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I have walked half the distance. Now I’d like to tell the audience that you should walk half the distance towards me. Because the time has come: I have finished my walk towards you; it is your turn to walk. Then only will we understand each other. Advice for young dancers? Young dancers shouldn’t see themselves as young. They should see themselves as ancient women of this country. And they should see that there is so much ancient knowledge here, a whole lot of knowledge, and they should start from there. — Chandralekha, celebrated dancer WHy am I suddenly remembering and writing on Chandralekha — that blithe spirit, who left us some seven years ago? Because a slim little volume, moving in so many ways, turned up among my papers the other day. "Chandra — in Other Voices `85 and Her Own" is how it was titled, put together by Dashrath Patel and Sadanand Menon, her closest friends and collaborators, who also organised a tribute to her not long after she passed away at the end of December, 2006, at three different locations: at Chandra’s own dance and theatre complex at Chennai, the Sanskriti Kendra in Delhi, and at the National Centre of Performing Arts in Mumbai.
This volume was a record of those ‘events’, appropriately so described, because it is not easy to think of any memorial congregations that were quite like these: these were an ‘invocation of her presence through her absence’. Having conceived the idea, Dashrath and Sadanand, as they wrote in that volume, got on the phone with friends and collaborators and co-choreographers from India and abroad, and requested them for a three-to-four minute remembrance of her on the phone. These recollections/messages/tributes were recorded through ‘a computer device and fed into MP-3 players which were, in turn, harnessed to mini-speakers’. Hardly anyone demurred, for Chandralekha, wonderfully innovative dancer that she was — "a thinker who danced, or a dancer who thought"? — had left such an impression on so many minds: from great dancers and choreographers like Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham, theatre directors ranging from Ebrahim Alkazi to Habib Tanveer, scholars of the distinction of Romila Thapar and Kapila Vatsyayan, writers like Arundhati Roy, musicians like the Gundecha brothers. Seventeen voice-messages were received. Countless other people wrote, of course, and mourned the fact of her passing away. But these voice messages were very special.
Dashrath and Sadanand decided to spread these out over the sprawling complex at Chennai. "Using a bamboo rig", as they describe, "fourteen voice ports were created with photographs of the persons who were speaking". The portals hung from or tied to Chandra’s favourite neem trees, the trunks of many of them partially wrapped in Chandra’s own saris, were at a distance of five or six metres from each other. These were in a loop, and on low volume, so as not to disturb anyone beyond a distance of two metres. "The idea was that the assembled group of friends would absorb these tributes at different emotional and personal registers". Then, everyone would assemble at a different spot within the venue, sit together to listen to a 40-minute excerpt of voice clips from Chandra’s own talks and lectures — the two pieces I have cite above are from those clips — concerning her ideas on dance and life. I was not there but it must have been magical: colour everywhere, hushed sounds, deeply felt words. There are photographs showing men and women standing under trees, listening quietly, almost reverentially, to these recorded voices, heads bent, ears cocked: Ebrahimhere, Kyoko Edo there, Indira Jaisingh a little further off.
Kumar Shahani, the filmmaker, said it well: "I can hear Chandra, I hear her all the time. And I can feel the way she clasped one’s hand and caressed it at the same time. I know that for many she presented a spectacle. But she did more than that I feel, because, somewhere, she was telling us how to be joyous in every situation, in every kind of challenge that one faced whether it was mental or physical. I think that was what her dance was all about, what her choreography was all about." Chandra’s choreography was all about ideas, those ancient thoughts embedded in the soil of India. Consider the titles alone of some of the programmes she took all over the world with her troupe: Navagraha, Yantra, Sharira, Raga, Shloka, Prana, Lilavati, the last inspired by the great 12th century mathematician, Bhaskaracharya, and striking a special chord within her for so much of her work was about the mathematics of the body. Ideas of time and space reverberated through her head all the time, it seems. She worked ceaselessly on the notion of Time as understood in our culture: Kala, which means both time and death and is one of the names by which Shiva is invoked. Speed is not what attracted her, it was slowness. "Through slowness you understand", she said once. But consider this passage: "In Ujjain, I took all my dancers to the Mahakaleshwara temple, and we were wonderstruck. Imagine having something like a temple to Time. And I was so moved by that. I was walking with tears in my eyes, and even now, when I think of it, I have tears in my heart. How our people have thought of the Mahakaleshwar temple! So when I went around, people were not allowed inside. But I said I wanted to go and touch the linga. I touched and they could not stop me. I touched the face and felt `85 it was like a pockmarked face. Time had done that. It was so beautiful to touch the face of Time. And I came out crying `85 And to this day, I have a feeling that I touched Time". Somewhere, I am sure, people who participated in that tribute to Chandra that I am writing about, must have sensed the presence of time — past, present and future — in the midst of a space that Chandra so loved.
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Chandralekha’s innovative choreography explored the ideas of time and space. Great dancers, choreographers, theatre directors, scholars and writers come together to pay an uncommon homage to this dancer-thinker
