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transcendent, ephemeral, sacred, empty and full, a syzygy. Art informs culture. Performance is at times luminous, bright, a revelation of form in transition, new clusters of intelligence activating perception and sensation, igniting the imagination.
Forces Creative process can feel like a force of nature. Dance is under my skin and in my bones. I think interculturalism is as much about the individual as it is about the group. The merging of two culturally different dance forms (Indian and Western), firstly in my own practice and then to take this into collaborative meetings with other artists has proved challenging at times. A shared aesthetic space can feel quite disorienting, especially in considering aspects of authenticity in traditional practice and cultural identity. I think it was probably through my training in classical Indian dance that I came to embrace the idea of ‘Dance as the embodiment of culture’. But the dynamics of this, of how it might play out in cross-cultural collaboration was and is a difficult
thing. A fracturing of meaning does at times seem inevitable in the creative collision between different traditions. In other instances, meaning is invented, felt, or sensed as a force, resonant in the re-framing of inter-subjectivities present within a shared artistic space. It has been important to me artistically in my own choreographic work that in combining Indian and Western styles, I seek to represent the aesthetic attributes of both forms. My contemporary dance expression continues to evolve. Creative collaboration seems to say that conflict is ok, that somehow the “whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. This is not always the case in culture “out there” in the world, in social-culture - a culture of comfort that expects things to be either this or that, never both, usually excluding the middle space, the space in-between. Maybe art can inform culture and cultural practices and perceptions? Culture is a kinesthetic encounter with a world of forms via perceptive fields of study and observation. We train the body and the mind, both are inextricably linked, the body/ mind, a continuum of simultaneous energies, evolving along lines of force, resistance and surrender.