Photos by Hu Rong of Shebana Coelho in the ruins of the ancient city of Italica, near Seville, Spain.

Note: This essay was first published in Stance on Dance’s fall/winter 2023 print issue. To learn more, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

My first memory of dance was a memory of dread.

A child had to go somewhere in Bombay to give an exam. Someone drove her. It was in town, far enough away from the suburb where we lived that we had to arrange for the driver to come early. I remember, for once, my mother and I left our bungalow at the appointed time. Meaning we were not late to leave as we usually were.

The exam was a choreography. In the room she entered, there were a few adults watching – a committee of some kind. One of them was a woman with glasses. There must have been a teacher too, the one who taught the girl.

The girl was eight or nine or ten. She danced the exam. She made mistakes. But she passed – barely.

Her stomach was full of rocks.

That morning, she had woken up with them. She had cradled them all night.

Even the sun was a stone and it had landed on her.

She was dressed in finery that I now would savor, the ritual of preparing for love.

She wore bells on her feet and flowers in her hair.

Like dreams drenched in a lake, I see all the dance lessons before that moment. They took place in a room with large grey tiles. The floor was cold and smooth. There must have been a teacher speaking and singing. There must have been the sound of taal, the beat of all ages and the bending of hands and feet to it.

It was a private class. The teacher knit her brow as she taught. She snapped her voice. She shook her head. She urged the girl to show some grace.

At first, the girl had no feel for the dance. Everything was stone.

But later, there were small moments – I remember them as blips – when the steps matched sound and she fell into a rhythm.

But then everything went dark. For decades, there was silence, stasis.

Then in my 30s, I fell in love, first with salsa, then with flamenco, then with the bharatanatyam I had learned as a child.

And now the girl is awakening in me. Or I am awakening in the memory of her?

Now, the stones are singing.

Fui piedra y perdí mi centro. 

Once I was a stone and I lost my 

center.

That’s the start of an old flamenco letra, a verse sung por soléa, a flamenco style that means solitude.

Now the sun is a dancer and she moves across the sky. I hear the music she makes with her feet.

Now I am the music, the feet, the memory, the sun. Also the sky. Also, the sea reflecting the sky.

The flamenco verse continues:

Fui piedra y perdí mi centro. 

Y me arrojaron al mar.

Once I was a stone and I lost my center.

And they threw me into the sea.

I couldn’t get enough of this verse. I kept listening to versions sung by Enrique Morente and La Niña de los Peines, both famous flamenco singers.

Then a few years ago, I went and asked my mother to attempt an Urdu version of it. I had begun performing solo plays, and I sensed I wanted this new play to begin with that same stone in Urdu.

Why Urdu? Why now?

I couldn’t answer that easily. Except to say that Urdu is also calling to me now like a lost root.

Urdu came to India with the Mughals or rather, because of them. Somehow Hindi, Persian, Arabic, and other languages mixed together and produced a language that has become known for poetry, especially about love and belonging. Urdu is associated with Muslims, and in India these days, it might even be called a dangerous sound because speaking it might endanger your life.

But in the India in which my mother lived till she was 40 and I lived till I was 12, Urdu was the language of lavish lyric Bollywood films. Some were period pieces about princes and courtesans. Urdu also has famous verses, shayaris and ghazals, by long-ago poets like Iqbal and Mirza Ghalib. If you speak these verses in casual conversation, someone might respond with a wah wah. A wow. They might even make a gesture called adaab, where you slightly bow your head, and brandish your hand, palm cupped, facing up – as if you were cradling the lyric in your hand and gently shaking it, inhaling the beauty of it.

My mother’s name is Tanveer. It means “the first rays of dawn”. As a teenager, she and her cousin had gone out of their way to find Urdu, taking poetry classes with a woman who lived beyond Linking Road, near National College.

I had grown up on the margins of the language, always longing for it without knowing why. In our household, we spoke English. For years, even as I longed for Urdu, I kept my distance from it. I feel that longing and that distance is connected to the colonization of India by the British and my coming from a class created to be English in intellect, as Lord Macaulay famously put it in his 1835 treatise, Minute on Education. This treatise became the education policy of colonized India. The whole quote bears repeating:

We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreign language…We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern–a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect…

My journey of awakening to the created class in my heritage is another story. But it is also part of this one.

