Drawn from Practice: Of Process and Detritus
In a pit lies five recumbent bodies, and above them a fishing net is hung around a singular light source affixed to the ceiling. Enveloped in the emanating light, the huddled bodies move in progressive strides—imperceptibly at first, and then more assertively until they physically separate from each other. Standing using their own limbs at the end of this embryonic evolution, the bodies veer in different directions in the space while armed with an untainted curiosity for their surroundings. The bodies interact with objects, collide with/against each other, and engage in a shifting scape of energies towards a seemingly enlightened perception of altered ecologies—while the audience looks on from various vantage points. The mise-en-scene is minimal and is animated by the asymmetries of the dancers’ movements and Karshni Nair’s evocative score.
Staged at the Experimenter Gallery, Hindustan Road (Kolkata), the performance piece Detritus was conceived by choreographers Paramita Saha, Surjit Nongmeikapam, Prashant More, and dramaturg Diya Naidu. The piece emerged from the choreographers’ practice at the intersections of art and environment, and a subsequent collaboration with the dance collective Continew. The performance was mounted as part of Experimenter’s programme A Site for Encounters, in conjunction with the gallery’s ongoing exhibition at its sister site at Ballygunge Place. Titled Drawn from Practice II, the exhibition looks at drawing as not only a scaffolding for accumulative layers but as a process that accommodates gestures, lines, marks and traces as self-standing units of expression. Detritus emerges from this premise of considering drawing not only as a tool but a performative medium unto itself. The performers convened online for discussions, following which they met on-site with the choreographers in tandem to progressively build on their rehearsal notes. Drawing became a matter of both genesis and documentation as personal experiences, cognitive maps and memories extensively infused the development of the constitutive movements.
The piece reflects on refuse, waste, and remnants as well as their impact on the environment. Using the L-shaped pit in the gallery as a convergence point, the dancers manoeuvred the unique architecture of the space to create trajectories of traversal across registers of urgency, reflection, and quietude. Sessions with the lecturers had further informed their thinking on the issues, including reflections on the East Kolkata Wetlands and the impact of their depletion due to urbanisation drives on the communities dependent on them—as enabled by artist-scholar Nobina Gupta of Disappearing Dialogues. This was followed by interactions with Marc Rees, who led virtual exercises in what he terms the “square mile”—here the dancers created visual patterns from their childhood memories revolving around homes and locales, which were eventually distilled to the use of certain props that emerged through these emotional connections. One of the props was soil, and the memory of its interaction with skin. The soil was soon packed into potlis (fabric pouches) to denote a sense of proprietary evolution in the relationship, explained Paramita Saha. The soil translated to sand in the performance piece, and the potlis were foregrounded through continual use and exchange of hands, as the dancers’ bodies accumulated, subtracted, acquired and stole from each other in an extended comment on consumerist impulses. Sand was further uncontainable—resisting grasp and slipping on tangents, despite attempts to colonise it.
The formal showcase of the performance piece was preceded by several days of rehearsals that were open for the public to walk in and watch, thus already including the audience in its fold. As the private reflections of the dancers came in precarious contact with the public realm, process was established as central to the creation and sustenance of the piece.
Open-ended, formless, and premised on constant revisions, the performance piece was shaped through a series of encounters between dancers exploring similar performative vocabularies around the altered constitution of the body and its ecological extensions. The friction between body and space, line and movement, and light and darkness inform the detailed shifts in pace and tone in the piece. Co-regulated in a tableau of landscapes, objects and incidents, Detritus traces alterations through notations in space. Akin to the exhibiting artists, the performance piece takes the conceptual arc of drawing as the blueprint to deliberate on modes of mobilisation beyond its normative understanding. Finally, in its performative register, the piece retains the structure of the blueprint while using it as a backbone to sketch new pockets of growth and exploration.
All photographs courtesy of Ivy and Pine Studios and Experimenter gallery.
