Dancing duels of place and culture

Several dancers at this year’s Dublin Dance Festival are exploring the no-man’s-land between where they come from and where they call home

DIVYA KASTURI IS exploring “an in-between” land, she says. “When I go back to India, people introduce me as English and in London I am definitely Indian, but I would really like if I could be seen more integrated and identified with the place I live in, or am from.”

Kasturi is an Asian dancer and choreographer whose show NowHere is part of this year’s Dublin Dance Festival. The interrogation of concepts of difference, of cultural identity and exile, migration and settlement, is a fertile one for artists, especially the confusion created between a sense of displacement and, alternatively, feeling “at home”.

Kasturi trained in classical south Asian dance and later at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London. She lives two parallel lives and has maintained two parallel careers: one in the south of India where she was born and raised, and one in England, where she mostly lives and works. But despite the displacement, or probably because of it, she recognises this is a rich area for inspiration.

Many of her fellow artists are envious. “They say to me: ‘I am boring, white, have lived here all my life, no exotic alternatives.’”

Aakash Odedra, another Indian at the festival, is also aware of his dual identities, growing up as he did in the strongly Asian and English cities of Birmingham and Leicester. He believes that when you are raised in these mixed communities, it is hard to avoid searching for that sense of belonging. But, like Kasturi, he recognises and welcomes the creative challenge to both stay inside and outside his cultural milieu.

Odedra and Kasturi trained in the rigorous Kathak and Bharatanatyam styles and traditions, but Odedra says he needed to find a new and more appropriate dance vocabulary that interacts with both of the cultures in which he lives. And that he had to “find a new dynamic”, a way for this dance “to speak its new urban environment”. He was mentored by Akram Khan, who led a revival in Indian dance. Now Odedra has embarked on this new journey into a more contemporary style, and his Dublin Dance Festival show Rising includes three solos that were created for him by some of the leading names in modern dance-making, such as Russell Maliphant and Khan himself. This is testament to how performers and choreographers are seeking ways to mine the potential of multicultural artistic communities in Britain.

Divya Kasturi echoes the view that there is a need to create a new language, even in words. “We have to find more secular language for a dance that has up to now been expressed only through the spiritual dimension, bringing it with us into a contemporary world, not losing that dimension but aware of the changed context.”

Sometimes it is not crossing into the syntax of a new language that is required to open up a creative world, but crossing physical borders and being immersed in a new country and culture.

Yuval Pick, an Israeli choreographer whose work Score was seen at the festival last week, has been living in France for 16 years. Although exposed to Arabic, Yiddish and Hebrew, Pick needed a new language. “I feel there is an adolescence, culturally and politically, in Israel and the layers of older cultures have helped me in my work. I had to leave my home for creative reasons . . . It was a hemmed-in feeling, a physical thing as well as in the mind. Too little space, the country feels too contained, everything is too close.

“I use that sense of proximity, body contact and claustrophobia in my own dance-making.”

The title of his piece also translates, appropriately, as memory in Hebrew. In the manner of a latter-day Joyce mapping his native city, Pick returned to Israel to create the soundscape for his work. “I wanted to capture the very vibrations of the earth and street and to translate feeling through the sounds which mirror this suffocating proximity.”

Other festival performers have also explored this ghostly half-world of in-between identities. Sarah Dowling’s Wake, part of the opening double bill, was a way of retracing rituals belonging to her Irish heritage and absent in her adopted culture. There is a continuum of choreographers who, in common with other artists, are questioning their sense of identity and creatively using it as a filter.

As Yuval Pick says, this is “using your own heritage to see another culture, and using the other to get a perspective to see your own”.

Aakash Odedra’s Rising is at Project Arts Centre – Space Upstairs tonight at 7pm

Divya Kasturi's NowHere is at the Peacock Thursday and Friday. Dublindancefestival.ie