Once I was a stone and I lost my center. 

And they threw me into the sea.

And after a long time, my center returned to me.

That’s the full Spanish letra. I’ve heard it attributed to the nineteenth century cantaora, La Serneta, famous for her verses and for living her love boldly.

My new play was going to be about love and loss and I had a strong feeling I wanted to speak some of its story in the stone verse, in Urdu.

But in the first few conversations with my mother, it didn’t seem like it was going to work. And then suddenly one morning, my mother called me and said, “I have it.”

She spoke her translation. The Urdu version was longer than the original. In fact, it was its own story.

It starts the same:

Mei ek bar pathar thi, magar apne aap ko kho gayee. 

Once I was a stone, and then I lost myself.

Then, in her version, there is nikama, being useless:

Nikama samajkar kisee ne muhje samunder me phek diya. 

Thinking I was useless, someone threw me into the sea.

Years decades eons pass.

Arsei guzrei, vahi rahin

Nacheez bandé ko waqt ka kya kehna 

For useless people, what use is time?

Then hope surges from the very waves in which the dance is drowning:

Jinhi mujhoo me dubee thee, unhee mujho né rah dikhaya 

In those same waves in which I was drowning,

Those waves showed me the way out.

“And then,” my mother said, “here comes the last line and after it, you have to make some ta pa ta ta sounds with your feet.”

“Got it,” I said.

“Mei apne aap ko paa gayee,” she said.

“I found myself again.”

ta pa ta ta.

And aisa, así, like this, decades after that first memory of dread, my feet danced a new story.

~~

Shebana Coelho is a writer and a performer, originally from India, once based in New Mexico, and now in Spain.

Shebanacoelho.com

The post Of Stones and Dance appeared first on Stance on Dance.

I love interviewing dance artists. It allows me to speak with someone I normally wouldn’t and ask them directly about their inspirations, perspectives, and goals. I’ve been doing interviews for more than a decade, and I’ve come to love platforming artists.

When putting together this issue of Stance on Dance, I was tickled when several writers pitched interviews, profiles, and conversations with artists they admire. When I recruit contributors for each issue, I essentially give them carte blanche, asking them to write about their own work, a phenomenon in the field, or another artist they are interested in. While there is immense value in all the above, I like when contributors opt to cover other artists because it gives readers a glimpse into the minds of both the writer and their subject. It’s two for the price of one.

I’m also delighted about the various genres included in this issue: swing, body music, vogue, physical theater, flamenco, bharatanatyam, contemporary, belly dance, ballet, pole, and somatics. I’m proud to see Stance on Dance covering so many facets of the dance ecosystem.

This issue includes Bonnie Eissner’s interview with Caleb Teicher of Sw!ng Out, Ana Vrbaški’s essay on the New Balkan Rhythm Festival in Serbia, my interview with vogue and physical theater artist Willyum LaBeija, Shebana Coelho’s meditation on connecting dance with Urdu poetry, my interview with Leslie Streit and Robin McCain about the historical significance of the Harkness Ballet, Jill Randall’s conversation with Darrell Jones about endurance, longevity, and rest, Nikhita Winkler’s interview with tribal fusion dancer Alhazar, Julianna Massa’s profile of her pole dance teacher Irlanda, and my interview with fat somatic practitioner Jules Pashall. Magical realist illustrations are by Liz Brent-Maldonado.

As always, copies of Stance on Dance’s print publication are donated to college dance programs and other dance learning spaces around the US. To date, Stance on Dance has partnered with faculty at 25 programs to help ignite interest in the possibilities of dance journalism. And even though I’ve been running Stance on Dance for more than a decade, my own understanding of the possibilities of dance journalism is always being augmented too!

~~

To learn more or get your print copy, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

Cover art by Liz Brent-Maldonado

The post Expanding the Possibilities of Dance Journalism appeared first on Stance on Dance.

Photos by Hu Rong of Shebana Coelho and Wei Wang in Sevilla, near the studios of Calle Castellar

Note: This essay was first published in Stance on Dance’s fall/winter 2022 print issue. To learn more, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

I came later in life to dance, later still to flamenco. I took my first flamenco class in 2011 when I was 38.

Since then, I have started and stopped, come and gone to Spain, and done other art: theater, films. But as I began performing solo plays, the need to know flamenco in the place it was born began growing. It felt connected to deepening my body’s ability to express emotion. So in March 2022, I came to Spain on a student visa to study flamenco.

