Preeti Vasudevan is a 2018-2019 Jerome Robbins Dance Division Research Fellow. The participants in this fellowship cycle focused their research on Merce Cunningham, as 2019 markes the centennial year of his birth.

Preeti began taking lessons in Bharatanatyam, a style of classical Indian dance, at the age of four. In this blog post, she recalls connections she has made with Cunningham technique throughout her formal education. Preeti continues to observe a connection between her contemporary dance-theater works and Cunningham. She is interested in trips that Cunningham and music director-composer John Cage took to India to perform, and anxiously awaits the preservation and availability of letters from a Bharatanatyam artist with whom Cunningham stayed during that tour.

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I consider myself a wild card in the Cunningham mix! What is an Indian dancer doing researching Merce Cunningham?

A journey into the past

Backtrack 18 years, where I am in London enrolled for my Masters in Dance Studies at the Laban Centre. I am there to "swing the pendulum" with my own classical Indian dance, Bharatanatyam, and see what this ancient form is all about. Thus far, I had been touring either as a solo dancer with my own troupe of musicians or playing lead roles in my teachers’ dance company from India. During my time off, I collaborated with many western artists and, through these exercises, found myself developing new thoughts towards my dance form.

One of my specializations was choreography at the Laban Centre. With no real structured classes to attend at the centre, I located Cunningham-based classes at The Place, one of the premiere places for contemporary dance training in London. With more knowledge on Graham technique (classes I took in midwest America when I wasn’t on tour), I walked in blind to a Cunningham class. My first impression was "this is ballet with a curve!" Clearly not for me! However, I felt a certain draw to the approach. The isolations and use of spine were different than what I had experienced. Given, I was looking like the clown of the class filled with beautifully trained western dancers; I nevertheless felt I had a place amongst them.

Surprisingly, it also took me no time to find the intention of the movements I encountered. My own form uses isolations and we see the body as a revolving kaleidoscope while keeping the Whole intact. It’s the constant state of flux within the body, shifting internal energies, in which I found a common ground between Cunningham technique and Bharatanatyam. Was I imagining this?

For almost two years through my graduate studies, I went back regularly to take these classes, much to the amusement of the teachers (there comes that Indian dancer again!) What I didn’t realize then was that Merce Cunningham, through his approach, was allowing me to liberate myself from themes and variations and get straight to the point—the body! Accustomed to a whole cultural baggage of a thousand Gods and Goddesses, not to mention the centuries of male poets devoting themselves as the ultimate sacrifice to their Gods through the female body, I felt a new lightness—it was just me and my body! The issue was I had no safe areas to depend on. I had to confront the omnipresent question: Who was I?

Classical forms, whether eastern or western, are by and far visualizations of musical compositions. The dependency on music to transport oneself and the audience is a given. With over 20 years of this dependency, I now worked with silence, the dinning sounds of London streets, the shuffling of my own feet, and occasional sighs emanating from my own body giving up on art-making. Indian dance in the early 20th century forsook the 360-degree engagement with the audience to the frontal proscenium—as part of the reformation and revival of the dance, purifying it from recent historical slander.

What was gained was the emergence of training of women and men (though mostly women) from upper-caste societies, raising the status of the dance and bringing a new elitism to the experience. What was lost was the body! Submerged in the political turmoil of pre-independence movement, Bharatanatyam became a voice for Independent India. Hereditary dancers either became enveloped as teachers to impart their art for future generations, allowing the formation of a modern codification by the new dance makers, or were lost in coffee table books of the high society in exoticized black-and-white pictures. We went from sensual three-dimensional sculptural beings to two-dimensional paper cutouts in linear formations.

Back in the Laban studios, in that silence and stripping of my cultural signifiers, I rediscovered my spine, a sensuality, almost androgynous but satisfying. Frontal could be anywhere and my back had an equal status as the front of my body—shocking! The form started to unravel itself and I started to get addicted—is this what Merce was going through as well?, I wondered.

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Fast-forward 18 years, and I am bestowed a wonderful fellowship by the Jerome Robbins Dance Division to do research on Merce Cunningham and his connection with India. Merce, in my mind, has by now become a western choreographer creating abstract movements. Submerged in my own contemporary works, I had forgotten my London experience, left it (and Merce) behind in some research drawer, randomly archived. An opportunity to revisit the dusty drawers.

1964—six-month world tour—India! John Cage’s history, more familiar to me, allowed an access route that took me directly to a dear friend in India whose family had planned the Cunningham tour of '64. With a special invitation to India, the then-struggling group of abstract, modern dancers planned a six-month tour of the world. A good place to start, I felt. After all I knew this family well and could find out the Indian connection for my fellowship. What I didn’t know was that, for almost two decades, Merce Cunningham had been exchanging personal letters with the Bharatanatyam artist with whom he had stayed during that tour, and they had had a series of communications the world of dance was yet to discover.

