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Celebrating dance as affirmation of life
Her sense of freedom was, to a large extent, stimulated through travel and her voracious reading habit. In a rare outburst of emotion, she accords her non-conformist attitude to her father — a free-thinking doctor. What she respected most about him was his life of the mind. In his library, she read a wide range of books devouring them without necessarily understanding everything she read. At the age of 13, she had
her major confrontation with her father when she wanted to study the
fine arts. Her father wanted her to graduate from college as he thought
she was too young to make decisions which required development of the
mind. She told him that she didn’t believe in the development of mind
and wanted to experience things. When she looks back on that period of
her life she states with honesty and grace that her family was of nice
people, not orthodox or repressive but they were conventional. She
realised that she was not like the people around her. |
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Even before she left home to create a life for herself, she was convinced that she did not want to get married. She went away to Bombay to study law which was itself motivated by a conscious need to fight for feminist rights. However, when it came to the finals she decided to opt out of college, perhaps a gesture of protest against the system. It was during this period of confusion that Chandralekha went to Madras where she came in contact with Harindranath Chattopadhyay who became a kind of mentor to her. She was exposed to some of the most significant artists and cultural activists and Bharatnatyam became her new love. It became a discipline to which she surrendered after abandoning her study of law and she realised all she wanted to do was dance. She moved on to yoga and martial arts too. Hrishikesh Mukherjee, the famous film director with whom she shared her inmost intimate thoughts despite the difference in their careers and attitudes, never failed to appreciate her talent and sensibility. He once stated admiringly, "rarely in life does one come across such a unique personality, she never borrowed ideas as she had a wellspring of those within her. She had the potential of being one of the finest writers in the country". She is not only a talented dancer and designer but more than anything, she has great zest for life. She did not develop her potential in anyone direction, rather she preferred exploring different disciplines with the intensity and directness of an amateur. She distrusted regimentation or any kind of professionalism. However, her dance productions are professional despite the fact she never belonged to any formal school and administration. She was most true to herself and by not restricting her creativity in any one particular manner, she lived life on her own terms. Rather she says today," I have never regretted what I have rejected". In the sixties, her rejection of dance was as exhilarating precisely, as it compelled her to search for other sources of creativity of relationships that have ultimately mustered both her life and art today. Early in her career, she knew that ‘art’ and ‘life’ had somehow got to go together. In 1959, she conceptualised her first piece of choreography with a full length production called Devadasi. This was her attempt to see Bharatnatyam in the larger context of history as she felt dance doesn’t belong to the temple or to the court or even to one’s country. It must go back to the people, to the body. In the early seventies, Chandralekha found herself immersed in multiple idioms of dance, graphics photography and cinema. She was even drawn in her own way to the dialectical thought processes of a Marxian historian like D.D. Kosambi. However Chandralekha returned to dance when she was invited to participate in the first East Dance encounter organised jointly by Max Mueller Bhavan and the National Centre for performing Arts (NCPA) in Bombay between January 22-29, 1984. She revived Tillana from the Devadasi tradition and Surya Namashkar from Navograha and also created a special piece entitled ‘Primal Energy’. Her Angika, later in 1985, was regarded as her manifesto of the body in dance. It was turbulent yet joyous evolution of dance. Angika recalls earlier myths of women which radiate a power out of which a renewal of energies in dance is possible. Choreography had been dismissed by many professional dancers who could never imagine performing such seeming simplicities on the stage. Rather Chandralekha emphasised with this, that most dancers have moved away if not camouflaged the ‘fundamentals’ of dance in their search for virtuosity. Chandralekha continues to hold her quest to find space and time for herself which she desires for all her dancers and friends as well. She seems to have made a commitment to be honest with herself, her body and her values not in indulgence or excess but in vitality alive. She believes in being true to herself not as a myth, with borrowed strait-jackets, but in her own guts and deepest pre-directions. She believes "You never arrive, one is always seeking". As Chandralekha ages in her life’s journey, she becomes oddly more and more youthful. |
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TO
probe into the life of the non-conformist dancer Chandralekha — the
danseuse mathematician, writer and choreographer — is like renewing
the sources of resistance. Having been brought up in a conventional
traditional family, Chandralekha could stand up for herself and be
defiant.