I’ve been in Spain for six months. Right now, I’m in Sevilla. There is a dizzying amount of flamenco schools here.

Everyone I know (including me) has done battle with how many classes they should/are taking: cante, choreography, technique, castanets, palmas (clapping), soniquete (rhythm and groove). And go to flamenco tablaos (small shows), espectaculos (bigger performances), or peñas (flamenco clubs).

Everyone I know is renting separate studio space to practice and paying a “bono,” a monthly packet of classes, between 10 to 40 hours or more a month. In looking for a studio, one asks: what does the floor sound like, is there a window, and in the summer – the mother of all questions – is there AC?

So much of my story of studying flamenco in Spain has been about encounters with other dancers and the stories we are telling ourselves and figuring out about why we dance: what it means, what is body? what is movement? what is feeling? what is progress? what is success? why am I here? what does flamenco mean to me? who am I when I dance? what is left of the dance after I dance? what is left of me?

Searching for peso, gravity

~~

Flamenco is utterly recognizable and difficult to define. It is made of cante (song), baile (dance), and toque (guitar), accompanied by percussion of cajon (box drum), palmas (clapping), and castanets.

I don’t dare venture into the complexities of how flamenco was born. But what is clear is that it happened here in the south of Spain, in the province of Andalusia. A heavily cited Wikipedia entry describes it as:

an art form based on the various folkloric music traditions of southern Spain, developed within the gitano subculture of the region of Andalusia… Flamenco is closely associated to the gitanos of the Romani ethnicity… However, its style is uniquely Andalusian and flamenco artists have historically included Spaniards of both gitano and non-gitano heritage.

The gitanos, or the Spanish Roma, have played a major part in the making, dissemination, and artistry of flamenco. Their genetic origins can be traced back to India, which they left in the eleventh century and arrived in Spain in the 1400s.

Andalusia itself has lived a history of many cultures including Phoenicians, Romans, about eight centuries of Al-Andalus-Islamic Iberia, intermittent periods of slave trading, and a Catholic “Reconquista” that feels like a significant aspect of modern Andalusian culture.

Flamenco was sung and danced in houses, villages, and caves for a long time before it was recognized publicly and given the shape it has now. You can feel the potent mix of history and cultural encounters inherent in it.

I used to think of flamenco as sadness, cante jondo, the profound song of lament, but I’ve come to see it as a fullness of feeling that expresses a wide and deep spectrum of human-ness, being alive in the world.

Flamenco is made up of different styles called palos. Palo means “stick”. The major rhythms are in cycles of 4 and 12, with accented beats. To dance, you need to be able to hear the accented beats while being conscious of the encasing rhythm. And also to respond to the cante. Choreographies have steps that are a tiempo (on time), contratiempo, and syncopation.

Each palo has its own feeling – there are palos like alegrías that are happy and others like soléa or seguiriya, two of the oldest styles, that are somber, and bulerías, which is often festive and comes from the verb “to tease, to play.”

As a student, the biggest compliment you could receive when you have lost the choreography or your technique is off, when all else has failed, is that you were – al menos, at least – in compás. You kept the essence of the rhythm going.

To dance well you have to understand the song, the dance, the guitar, the palmas, because they, you, and all of this together makes flamenco flow.

Much of this may come naturally to someone who grew up here, who has had the music in their ears for years. But for many of us learning, it is a formidable task to coordinate all these elements.

Feeling the aire of braceo, arms…

~~

Wei is 31, originally from China, went to college in the US, and has been in Seville for almost three years. I met her last summer. I remember we were at a cafe when she smiled in that sincere way of hers, and said, “Hmm, maybe your future is right here on this street.”

Turns out it was.

“Just now,” she says, “after all these years, I feel I am just learning how to study. I am learning to take just one class, spend a lot of time in the studio, really understand the steps, be gentle with my body, take time to rest.”

Much of her approach to dance and life is shaped by having scoliosis, a progressive condition that affects the curvature of the spine. When she was 18, she spent almost a year and a half in a back brace to straighten the spine. “For me,” she says, “the sense of gravity drew me to flamenco, connected to the ground, fully landing.”

“Roots,” I say.

