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Picture Courtesy - Bharatanatyam Dancer Pooja Hirwade On the Means and Ends of ‘Rasa’ in Classical Indian Dance By Donovan Roebert In attempting to examine at least some aspects "On the Means and Ends of Rasa in Classical Indian Dance", we must try to determine what we mean by the ‘rasika’ and by the idea of ‘classicism’ in strict relation to the forms of Indian classical dance. rasika .... he or she is a close "reader" of the dance To begin with the rasika, we may make the fundamental generalisation that he or she is a close ‘reader’ of the dance, sufficiently educated, at least with regard to all the ‘readable’ facets of the living recital, to be able to recognise their formal structure, semantics, signs and grammar, and to know when these are being successfully or imperfectly utilized. Beyond involving only the assembled and fluid aspects of technique, this sort of recognition also implies an adequate cultivation of taste – what we may characterize as the knowledgeable appreciation of subtle combinations of ‘flavour’ (rasa) – which comes by close, repeated and longstanding attention to and experience of the effects of the dance. kinds of reading The rasika is thus involved in two kinds of reading : in the first, emphasis is laid on technical correctness and accomplishment; in the second, focus is deflected to the total mental experience evoked by the technical elements. In the first kind of reading there is an outward flow of attention; in the second there is the reading of an inward experience. But there is a third reading which lies at the nodal point of the two already mentioned, and from which these two themselves arise and are made possible as readable objects : this is the dancing body. We call it the dancing body in order to distinguish it from the dancer’s body because the latter, strictly speaking, is not present in the recital in the same way in which it is present in the dancer’s physical activities outside of the performance of the dance. And we might add that, apart from this distinction being necessarily made on the rasika’s part (for purposes of properly objectifying the dance as art), it is a distinction of which the dancer herself ought to be and usually is intensely aware. This is because the dancing body becomes for the dancer as much the object of disciplined performance, and the visible means by which the work of art is placed before the rasika, as it becomes for the critically aware rasika an artistic medium completely separable from the everyday bodily person of the dancer. dancing mind.. Infusing the dancing body is, of course, the dancing mind. Here again we are obliged to make a distinction between the everday mind of the dancer (the dancer’s mind) and the dancing mind that is present and functioning, in a myriad ways, to inform, direct and manipulate the dancing body, and to act as the vital channel between the dancing body and the preceding givens on which the dance is based. It also works as the outward channel transmitting the full mental (and mindful) implications of its dancing work to the rasika. And again it is incumbent on the rasika fully to appreciate this distinction in a formal sense, and to determine by the critical means at his disposal the extent to which the dancer herself is able to keep the personal and dancing minds apart for the full duration of the recital. For what we are pointing at here, and what will be discussed at greater length later, is the self-limiting, self-constraining and self-effacing qualities that establish the essential character of classicism in the dance. and the determining forces Beyond the dancing mind and body stand the prescriptively determining forces of choreography and the delimiting classical tradition from which the choreographer must access and develop the suitable tales and combinations of steps, expressions and postures available for conveying them, and, as is regularly the case, for contriving the geometry and flux of the pure dance, or ‘nritta’. It is on this continuum (tradition – choreography – transmission) that the dancing mind and body are situated and from which they may be said to emerge as the vital superstructural expression of the deeper underlying, foundational and predetermining structure. We allude to this layered and complex dynamic, for all its obviousness, in order more clearly to illustrate the multiple components with which the rasika has to deal both critically and self-critically if he hopes to experience the dance in its detailed and impersonal, yet personally alive, fulness. finer constitutive aspects In addition to the elements already described – as it were in passing, for the description offered here is sparse indeed and sparing of a host of finer constitutive aspects – we have to consider the music and sung vocalisation of the dramatic tale, or ‘natya’, which together imprint into the dancing mind an inward and immediate rhythmic and melodic path on which the dancing body dances outwardly, in