Recounted by the dancer’s daughter, Mrinalini Sarabhai became a dear friend of Merce Cunningham and, to reciprocate their gratitude to her hospitality, the Cunningham company helped by organizing the North American tour of her Indian dance company in the 1970s. These letters between Mrinalini Sarabhai and Merce Cunningham are still in India waiting to be discovered and read, and re-order history.

The archives at NYPL allowed me to observe Merce’s expressions during interviews with Indian dancers during his three tours to India (1964, 1984, and 1990). Without giving too much away, he would periodically throw his head back and laugh, with a twinkle in the eyes, when asked if he was influenced by Indian dance. I have met a few Gurus in my time and his reactions often reminded me of them. So much to say and yet it’s a universe that one can’t simply put into words.

What he didn’t say in words, I saw in his movement. He was full of theater, and his facial and hand expressions were exquisite. It wasn’t a case of being a wonderful dancer, no—his was being infused with a deep spiritual philosophy, a questioning one that seemed to participate with the joys of chaos. That is what connected me to him. While I loved seeing his dancers move, and his own choreography was and still is challenging, it was the way he moved that struck me the most. As a person affected deeply by rhythm (given his history with tap dancing), his inner timing was filled with micro rhythms, quite similar to Indian rhythms themselves. Out of curiosity through my research time, I interviewed a few of his dancers from the 1964 tour. Each one, through their immense generosity, gifted me with their personal experiences in India, but none could tell me much about what Merce went through or even if he was interested in Indian dance. How could a man who moved with a combination of such abandon and precision not be affected or impacted by one of the biggest and oldest cultures of art making?

A series of photos of Antic Meet caught my attention. There is one image which stood out: Merce was having an internal joke. I saw him imitating Shiva (the Hindu God of Dance) in his iconic pose, what most westerners would relate to as a front arabesque. Except it wasn’t! It was grounded in an Indian body attitude. The grounding of the pose is not to move away from the standing leg, nor did it have a Sagittal directional intention. It was established in its Vertical Dimension with the upper body in a very sensual, fluid form—Shiva! (I was later told it was not from Antic Meet after all, but Merce actually creating a pose inspired by his years of interest in Indian philosophy!).

Towards the final part of the fellowship, I received some gold dust. Focusing so much on 1964, I hadn’t realized that, in the special collections, sat a box with curious materials yet to be sorted. That box was kept aside for me to rummage through and I stumbled upon what I now feel is my next step into the Cunningham world: his 1951 work called 16 Dances for Soloist and Company of Three. With music created by John Cage, this work was the first in which Merce tested his now famous Chance method.

Why this excited me was that the work itself was entirely inspired by the nine emotional states in Indian Theater. Merce interpreted each emotional state through the definition of the Indian lens, took the Gods out of it, and brought the human experience into it. I couldn’t find a video of it, as it was only performed twice, but the few photographs I encountered were straight from the world I grew up in. There was my answer. The complex storytelling style in Indian theater drew him to consume it and then create his version through what he did best—his body.

Speaking with Indian artists who had some experience with Merce over the years, I discussed this aspect, hoping to get some insight. After all, I couldn’t be the sole discoverer of this fact. There have been many before me, in a time when there was much more of an exchange in the arts. But none that I spoke with knew of this work and its influence. I have since sensed an excitement from both Indian and western dance communities of this information that has been veiled for a while, lost in history, and only a few remaining to muse over the time of the past.

The future

I am not writing a research paper here—it’s a blog post, a personal statement, a sharing, a musing. Something as artists we ought to do more of to share with the public. Research, as many of us know, opens the door with a promise and then leads us down the rabbit hole into incredible discoveries, often leaving you amazed but lost—like Alibaba looking at the treasures in the cave. But every now and then, a lamp calls to your attention and that’s the one you know you need to seek. I feel, at this stage, I have seen a lamp calling me. A lamp that can possibly throw a new light into the history and development of one of the most iconic choreographers and humans of the 20th century—the connection between Bharatanatyam, its checkered history, the philosophy of its art-making, and its connection with early-20th century modern dance in America—through Merce Cunningham.

As a practitioner, this I find a very exciting step to enter. As a choreographer, it’s a gold mine to take my own form further into a 21st century identity without throwing the baby out with a sluggish, cultural baggage-infused bathwater. Shiva was all about regeneration and distillation expressed through the body—the stillness of the chaotic cosmos. Merce, to me, might just be the modern universal entity who shows where precision and abandon marry—with a twinkle in his eye and a chuckle in his being!