“Yes, and that is so important to have when we are living in an information age, everyone thinking… Instead, feel the ground, feel the food. Flamenco is earth, tierra,” she says, “which, for me, means inner strength.”

Constanza and I got to talking about the cultural encounters in flamenco. She is 34, a dancer, originally from Chile. I was telling her about startling conversations I’ve had with one Spanish colleague who said that for him, the Spanish colonization of Peru was about “civilizing, not colonizing.”

“My mouth just fell open,” I said. Especially since I come from India, and my artistic work is about understanding colonization in all its forms, historical, emotional, cultural. Especially since we are in Iberia, which funded the whole enterprise of colonization. Columbus set sail from here.

She nodded. “Yes,” she said, “I’ve had similar conversations.” She is keenly conscious of the impact of Spanish colonization on her country, and on her. “Look,” she says, “I’m fair, blue-eyed and I know that just because of this, I will have a better chance of making a living in my own country. There is this hierarchy of color that favors lighter skin, and that is a legacy of colonization, that if you look like them, you have more value.”

“In India too,” I said, which was colonized by the British and the Portuguese.

“I have chosen an Indigenous middle name,” Constanza said. “I am just beginning to explore those roots. And so I do have this mixed feeling that comes up in me sometimes when learning flamenco, especially being here in Spain. I sometimes wonder…

“…what am I doing learning the dance of another culture?” we finish our sentences together…

“Yes,” I say, “I sometimes wonder too.”

“But if you learn it with the utmost respect…,” says Rhina, who is Japanese. She has been dancing flamenco for more than 20 years. Along with her husband, Javier Heredia, a flamenco festero who dances and sings in the old way, she teaches one of the most difficult palos of flamenco, bulerías. Bulerías is improvised, danced at the end of shows, informally at parties, and requires a keen sense of responding to the song and the compás. Many students I know are slightly terrified of it. For me, to see Javier sing and dance is to witness what is described as “baile natural,” a natural expression of a particular community. To see Rhina dance por bulerías is to be in awe of how attuned she is to the compás and cante.

I ask Coral de los Reyes how she feels about so many people from outside Spain learning flamenco. Coral comes from a long line of gitano flamenco singers in Jerez. I’ve known her for years because she would spend summers singing for flamenco dancers in New Mexico where I used to live. I also take cante classes with her.

“Listen,” she says, “I’m glad other people are learning it. It means the art form is alive.” What matters to her is that people are authentically themselves in it. “When you sing, you need to put a lagrima, a tear in the voice,” she says. “We sing with the viscera, the guts. There is no technique for that. You have to find it in yourself, in your way.”

Juan is finding his way. He was the lone male dancer in a technique class I took recently. He’s 38, originally from Colombia, and has been in Seville since January. Mostly, all the classes I’ve been to are majority women and I was curious how he felt, just one of him. “It doesn’t bother me,” he says. For him, “Flamenco is a way to express things I cannot express otherwise, in any other way.”

What occupies Juan most is: “Why is this dance so difficult to learn? Because there are all these cultural codes inherent in it.”

Yes. That. In the end, and also the beginning, that’s why I came to Spain: Because flamenco lives in the streets, in the body language, in the way people talk in Andalusia, how they swallow “s” and “d” (“darkness” or “oscuridad” becomes “ocuria” en Andaluz), how the tone of voice reverberates. One winter, when I was in Jerez, I swear it was raining in compás. ta ta ta ta ta ta. The streets are singing and if you listen closely, maybe you’ll hear the song.

Finding the form for an escobilla, footwork

~~

I came to Spain to disappear into the dance, to apprentice myself to it. I didn’t expect to have an opportunity to bring the particularity of my art into this experience. But curiously, that has happened. I’ve been invited to present my solo play, The Good Manners of Colonized Subjects, in September at a conference at the University of Cadiz. The conference is about India and colonization, and organized by the Asociación Española de Estudios Interdisciplinarios sobre India (Spanish Association for Interdisciplinary India Studies). This happenstance is pretty wild.

My play is about the impact of European colonization on an Indian woman, about art and fear, and it is made of poetry, memoir, and dance drawn from flamenco and bharatanatyam, which I also study with Aparna Sindhoor. The play begins in India and ends in Spain. I’m using the conference invitation to do a new version with live music accompaniment by Coral de los Reyes, new choreographies developed in consultation with Jesus Fuentes and La Rhina, and a new ending that connects the shared pani (water), the words in common between Calo, the language of the Spanish Roma, and Hindi.