space and time. And these too present themselves as supportive concrete forces throwing up into the purview of the rasika futher conventions of technique and taste having their own criteria for success or failure – and quite apart from their individual prerequisites, implying the equally important question of the balance of elements within the whole. Clearly this balance must be posited on a fundamental imbalance which ensures that all of these contributive activities (because that is what, chiefly and emphatically, they ultimately are) are working efficiently among themselves to tilt the balance in favour of the dancer, while at the same time acting to constrain and ‘capture’ her within their compound dynamism. ornamentation.. Finally, some mention must be made of the customary ornamentation proper to the dance, by which we mean such things as costume, make up, vermilion ‘aalta’, jewelry, headdress, and so on. Naturally one would include in this category the ornamentation of the stage itself, in terms of backdrop, lighting, props and so forth. These ornaments and adornments, taken together, provide what may be called, on the one hand, the frame (as distinguished from the formal framework) within which the dancing body is contained and, on the other, a system of highlights by which certain of its salient points – hands, feet, eyes, lips, hips, and so on – are rendered more prominent and more sensual through beautification and latent symbolism. every supporting element is doing neither more nor less.. The dancing mind and body, as we see then, perform upon, and, during a successful recital, emerge fully and fully-articulated from, a cooperative mass of supportive objects and activities whose own prerequisites for technical success must each be met if the performance is to succeed as a whole – and by this we mean that every supporting element is doing neither more nor less than supporting the dancer in exactly the right way, through sustaining each their own due proportionality (especially their subtle ‘secondariness’) throughout the entire recital. There can be no latitude allowed for the kind of virtuosity that might distract the rasika’s attention from the dancer, any more than allowance can be made for reticence or other flaws arising from insufficient ability. balance, unity & wholeness Now it is this balance, unity, wholeness and efficiency of the secondary objects and activities which, if properly utilized by the dancing mind and body, cause the ensemble working in unison in this way to cross the threshold that transforms them from a complex, interdependent mechanism into an harmonious organism, of which the dancer represents the presentative form or ‘rupa’ which we have called the dancing body, and whose vitality is expressed through the inwardly directing and energizing dancing mind. It is this transmuting intensification from mechanism to composite living being that takes the rasika out of himself to become included as an onlooking extension of the same vital entity and its transmitted or radiated energy or ‘tejas’. We argue that this kind of inclusion cannot be effected by an ensemble working together only at the level of a mechanism, even that of a perfected mechanism, because the purely mechanical and mechanistic cannot absorb or even address the personal mind in a living way – it cannot, that is, awaken that mind to love. dancer's standpoint Now let us look at this transformation from the inward standpoint of the dancer herself, albeit ideally and – some might say – with a certain degree of presumptuousness. We have said that classicism demands of the dancer a high degree of self-effacement and this is an unanswerable postulate, offered on the grounds that the purely and cleanly classical has very little tolerance for the whimsicalities and novelties, distortions and excesses, and general waywardness of the personsal stamp (for all individuality is a form of waywardness) or, what is worse, of the marks of the persona desiring to express itself on account of its self-cherishing nature. The poet, if he wishes to devise a classical poem, must absent himself from the final text as far as this is possible. But this does not mean that the dancer as a personality is simply not present in the dance in the same way that a turtle with wings is not present in the universe. Such utter absence is neither possible nor, so far as both dancer and rasika are concerned, even desirable. Classicism wishes to a very high degree to restrain and constrain the practitioner, but never to eliminate her entirely, which would be tantamount to making of itself, through such an absolute exclusion of the creatively active and personal selfhood, a mere ritual or exemplary exercise in pure method, which is to say, a thing of no life. idea of classicism The point of classicism in this regard lies in the effect on the dancer’s person of the very high extent of personal constraint imposed on her by the classical methodology. So far from completely eliminating the personal aspect