CHRISTINE MACHADO
Although dancers Dayita Nereyeth and Poorna Swami have been friends since they were little they had never worked on a dance piece together. Until now.
“Although we went to the same school and dance college (Amherst College (USA), both of us have trained in different dance forms and thus been part of very different performances,” says Swami. While Swami is a trained Bharatnatyam dancer, Nereyeth has trained in ballet. In 2017 however, they decided they should try out doing something together.
Without an idea of what they wanted to do, they got into the studio to figure out what both of them were interested in at the moment. “We realised that we were both in similar places. We had both been to America and then returned home to Bangalore. But we didn’t recognise the city that we had returned to“ the people had changed, the places had changed,” says Swami.
And so they began investigating the characteristices of a city and what makes it peculiar, looking at what other writers had to say about what makes a city. “We realised that somehow we always keep going back to cities even though they take us to our lowest point,” says Swami, adding that she personally loves the city for the people and the conversations. Nereyeth meanwhile is especially attracted to the city because of the energy. “Our dance college was located in a small town and until I lived there I had no idea how much I needed that city bustle,” she says.
“In a way the city is a fantasy that we all go towards. We see cities as a space where we can project our own ideas or what we want to make of it,” says Swami. And thus their duet piece Long Time No See came about. “In the dance we are constructiong our own city, dismantling it and trying to find where these two bodies are occupying this architecture,” says Swami, adding that it is not specifically about New York or Bangalore but just a city as a whole
Alongside the duet, Swami and Nereyeth will also be perfoming solo pieces. “As we come from very different dance backgrounds so we thought we would establish ourselves separately before doing a piece together,” says Swami. Swami chose to revise her solo piece Cartography which she had created in 2016 “This is a love poem that I wrote where I speak and dance together. It is essentially about longing and losing love,” says Swami who has collaborated with Swiss composer Marcel Zaes for this piece
Nereyeth on the other hand chose to revisit Pants Becoming Kites, her collaboration with Ellen Oliver for a student production at Amherst College in 2014. As this was orignally conceived as a duet, it had to be reworked into a solo. “The piece deals with the mundane and the waiting. Sometimes I feel like it is about an existentential crisis. I felt really connected to this piece when we first did it and I felt that I had to do more with it. This is probably because the style of the piece is what I feel is my style maybe because the choreographer and I have similar dance backgrounds,” she states.
Rather than a conventional theatre, in Goa, they will be performing at very different spaces. And they state that the place in which the perfomance is held does matter. “These pieces are inherently intimate and our relationship with the audience changed depending on where they are places. We have to work harder to communicate with the audience if they are at far distances. Also, the choreography “ what you do with your body “ is affected by the texture of the ground, the backdrop etc and it has to be adapted accordingly,” says Swami.
As for the contemporary dance scene in India, they believe that it is definitely growing but it is not necessarily where it is in the West in terms of scale. “We also don’t have many choreographers. There are a lot of dancers who are choreographing on themselves but the whole culture of people being primarily choreographers is something that is still finding it’s way,” says Swami.
(‘Citations’ will be performed on March 15, 7.30 pm at The Village Studio, Parra and on March 16, 6 pm at Gallery Gitanjali, Panaji)
