, I haven\u2019t\u2026<\/p>\n

Bijayini: <\/strong>Please watch, please watch it! Israel Galv\u00e1n\u2019s Maestro de barra \u2026 <\/em>It\u2019s stunning.<\/p>\n