So now, I am rehearsing.

As I rehearse, I am thinking of the conversation with Constanza, about the legacy of colonization in a personal way. Imprinted within those who were colonized are values and beliefs that are not yours, that ennobled you if you looked, spoke, talked, and dressed like the colonizer. You believed this and generations later, this still lives in the body. Unless it is questioned, seen, and taken out, it will stay there.

For me, flamenco allows for a kind of decolonizing. I am excavating the body. Through the rigor, play, and nuance of flamenco, I am expressing emotions and movements that feel like a catharsis, and true to my way of being in the world.

~~

Recently, I asked Rhina, “When you’ve already reached such a level, what are you seeking?”

“Less,” she said. “How can I take away more and more of what is not necessary? There are dancers you look at and say, ‘They are not doing many things. But they are doing everything.’ Because I feel we learn so many steps and movements and we get greedy. We don’t want to let go of them. But I go through a process of getting rid of them just to get to the essence of how I want to communicate.”

Later, Wei told me she also asks herself “how to be me” in the dance. And that “now when I am doing the pasos, the steps” she says, “I put my own storyline into them.”

Her scoliosis condition is stable at the moment. But she lives not knowing when or if it will change. “So I am grateful for now,” she says, “and I dance for now.”

Sharing a pose from Indian classical dance

~~

I am sharing everyone’s words because inside them is a resonance that is also mine.

Dance is nature, what arises when the body seeks its own way to be known in a world that is forgetting what it means to be grounded.

Flamenco in particular brings me into the present, into presence, into feeling. I already sense I will stay in Spain longer. Everything here is calling me into the dance.

subhsé pehlé, en la oscuridad, in that first dark…

goes the first line of The Good Manners of Colonized Subjects

…the animal left the sea

found the shore

loved the dark and

“tadaap”

became

song

tree

stone

dance

Doorway to the dance

~~

References

1. Flamenco. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamenco
2. Harmon, Katherine Harmon.​ (2012, December 6)​​ ​Genetic Sequencing Traces Gypsies Back to Ancient Indian Origin​. Scientific American Blog. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/genetic-sequencing-traces-gypsies-back-to-ancient-indian-origin/
3. Solsten, Eric and Sandra W. Meditz, editors. Spain: A Country Study. Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1988. http://countrystudies.us/spain/1.htm

Shebana Coelho is a writer and performer, originally from India, once based in New Mexico, and now in Spain. To learn more, visit shebanacoelho.com.

Note: This essay was first published in Stance on Dance’s fall/winter 2022 print issue. To learn more, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

The post Encounters with Flamenco in Spain appeared first on Stance on Dance.

I’m excited to announce the release of Stance on Dance’s second issue! In case you haven’t heard, Stance on Dance launched a twice-a-year print publication this past summer. Each issue features 6-8 dance writers from across the country and globe who share their stories and perspectives. I’m excited to send a copy of each issue to folks who donate at least $25 a year to support Stance on Dance’s arts journalism nonprofit. I also send free copies to college dance programs and other dance learning spaces. And because Stance on Dance is devoted to ensuring access, all the articles in the print publication will be published on stanceondance.com over the next couple months.

In this upcoming fall 2022 issue, there are several informative and thoughtful articles in store: Snowflake Calvert’s edifying essay on pretendians in dance, Michelle Chaviano’s vulnerable essay about her road to loving her body, Shebana Coelho’s musings and encounters while studying flamenco in Spain, Sarah Groth’s whimsical and other-worldly illustrations, Aiano Nakagawa’s story of overcoming her teenage body image demons, Kathryn Roszak’s profile of Wendy Whelan, Janet Eilber, and Lia Cirio, all women leaders in the dance field, Mary Trunk’s meditative essay on her process making a film about aging in dance, and Nikita Winkler’s profile of traditional Namibian dance artist West Uarije. Also included are interviews I conducted with Ralph Buck, Head of Dance Studies at the University of Auckland and UNESCO’s first Co-Chair on Dance and Social Inclusion, and Yashoda Thakore, a Kuchipudi dancer and scholar in India whose current research focuses on women temple dancers. I’m excited to include so many voices and perspectives in this issue, and to give these dance writers a platform to practice and share their craft!

