MARTIN HARGREAVES:

Do you have an idea of what a starting place might be for this conversation?

ANJANA BALA:

Maybe we can start with why Shivaangee and I are always in dialogue. Outside of being close friends, Shivaangee and I are thought-collaborators in a way, where we see thinking together as a practice of our friendship and thought as choreographic.

MARTIN:

Sometimes there's a distinction between collaborating in thought and language, and collaborating in dance studios. And sometimes those are the same things. Sometimes they're not so. So, for you, is it much more of a language-based collaboration, or do you dance together ever?

SHIVAANGEE AGRAWAL:

I feel like we dance less together, talk more together, but it was shared dance lineage that brought us together.

Something you just said, Martin, reminded me of a question I have been thinking about; why do we, Anjana and I, talk so much? And how is our talking specially part of our practice? I think there's some synchrony between drawing macro and micro together; drawing on micro experiences, on the ground, real-time experiences that we're having as dance practitioners in the UK landscape, and being able to draw out macro tendencies, trends, provocations, wonderings, hypotheses from our experiences. So, I think that's definitely one of the reasons why I'm drawn to speaking to Anjana; it’s because I feel like we can do this dance of zooming out, zooming in together.

ANJANA:

Yeah, absolutely. I think that our practice of thinking together is really inter-scalar, moving between the immediacy of felt sensation and macro historical/structural forces. It’s a kind of way of validating the immediacy of our emotions, but recognizing how they are mediated by forces and social facts much larger than our individual emotions. Shivaangee - how would you say this relates to your practice? I feel your practice is really a kind of embodied politics, and you recently called for a leaning away from apolitical dance practices in the UK. Do you see this embodied politics as separate or related to dancers who are also activists? Or what is the distinction?

SHIVAANGEE:

I see dancing as a way of paying attention to our experiences, which in turn is a way to engage with our political reality. While dancing can take many different forms and purposes, I’m often creating scores and generating material because dancing that score helps me to pay attention to a specific experience that is otherwise too fleeting to consider day-to-day. For example, what is our experience of ‘being left behind’ in collective systems, and how does that feel to us? How can we find spaciousness in that experience? How can we reframe that experience to be about the system that’s pushing and pulling us at different speeds, rather than only understanding it in reference to our individual capacity? I score group improvisations that let us linger and dance in these considerations - I think the mode of dancing can yield so much emotional insight that we otherwise struggle to access. I’m often also dancing long, scores that are durational, repetitive, rhythmic. One thing I’ve been developing for years is called a Disorientation Practice, which attempts to turn the experience of disorientation (in however you may experience it), into a practice - ie something that I return to frequently with curiosity, tools, accumulating experience and commitment in order to understand it more. Recently, I read Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology for the first time, and was massively excited to realise that my Disorientation Practice had made the reading much more accessible to me. I guess in these ways, I think of my practice as political - there is no distance between what I’m trying to make, and what I’m trying to understand of my lived reality.

SHIVAANGEE:

With Anjana, the durational practice relates to our thinking together in a similar way, repetitive, rhythmic, orbiting together on unresolved things. We're not afraid to draw out the issues and pay attention to the dynamics over and over again. With Anjana, the conversation won’t immediately jump to how are we going to fix this? How are we going to make it okay? In our practice together, we're not afraid of being critical and just sitting with that critique.

ANJANA:

I think this is where friendship comes in, as you’ve been urging us to think about Martin, through the politics of friendship, a sense of open endedness toward the recognition of these dynamics and the emergent possibilities of responding to them. We’re both also comfortable implicating ourselves in this, knowing that we aren’t somehow sitting outside of this critique or problematic. We’re thinking about it while also being implicated in it. And knowing that there are of course blind spots in our politics.

SHIVAANGEE:

Yes. I think it would be impossible for us to even have any relevant conversations or discussions if we thought we were functioning outside of these systems and outside of complicity. That's where the most interesting and valuable and difficult kinds of thinking happens. I'm thinking of the conversations we had around your film Optics as a critique of competitiveness, but as an empathetic critique from the inside. We experience this regularly, so how do we work through it?

