Body | Space | Time

By Ranjana Dave

An extract from the essay featured in Projects / Processes Vol. 2 (HarperCollins India, 2019) which discusses a dance programme comprising commissioned performances curated by Ranjana Dave and showcased at Serendipity Arts Festival 2018. 

While creating Boundary Conditions (2018) in a heritage structure, Shivaswamy began to think about the meaning of placing moving bodies in a space that had a character of its own. Using the courtyard of the Palace allowed him to play with textures and levels. The stone surfaces, grooves on the staircase (from an era when carpets may have been draped and tethered to the stairs for special occasions) and the dramatic potential of the landing where the stairway ends, all shape the flow of the piece.

At the beginning, Shivaswamy, who is also one of the performers, is lying face down in a bed of salt, coarse and unprocessed, spread out in a thin layer across a section of the courtyard. Shivaswamy’s face and head are masked by a piece of cloth and a thick rope wound around his head, bells woven along its length. In its most common occurrence, this combination of rope and bells is used for cattle, the bells alerting herders to the whereabouts of their flock. Gradually, as the other performer, Manju Sharma, enters the space, Shivaswamy rises from his bed of salt and tethers the rope to a window-frame. Using this as a mooring point, he begins to rotate his body to unwind the rope as he moves away from the window. This is done in slow motion, and the audience that finds itself in the way of this unwinding must move to clear a path for the definitive trajectory of the rope.

The performance of Boundary Conditions at Adil Shah Palace combines live movement with a video installation. In the grooves of the sweeping stairway leading to the upper floors of the Adil Shah Palace, Shivaswamy places a series of tiny video screens, playing fragments of movement shot at several heritage locations in New Delhi. The space of the video installation is woven into the movement trajectory.

As Shivaswamy ascends the stairs, thumping his forehead with a microphone, producing muffled sounds of impact, Sharma standsat the very edge of the landing bending over into empty space as she swings her head to the beat of the microphone. This starts smalland grows into a movement of dramatic proportions. Her long hair streams over her face, swinging violently from side to side as she moves her head, prompting voluble speculation about the possibility of her plunging off the balcony.

In viewing the moving body as part of a broader landscape, our priorities as spectators change. The performance is no longer contained merely in the mechanics of the body. Instead, the body must constantly think of how it chooses to make itself visible in this landscape. The work of the viewer is also complicated because there is no fixed seating. The viewers move with the performers, implicating them in a process of decision-making—what to see and what to occlude, and how to pick vantage points to do this from. The viewers are also held more accountable; they might find themselves in the path of the performance and must choose how to engage or disengage from such a situation. Sometimes, their responses are equally visceral and tactile. In a section I later revisited on film, two performers walk along the length of the rope that Shivaswamy tethers to portholes in the space, encircling each other’s bodies with their arms. One encircles, the other wriggles out, and then they swap roles and repeat their actions. In their faces, you see no agitation—only curiosity— as the boundary is created and then circumvented. As they repeat, a photographer positions herself right behind them, at one end of the rope, squatting and contorting her body in similar ways and directions to keep the performers squarely in her frame.

In the constricted space of the courtyard, the camera is a recurring presence. Festival staff and members of the audience hold their phones up. As a viewer, what you can’t see in real-time in three- dimensional space is sometimes more visible on a smartphone screen.

*To read the essay in its entirety, kindly visit the Amazon for Projects/Processes shared in this newsletter to purchase this, as well as other volumes focused on research and writing around Serendipity Arts Festival.