Cover art by Sarah Groth

In addition to covering dance artists and supporting dance writers, another integral part of Stance on Dance’s mission is distributing dance journalism to the next generation of dance artists. That’s why we have given away more than 80 free copies of our print publication to several college dance programs and other dance learning spaces, including California State University East Bay, Florida International University, University of San Francisco, University of Richmond, University of Florida, University of Silicon Andhra, Old Dominion University, Texas Christian University, Antioch University New England, Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, and Ohio State University. My hope is that students pick up a copy of Stance on Dance, learn about the vast and myriad ways there are to be a dance artist, and perhaps even get excited about dance journalism.

If you work with a college dance program or other dance learning space and would like to learn more about this program, please reach out to me at emmaly@stanceondance.com. And if you’re reading this and thinking, “I would love to write about dance!” then of course get in touch! My goal is to elevate dance journalism by making it accessible for anyone who has a stance on dance.

Even Doozle is reading Stance on Dance!

The post Working to Fulfill Stance on Dance’s Mission appeared first on Stance on Dance.

BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT; PHOTOS BY GENEVIEVE RUSSELL

Shebana Coelho is a writer and performer originally from India who now resides in Santa Fe, NM. Her current project, The Good Manners of Colonized Subjects, combines flamenco, Sanskrit theater and spoken text, and explores themes of colonization, indigeneity and resonance.

~~

Tell me a little about your dance history.

My dance history is brief. My first creative enterprise was documentary filmmaking. Then I began writing short stories and fiction in 2001. My journey has mainly been as a writer. What shifted is when I literally moved; I began to travel. That began moving things in me, particularly the idea of space. The geography inside me shifted. My first encounter with dance was salsa while in Mexico. Salsa is what led me to flamenco. I don’t remember what compelled me to take my first flamenco class but the impulse felt very visceral. Later I learned of its roots in India. I began studying flamenco in New Mexico in 2010, and then also studied in Spain. It was fierce, like something woke up in me.

I had taken classical Bharatanatyam in India when I was very young, but not in a way in which it entered my body. In 2016, I saw an announcement for workshops in India that called to me – they drew on the Natya Shastra, an ancient treatise and manual on the dramatic arts that dates to approximately 200 BCE. So I went for about three months. The most remarkable workshop I took was at Natanakairali Arts Center in Kerala, with G. Venu, a famed practitioner of Kuddiyattam, a 2000-year-old Sanskrit theatrical form that features elaborate eye movements, mudras (hand gestures and stances) and recited text to the accompaniment of drums. Every day, for three weeks, he led us through intense eye exercises, improvisations and choreographies to understand a core teaching in the Natyashastra: the nine primary emotions, nava rasas, that the sage Bharata had deemed as essential to the art of theater and performance. As a performer, how do you feel emotions, how do you manifest them, and how do you cause them to be felt in an audience? How do you submit to the depth of emotions and how do you move seamlessly between them?

I also studied at Adishakti Theatre Arts, Pondicherry, in their Source of Performance Energy workshop which teaches basics of a performance methodology developed by Adishakti: breath, emotion, rhythm centers and voice. I came back feeling transformed but not knowing what I would do with all this or when.

How did you begin making your own work?

In 2014, I found myself really inspired by theater. I started writing and directing. I wrote a one-act that was produced in New York, and then I wrote a play, When the Stars Trembled in Río Puerco, that was presented in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. I have a few other unproduced plays too! Also, around that time, I began writing poetry and speaking it at open mics. A big event for me was performing stories with Larry Littlebird (Laguna/Kewa Pueblos), a master elder storyteller, in Heirloom Food and Story, a collaborative storytelling performance and dinner, produced by his wife Deborah Littlebird. It celebrated two cultures: East Indian and Pueblo Indian. And then I wrote this poem, The Good Manner of Colonized Subjects, and I knew it was something that needed to be performed. I knew flamenco would be part of it, because it’s about being “frozen with fear, even when dancers come to call.” When I was studying flamenco, I was often performing in student recitals and private gigs, here and there. The feeling of being onstage registered in my body.

Can you tell me about your process combining dance, theater and text?

In a way, it comes naturally to me to mix things, as I am half Catholic, half Muslim, and I moved from India to the United States when I was young. But it was when I was traveling that I really found my voice. I had many encounters with indigenousness, which woke up something indigenous and true in me.