MARTIN:

When you say ‘it’, do you mean the demand for visibility?

SHIVAANGEE:

Yes, the dependence on visibility and the need to use it as a currency. The competitiveness, feelings of scarcity, the competition over limited space, the survival instinct and needing to carve a visual identity for yourself that can be read quickly and commodified. All these themes that were in the film.

ANJANA:

Shivaangee, I think what you are pointing to is if we think about these totalising structures - like austerity, competition, the politics of visibility - then what you were saying is that these forces are not fully totalising, because we can still leverage critique. There's still a possibility for critique within these structures, right? So, I think I really like what you said about the film, all these things we’re complicit in, and we can't fully disavow them, and it can’t fully be our responsibility either, but that's also okay.

SHIVAANGEE:

Being part of the system gives me information about why other people are also like this, right? Through my own experience, I can understand and empathise and be compassionate towards why other people are doing this, and feel what it actually feels like, how limited your options feel when you're in this moment. Then from that place, I think it's far more possible to affect change, more so than from the outside.

MARTIN:

I’m not even sure there is an outside, except as a fantasy. I think, in terms of the ways in which these various different power structures and institutional practices interlock, that even if you take a position that seems outside, you're in relation, you’re inside the logics somehow. I enjoyed what you said earlier about not imagining critique to have a fully instrumental distance. You know that there are ways in which you're implicated that are not available to you. So maybe also part of your friendship is your ability to check each other, to see in each other what you can’t see in yourself. Anjana when you were making Optics, were these conversations you would also have with the other performers or the collaborators?

ANJANA:

Not necessarily, butI think when I had the opportunity to present on Digital Stage, I had to really confront a lot of these things that I thought I was critiquing (from the fantasy of the outside). Instead of just reading something or watching something as a form of critique, making this film and dancing in it allows me to be implicated. It placed a demand on me to negotiate these dynamics rather than simply critique them from the fantasy of the outside. Maybe dance then is a cultivated, embodied practice of implication. It can be a practice of implicating oneself and thinking about what that generates. Optics allows me to question whether I’ve bought into myself in a way. It’s similar to many conversations Shivaangee and I have had around the narcissism and vanity of dance.

SHIVAANGEE:

I feel like we need to unpack this. Dance isn’t necessarily narcissistic I think! (Laughs)

ANJANA:

(Laughs) It's also, obviously, incredibly transformational! Yeah? The thing that we're both devoting our lives to!

MARTIN:

I think it can be narcissistic, also, for the audience. I’m interpreting what you're saying in terms of narcissism that for the dancer, it’s a strong desire to be seen, and optics, in that sense, is really just controlling the attraction to the gaze, and focusing the gaze on oneself as a means to publicly elaborate an identity. But I think there's a kind of narcissistic desire from an audience - why do we want to go and see particular bodies on stage? Because maybe we think we want to see ourselves or a version of ourselves. Some of the thrills of dance are quite enmeshed in the politics of visual culture that we perhaps pretend that they're not. Desire and identification are so prominent in dance spectatorship.

ANJANA:

Totally, yeah. I also remember what you said, Martin, a few weeks ago, about how some students you knew at The Place said that they don't like watching other people dance because they want to be doing the dancing.

MARTIN:

I wonder about narcissism as an impulse for training in dance in both positive and negative senses. Narcissism is often levelled as a critique. But I don’t think it is one that we can have a huge distance from. To pick up what we were talking about earlier, I think we are all implicated in narcissism in some way. It's interesting to think that this is also positively one of the ways in which dance works, in that it does address people quite directly, and it addresses their fantasies and their imagination of their body. Optics is one of the most watched films recently on Digital Stage, so you obviously produced something that has touched people. And maybe one of the mechanisms through which it does that is through forms of narcissism. I don't think we need to pretend that we were never narcissistic in our relationship to images of dance.

SHIVAANGEE:

I don't know…I can't relate to this idea. Are we saying that people who don't dance - a member of the public who just wants to go see Pina Bausch - goes and feels a somatic identification? I just can't imagine that members of the public who don't have a personal relationship with dancing, have this narcissistic thrill when watching dance.

