Break the rules, just dance!
Contemporary dance groups in the city are getting innovative with their performances.
We all have come across various forms of contemporary dances, while we watched dance reality shows or just live performances. Recently, British Council with Wayne McGregor, a British dance choreographer along with some dancers from Attakalari, worked together to create ‘Mix The Body’. It is a digital interface for anyone to create contemporary dance choreography online.
Wayne McGregor, a British dance choreographer says, “I don’t think dance should be put in a box, there shouldn’t be any rules. It really depends on how you plug dance more and more into the real world and find more exciting opportunities for it to live.”
Some of the upcoming contemporary performances this week are, What’s Cooking, and one held recently by Wayne McGregor and other dancers called ‘FAR’. Contemporary dance has opened up so many possibilities for everyone and there are people who are constantly breaking grounds adding a new element to contemporary dance each and every day.
A Delhi-based dance artiste who has been performing for 10-years now, Sahiba Singh moved to Bengaluru a few years ago to join Attakalari and now runs her own dance company called Meraki. She elaborates on how contemporary dance is a non-structured movement. Sahiba says, “Contemporary dance has been around for quite a long time but has gained fame after the popularity of reality TV shows like Dance India Dance and Jhalak Dikhlaja. But, now it’s much more than just that. Now, contemporary dance is used as activism and showcases social issues like rape through dance. A lot of parents now encourage their kids to go for ballet and other forms of contemporary dance instead of the traditional dance forms as everyone is well aware of it.”
But, with technology enhancing rapidly, contemporary dance can be learned and seen on various platforms. Shrabani Basu who has been a performing contemporary dancer for 15-years,hails from Kolkata and now owns a dance studio in Bengaluru. She tells us that, “Since, the dance form does not have any structure, it can pick up bits and pieces from other forms and create a fantastic fusion form of their own. I’m a ballet-contemporary dancer, so I bring in dance elements from ballet to the contemporary form. There’s more awareness because of technology now, so people can easily differentiate between the various forms of contemporary.”
A contemporary dance enthusiast, Aswati Anand reveals that her most memorable dance performance was inspired by Shakespeare’s play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream but without dialogues. “You can’t generally have a Shakespeare play without dialogues but here we convey the essence of the play through movements because there are no dialogues,” she adds.