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<\/strong>Philosophical Enactments 1<\/em>, performance, 2019.
Photos : Greg Wong, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Padmini Chettur\u2019s Philosophical Enactments 1<\/em> is rotational. While the work\u2019s title suggests a starting point in a series, its choreographic logic is circular rather than linear. The piece begins with a ticking metronome and a recording of Chettur conversing with collaborators. The first words we hear, \u201cI also think,\u201d assert that this entry point is not a beginning. We are mid-exchange, and both thought and discourse flow circuitously.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Chettur\u2019s choreography moves with subtle precision. Slow, sustained, and deliberate, the dancer\u2019s articulations fold and unfold, leading her body in ongoing rotation. Pronating, supinating, flexing, unfurling, Chettur activates multiple axes of her anatomy, while slowly, consistently, turning about the vertical axis of her own uprightness. A recorded voice seems to describe the motion, \u201ca body of spirals, speaking, speaking, to itself.\u201d These words form part of a script, developed with writer Aveek Sen, which we hear throughout. It is allusive and sonorous, and in a work where the audience\u2019s attentive faculties are tested with many-layered material, the text effectively employs literary techniques to foreground fragments of texture and meaning. The assonance\/consonance of the repeated words, \u201cbreak the embrace, return the urn, learn, unlearn, reverse the turn,\u201d not only highlights their affinity with Chettur\u2019s choreography, but also amplifies their vibrational quality. The text also integrates the line \u201cthe centre cannot hold\u201d from William Butler Yeats\u2019s \u201cThe Second Coming\u201d (1919). Again, even with so much to attend to, most audience members would snap to recognition at this frequently cited phrase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The poetic reference leads me to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak\u2019s 1980 essay \u201cFinding Feminist Readings: Dante-Yeats,\u201d from which I want to cherry-pick two important concerns: the sexist conventions of canonical art, and the effectiveness of deconstruction, the critical approach proposed by Jacques Derrida, when operating within the structures it addresses. Working amid genealogies of Bharatanatyam, Chettur\u2019s choreography interrogates formal hierarchies and interpretive functions. In her video work Varnam<\/em> (2016), the many elements of abhinaya, aesthetic expression, are unseamed and performed separately, challenging the communicative potential of Bharatanatyam\u2019s sign systems. Philosophical Enactments 1 seems to extend this project further. The ever-shifting alignments and spatial relations of Chettur\u2019s movement disrupt legibility, eschewing the grammars of Bharatanatyam in favour of figural ambiguity and open-ended time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many writers and artists have investigated the gendered machinations of Bharatanatyam canons; this is a terrain too massive to enter here. In the candid conversation that initiates Philosophical Enactments 1<\/em>, Chettur describes wanting to escape her art form\u2019s \u201cbeauty trap.\u201d She seeks a \u201cmovement from the seductive to the discursive.\u201d I want to suggest that rotation is essential to this project. Much as filmmakers Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen use 360-degree pans to disrupt the camera\u2019s voyeuristic gaze in their film Riddles of the Sphinx<\/em> (1977), Chettur deploys rotation to undo the seductive dynamics of Bharatanatyam\u2019s, and indeed most concert dance\u2019s, conventional frontality. As its program notes detail, Philosophical Enactments 1<\/em> began in response to critics\u2019 writing on Chettur\u2019s oeuvre. Things seem to have come full circle, then, with my writing here. And yet, as Chettur\u2019s work demonstrates so vividly, any orientation between two points is subject to change.<\/p>\n\n\n