MARTIN:

I wouldn't say narcissism in the sense that it speaks directly to their self-identity. So yes, I think maybe we can distinguish when dancers go to see dance works - they usually have very developed critical skills in really seeing what's on stage and are able to process it quickly and articulate it. And that's partly because it's being filtered through a certain kind of identity and bodily disposition. Whereas, let's fictionalise a non-dancing person - I don't know who doesn't dance, really – but yes, somebody who doesn't imagine themselves or self-identify as a dancer? Yeah, I don't know what the thrill of watching dance is, then, that's an interesting question. But I still suspect that narcissism in some form is involved. But again I’m not saying narcissism is inherently a bad relation.

SHIVAANGEE:

I think it's similar to the thrill of listening to music, like you're being taken somewhere and feeling something, which in my case isn’t linked to an identity as a musician. I'm just thinking about my relationship to witnessing things that have nothing to do with my identity. It’s not speaking to me and all the things I need to be doing better. Instead, I'm just receiving an experience.

MARTIN:

I'm wondering if sometimes the narcissism is about how close you can map whatever the encounter is onto the idea that you have of yourself? And often it is an inverse narcissism, like you said Shivaangee, often you'll see something and think I need to go home and do some work. I need to get better at being whatever myself is, because this is pulling me into relation!

SHIVAANGEE:

I think there's a difference between what dance is or what our experience of dance is in our contemporary structure and society, and the narcissistic tendencies of professionalism. Living and earning through dance is different from experiences of dance that are interactive and fun. This month, I feel really deeply connected to the transformative power of dance. It's interesting to have that connection at this moment, because I'm working with a group of elderly people in Deptford. I go every week, and it's just really brought home, in a very deeply felt way, the power of dance, because we gather together, we chat. We have tea, we talk. You know, we greet each other, but when we dance, it's a completely different kind of connection with each other. It's a different kind of intimacy; it's a different kind of trust. It's just a different kind of connection that crosses all these other boundaries and realms and abysses that otherwise exist between us. And it's been a really emotional experience going there every week. So that's forefronted in my mind when I'm thinking about dance.

MARTIN:

Yes, when it is participatory? I guess you're not really creating a space where there's a watcher and a dancer, so everyone is moving around, moving in between those positions? So, actually, maybe you’re right, we need to be specific – it is the architecture of the theatre that is established for narcissism in a way, it transforms the transformational potential into the possibility for vanity!

SHIVAANGEE:

I think I felt for a really long time that sitting down and watching dance feels incredibly irrelevant and outdated. Why do we sit down and watch dance, because it really is a participatory form? And I think that's why, personally, I'm obsessed with folk dance and social dancing practices where witnessing isn't a key act. It can happen, as part of the invitation of what people might be doing in a space, but the dance doesn't come into being because it's being witnessed, but because you're doing it in relationship with the other people. So, it's much more towards ritual rather than performance. There is a performance element, but you are just performing to each other while you're all dancing. I'm kind of obsessed with these first visions and experiences of dancing where there isn't an audience, or an audience that only witnesses.

MARTIN:

Is there a way that you would map your experiences of dancing Bharatanatyam onto these notions of representation and witnessing? I’m interested in the differences you’ve experienced performing here in the UK and in India in terms of the labour that you think the form is required to do in the presentation of identities. I also wonder what experimentalism means in these conversations you've been having?Does it mean a certain kind of rejection of known form? If you're saying South Asian dancers always have to perform ‘South Asian-ness’ in the UK, or stay within certain limits of recognition, would experimentalism be through a movement beyond recognition? And I guess a flip side to that would be a question whether the only people who are afforded that movement are people who are not overly marked in the first place? So, when white people experiment, their whiteness is not really seen as the thing that they're questioning, they're just seen as experiments. So, I’m interested in this, where would we locate experimentalism? Is there a kind of pure resource of experimentalism outside of these organisations of identities and power structures?