Once I felt the power of the eye movements and gaze in Kudiyattam, I wanted to punctuate the spoken word and the dance with this kind of silent kinetic eye movement. I also knew I wanted to do flamenco barefoot. I was dealing with the origins of things in me, and to have my feet on the earth felt rooted.

I feel like – and I am – such an apprentice in the forms I am playing with – flamenco and Sanskrit theater. At the same time, the body knows how it wants to move, and I believe in the truth and freedom of what my body wants to say. I believe in listening to the authority of my body. I went through this whole process where I didn’t feel like I’d been studying these forms long enough to do anything with them.

One of the first songs in The Good Manners is a Siguiriya. When the flamenco choreographer I collaborated with, Alice Blumenfeld, brought the music to rehearsal, I said, “Don’t you have to die first to dance that?” Usually, it’s attempted only after you’ve been dancing a long while. A Siguiriya is a compás of 12 broken into five unequal beats, and is one of the oldest, most profound palos in flamenco. It really moved me, and Alice assured me I didn’t need to die first to use it. She showed me three pasos, steps, that I use as the base in my choreography. I had to get over the feeling that I had no right to use it. Similarly with Sanskrit theater, the practitioner I collaborated with, Aparna Sindhoor, is so steeped in classical dance and, at the same time, she’s also fierce and free about the form, including the right for others to create from it.

The Good Manners deals in part with the cultural colonization of India. I feel like I’m a created class, meaning the British meant to create a group of interpreters who spoke English well enough that it would help them govern the rest of India. English is my first language. That’s how I grew up in India.

I began with elocution, how I speak, because it’s a function of the British being in India, and it felt like a good dramatic device to delve into history. I also wanted to use quotes from primary sources, like the actual speech from Lord Macaulay talking about how the British meant to educate Indians. It was in the process of doing this that I realized that they meant to create someone like me.

Then, there’s this cave theme. I’m absolutely enamored of that moment in the Upper Paleolithic when the first beautiful images of animals were drawn on cave walls. Incandescent images, feeling bursting out of the skin to express feeling, to create. This idea of caves, dark, light and shadow has been with me for a very long time. When I perform, I don’t want there to be cultural markers; I’m the ethnic person. I want there to be light and shadow around me.

In terms of finding the narrative form, I was also encouraged by Larry and Deborah Littlebird of Listening Ground. Larry would often say, “Don’t forget to remember that what you are doing is play.” And so I played… There’s a lot of improvisation in the piece. Sometimes my only instruction is to begin with “water” and end with “cave.” I want to keep these holes where words come out in the dark.

There’s a lot of conversation in dance these days about “decolonizing the body.” Do you feel you’re trying to decolonize yourself?

I teach creativity workshops that use material from different languages and cultures. These are mostly writing, but also include movement, theater, silence, dance and play. It’s all about: What is the story only you can tell? My piece is about the story only I can tell, because it contains my truth. I don’t mean true as in that it happened, but true as in resonance. I believe that if I go to the necessary depth to tell my resonant story, my hope is that it will inspire others to a resonant depth of listening, creating and connecting. When I say decolonizing, I mean getting rid of the foreignness, whatever is not indigenous to my spirit. It has less to do with culture, because I believe in the fluidity of cultures and communities, and I feel connected to many different places. It’s about finding an openness.

Where do you want to take your work from here?

There are certain things I know. I need to commission original music, ideally in Spain and India. For the works-in-progress shows, I used recorded music. I also want to create a mobile set. I want to perform The Good Manners in both theatrical and non-theatrical spaces. I want to play with expectation. Lately, I’ve been imagining performing it outside, in a field full of ruins, against an adobe wall or around fallen stones. And in caves, of course.

I’d like to present my piece as part of a larger umbrella project called Faraway is Close. It’s the name of my creativity workshops, because sometimes our creativity feels so remote to us. Creativity is really so close to the surface though.

Any other thoughts?

I feel younger now. Doesn’t dance do that? I literally have so much feeling in me that I have to move with it. And it forces me to live in the present moment with such fluidity. When I was travelling, I really found my center. I think dance does that as well.