of the dancer (which is after all the only finally real one), these constraints are devised to act as a prism through which the subtle remainder of the classically limited and disciplined dancer’s personal selfhood becomes intensified in such personal ‘touches’ as humour, warmth, irony, strength, grace and so forth. Not only is the personal dancer permitted, within the limits of taste and technique, to peep out personally through the dancing body (to the extent that the dancing mind knows its personal restraints and purposes), but this is in fact expected by the nature of the classical. It is expected by the nature of the classical because that nature is, in an extremely refined manner, a lyrical one, and no evocation of the lyrical is complete in its vivacity without the personal grace note, the personal style, the personal energy that inform it – however subtly and, it may be, unconsciously. In fact we may take the personal selfhood as itself being impersonally made available, as is the personal tenor and timbre of the singing voice, be it ever so classically trained and technically accomplished. What the hearer responds to in the deepest, fullest and final sense is the nuanced personal use of those disciplined impersonal acquisitions. In the classical Indian dance, the lyrical voice of classicism is expressed in the first place as the sensuous, for we are confronted here with a dancing body informed by a dancing mind. That is to say, the rasika is brought, by means of the dancing flux of the sensuous, to the flavour or ‘rasa’ of the particular instance of lyricism evinced in that specific dramatic context (in the ‘natya’) or in the storyless form of the pure ‘nritta’ dance. preponderance of the impersonal over the personal But the point is not that the sensuous is present and operative but rather that it exists only as the cruder basis of the poetic mode that is to be transformed by a critical and tasteful refinement into the lyrical. This is one of the reasons why the preponderance of the impersonal over the personal in the dance is so crucial : it is the impersonal character of the dancing body and mind that facilitate the switch from sensuousness to lyricism because they are working towards this end by means of conventional structure, mechanism and technique.They are eliciting in the rasika by these impersonal means a response that is equally impersonal because it is responding not to a person but to a series of artistic devices. But we are speaking here only of the penultimate phase. completion of the rasa.. subtle The final phase, the completion of the rasa, occurs when the experience of the sensuous, having been tranformed into the impersonal mode of the lyrical, makes a sudden connexion with the classically constrained personal force of the dancer and, in doing so, awakens a correspondingly constrained person in the rasika, so that we must allude here to the meeting of two extremely subtilised selves – so subtle, indeed, that the mutual recognition goes, as it were, unrecognised. This subtle meeting and interplay of subtly personal minds is typical of the classical in every form of classic art and is really indispensable to the full representation and appreciation of any classical recital. For, just as there cannot be anything genuinely sensuous in the sharing of the completely impersonal, so there can be nothing truly lyrical unless its creative realisation is graced by the personal presence made evident in the personal ‘touch’ and style, however constrained and even ultra-refined these may turn out to be. The reason for this, as classicists have always universally known, is that lyricism is finally as inseparable from love as love is inseparable from persons and impossible of realisation in the realm of the purely impersonal. a relational experience So that we may conclude that what the rasika wants, and is in fact owed, in the course of his or her full intelligent appreciation of the dance, is a relational experience of responsive and answering love on an unusually rarefied plane of refinement. ************************************************************************************************************************************ Supported by: WorldWide Indian Classical Dance Contributor: By Donovan Roebert Donovan Roebert is a writer and artist working in Hermanus, South Africa. His published works are: Samdhong Rinpoche: Uncompromising Truth for a Compromised World, The Gospel for Buddhists and the Dharma for Christians and Lama Charlie???s Big Bang and Whimper. His play, Jungian Moon, was nominated for the Artes Award for Best drama. He is an avid follower of Indian Classical Dance & Culture. Buy Odissi Girl Online *All views are of the contributor. Key words & Credits: Donovan Roebert, Natya Shastra, Rasa, Odissi Girl, Article, Indian Classical Dance, Pooja Hirwade Kathak, Bharatanatyam, Odissi, Kuchipudi, Manipuri, Sattriya, Mohiniyattam, Kathakali August 2017, 817/26A.1 **A Worldwide Indian Classical Dance Report Support: Bhavanvitha ******* |