SHIVAANGEE:

Yeah, that's interesting - what is an experiment? I was going to say that you have to define what is experimental for you. But then, am I also limited by the parameters of identity that are projected on to me? I mean, it's quite depressing. Will I ever be ever truly experimental if I'm colonised by these markers? I don't know. I just feel like each person has to decide. It has to be self-directed. I don't know if that makes sense?

MARTIN:

Yes, but that runs the risk of reinforcing a certain kind of individualist notion of art making, and artistic practice, where somehow the individual can determine and generate art and then it's an audience's responsibility to somehow understand where that comes from. Whereas I feel like what you've both been articulating is really situated practices. I don't know that I could ever fully determine that my practice is experimental, without some of the solidarities that you've spoken about, without being able to have conversations with people. So, I may have an intention to do something, but I'm only able to work within my limitations if I imagine that I work alone.

ANJANA:

Martin, something you said reminds me of conversations Shivaangee and I always have around performing identity markers and the conversations you and I have had on the labour of racialized artistic bodies. Either South Asian artists are traditional, and somehow bound by the cultural and “the ancient,” or if we “experiment,” we are somehow defaulting to white or some sort of ahistorical contemporary (riffing off of your words Martin!). Like we’ve betrayed these identity markers. Martin, we’ve also spoken about this in relation to other racialized bodies, the hypervisibility of Black bodies or the invisibility of East Asian dancers, for instance.

SHIVAANGEE:

That's why it feels important for me that any kind of experimentalism is directed by curiosity. The individualistic, or individual, curiosities and inquiries that you are engaged in. And I think that what leads it to being not just experimentation for the sake of experimentation, but an inquiry. And it may be an experiment. It may turn out to be experimental in some lens or definition or some way of looking at it but that’s not the main thing. I feel quite stuck in this view where, as I straddle contemporary dance and South Asian dance worlds, the biggest thing that has really struck me over the past decade, and continues to strike me, is the main inequity is that dancers of marginalised forms don't feel like they have the same space for curiosity. There’s the agency to experiment and, not just experiment for the sake of experiment, but to have a personal, individual inquiry that's driven by curiosity, and one that is not necessarily in dialogue with identity markers. Marginalised dancers don’t often have this agency but ‘contemporary’ dancers do. They are never held to be representing the whole form of contemporary dance. They are never representing their whole society, and it’s a privilege.

MARTIN:

Or they are, but they don't have to deal with it. They're representing a whole tradition of, for example, post-ballet, into modernism, into postmodernism. There’s a history to the forms they’re using, and they are constrained by those things. But they can choose not to be busy with this.

SHIVAANGEE:

They're not burdened by the responsibility to represent their culture and form and history and tradition, and they are able to cultivate a personal sense of inquiry and curiosity. We don't have that - marginalised dancers don't have that privilege. We are not nourished in a way to believe that it's possible or that we’re allowed to do that. And so until we even have the opportunity to develop an authentic creative inquiry, then what are we even doing?

For me, it all comes back down to the question: ‘as an individual, do you feel you have the agency to do your thing without carrying the burden of everybody else's desires on your back?’ Yeah, it's an individualistic way of envisioning art making. But I just think that's the first step, before you can even start to think about how your inquiry connects to audiences or communities that you engage with. I think you have to still believe in the agency you have as an individual to be curious about something and have the entitlement to follow through on that curiosity without fear of retribution or fear of falling into disrepute or being disowned by the industry or whatever.

ANJANA:

Yeah. This makes me think of this term called ‘burdened individuality’ by Saidiya Hartman - which comes from a very specific Black feminist context in the US responding to the emancipation of slavery - but I still think useful to carefully appropriate and think with.

MARTIN:

And this question of who has access to this notion of the individual who's operating somehow outside the burden of representing their history and their culture and their identity markers. Because, of course, these are all fictional positions. It doesn't make them any less real or any less felt or experienced, but they are constructed. So, for somebody to have an unmarked individual experimental practice, they're relying on a whole range of other people to be marked. Someone else is carrying the responsibility of representing the edges. Even if they don't have to do it there is a border patrol, there's a certain kind of violence in that hyper individualized experimental practice. Because it's taking a position of not needing to be busy with this, whilst knowing that other people will therefore have to pick up the slack. And usually it's the margin and the marginalised. So, if I don't have to be busy with representing whiteness or masculinity, that's because other people are carrying that labour, maybe by representing the edges, and it’s not my job to carry that representation. It’s an inequity in labour – psychic, emotional and all other kinds!