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Links to more info:

http://www.shebanacoelho.com/good.html

https://aliceblumenfeld.com/

http://navarasa.org/

https://www.listeningground.org/

https://www.facebook.com/natanakairali1975/

http://adishaktitheatrearts.com/

http://www.shebanacoelho.com/blog/heirloom-food-and-story

The post Shifting Geologies, Sifting Forms appeared first on Stance on Dance.

Meet our director and editor:

Emmaly Wiederholt is a dance artist and arts journalist based in Albuquerque, NM. She founded Stance on Dance in 2012. Emmaly earned her MA in Arts Journalism from the University of Southern California and her BFA in Ballet and BS in Political Science from the University of Utah. She further trained at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and performed extensively around the Bay Area. Her first book, Beauty is Experience: Dancing 50 and Beyond, was published in 2017, and her second book, Breadth of Bodies: Discussing Disability in Dance, was published in 2022. Emmaly is also a master DanceAbility instructor and facilitates movement groups at the UNM Hospital adult psychiatric ward, as well as is a founding member of the dance advocacy nonprofit ABQ Dance Connect. She continues to perform throughout the Southwest.

Photo by Allen Winston

Our contributors have included:

Snowflake Arizmendi-Calvert, a performance artist and organizer in the Bay Area.

Gregory Bartning, a photographer in Portland, OR.

Liz Duran Boubion, the director of the Festival of Latin American Contemporary Choreographers in the Bay Area.

Liz Brent-Maldonado, an artist, writer, educator, and producer in San Francisco, CA.

Michelle Chaviano, a ballet dancer with Ballet North Texas.

Bradford Chin, a disabled dance artist and accessibility consultant in Chicago, IL, and San Francisco, CA.

Shebana Coelho, a writer and performer currently studying flamenco in Spain.

breana connor, an interdisciplinary artist, facilitator + healer in Albuquerque, NM.

Lauren Coons, an interdisciplinary artist, performer, healer and educator in Albuquerque, NM.

Julia Cost, a painter, textile designer, sewist, and dancer in Maui, HI.

Sophia Diehl, a dancer in New York City.

Bonnie Eissner, a writer in New York City.

Katie Flashner, a.k.a. The Girl with the Tree Tattoo, a World Champion ballroom dancer and author in ME.

Micaela Gardner, a dancer and choreographer in Baja, Mexico.

Sarah Groth, an interdisciplinary artist from Albuquerque, NM.

Cherie Hill, a dance educator and choreographer based in the Bay Area.

Lorie House, a dancer, choreographer, and lawyer in NM.

Silva Laukkanen, a dance educator and disability advocate in Austin, TX.

Mary Elizabeth Lenahan, the director of Dance Express in Fort Collins, CO.

Shannon Leypoldt, a dance artist, teacher, and sports massage therapist in Berlin.

Erin Malley, a dance artist and tango teacher based in West Michigan.

Julianna Massa, a dance artist in Albuquerque, NM.

Aiano Nakagawa, a dance artist, educator, facilitator, writer, and event producer in the Bay Area.

Jessie Nowak, a dance artist and filmmaker in Portland, OR.

Kevin O’Connor, a multidisciplinary artist in London, Ontario, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Bhumi B Patel, an artist/activist based in the Bay Area.

Stephanie Potreck, a sports nutritionist and health advocate who currently resides in Germany.

Jill Randall, artistic director of Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley, CA.

Kathryn Roszak, a choreographer, filmmaker, educator, and activist in the Bay Area.

Donna Schoenherr, director of Ballet4Life and Move into Wellbeing in London, UK.

Maggie Stack, a dancer and teacher in Reno, NV.

Camille Taft, a CO front range-based mover and visual artist.

Mary Trunk, a filmmaker, choreographer, and multimedia artist in Altadena, CA.

Diana Turner-Forte, a teaching artist, healing arts coach, and writer in NC.

Ana Vrbaski, a body music practitioner in Serbia.

Nikhita Winkler, a dancer, choreographer, and teacher from Namibia who currently resides in Spain.

Erica Pisarchuk Wilson, a dance artist, visual artist and poet in Albuquerque, NM.

Rebecca Zeh, an interdisciplinary artist in Sarasota Springs, NY.

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Our board:

Snowflake Arizmendi-Calvert

Cathy Intemann

Alana Isiguen

Courtney King

Malinda LaVelle

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The post People appeared first on Stance on Dance.