Gus Solomons Jnr has written about this. He was the first Black dancer for Merce Cunningham, and he was around all the 60s experimentalism, this mythical period that I seem to have this attraction to. When he started making his own work some of the criticism he got was that it was either too identity-based or not identity-based enough! He was judged on how Blackness was carried by his work – Cunningham was never called to represent whiteness. And he responded by saying something like: ‘Well, I've only just gained an identity, so why would I want to make work that denies that identity? I'm only just gaining the right to speak as a Black artist in the US - why would I not want to do that? But do I have to do that in only one way?’ He was speaking back to the prevailing tones and aesthetics of experimentalism and saying: ‘you have the privilege to let go of your identity - that's a very privileged position to be able to pretend that you don’t have to deal with the position you’re speaking from.’ And he's right, it feels like a lot of the work that I know from that period, is really work where people are disavowing identity in some way. Although there's a disavowal of queerness in the 60s not just from choice but also because it's not possible to speak directly from that position, so it's spoken in other ways. There are other kinds of practices happening, which is where, for me, the experimentalism is driven by a personal curiosity that is in tension with dominant forms of appearance. Going back to this question of optics, and of your film Optics - there's possibilities to be hyper-visible, there's also power in being invisible. But there are also other modes of moving in and out. There are moments of moving in and out of marginality, or moving in and out of the gaze, the spotlights, and what your film actually helps me understand is that it is a dynamic choreography. It's never a singular, fixed relationship. It's a visibility practice.

ANJANA:

This is interesting. So while Shivaangee and I are busy “experimenting” in relation to tradition, it is other South Asian artists who are upholding the “tradition” to allow us to experiment in the first instance. I think this then goes against this individualistic desire of experimentation, in that the experimentation is one that is in dialogue. But this reminds me of something you told me Martin, about how at least within these other canons of dance (ballet, modern, postmodernism), these are documented and made to be historical. Not everything from the past becomes history, history allows us to see a kind of progression. Maybe history allows us to not be constrained. When Bharatanatyam is simply labelled as “ancient” or “The Dance of the Gods,” we don’t allow it to become historical. It becomes atemporal, existing outside of history almost, into the realm of the mythic, and so any rupture is now seen as “white” or “contemporary.” I’m obviously speaking very broadly and generalizing here, and there are so many positions we haven’t touched on - gender, class, caste, nationality, etc that makes the desire to experiment already more than individual. My need to experiment is because I’m a high-caste, middle-class body uncomfortable with dancing a nationalistic form. But I still love it, and I still see it as a part of my identity. I do want to perform this identity marker, I just don’t know what my politics are in relation to it. But yes, I think this idea of moving in and out of these confines rather than assuming a fixed position is key. And performance and dance as concepts also allows us to think about this - to be able to see the choreography of these positions. Being able to see a stage for what it is, being able to know this is a staged event. These are spectators. This is a ritual. This is choreography. So maybe that links back to the generosity of narcissism.

MARTIN:

I guess dancing and performance require both implication and consensus. So yes, we can see a performance is a performance. But that's because we've learned the codes, and we agree, but if somebody is in the space disagreeing then it risks the very ontology of performance, because all of the agreements that are required before this happens can be unravelled or unpicked or challenged. So, it loops me back to the importance of finding solidarity and friendship. Because sometimes what we want to do is actually really start to unpick dance by dancing. We start asking this question and it's going to pull all these other questions in, because they're all threaded together. Because of consent and because of consensus; we've all consented to being part of this performance for this moment, but that both implicates us in it, and also gives us the possibility to ask questions back to it, to break the consensus, to speak back to power.

ANJANA:

I feel like, for me, that feels like a good place to end - talking back to power.

Optics (2024), Anjana Bala

Disorientation Practice, Shivaangee Agrawal