Dance for thy identity

She had a strong desire to tell a story about Pakistan and finally figured that dance was a perfect space to explore. And thus was born I, Dance. A documentary by Sonya Fatah, made with a grant from the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) and editing assistance from her husband Rajiv Rao, it tells the story of how Sheema Kermani, one of Pakistan’s best-known dancer-activists, used her art to protest against President Gen. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq.  Excerpts from the interview...

I, Dance emerged out of...
My desire to tell a story about Pakistan. I was trying to figure out how best to convey the challenges of political identity, culture and religion and the impact of partition, 1971 and military rule on a identity of a place. Dance was a perfect space to explore since it had suffered the most brutal assault on its freedom. What was Pakistan? Muslim, not Hindu. Something other than Indian. As a result, the most obvious associations to the other had to be crushed out of public memory.

Sheema Kermani became the most perfect device for this story, as she had not only chosen the most distant of the classical dance forms to Pakistanis — Odissi, but she had also been part of the Left movement, and continued to use her dance to affect cultural change.

A story of the struggle to overcome odds...
Sheema Kermani is the narrator, in a way. Her story runs parallel to the story of Pakistan, but she becomes the sort of moral voice (with her own contradictions, as well) reflecting on the state and on societal suppression. How does classical dance relate to Pakistan today? It doesn’t, if you look at it as a pure art form. The film shows us how the transitions happen. The purists continue finding new avenues to recreate their art through the inspiration of more locally accepted fables, stories and poetry — Rumi, Bulleh Shah, Fehmida Riaz, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, for instance. And the next generation tries to find its own imprint, merging styles and ideas despite the vacuum of state support.

The journey of creating the documentary...
After we received a grant from IFA, I started filming in summer 2011. I had just had a baby, so filming, as you can imagine, was a complex process of running between baby and schedules. We wrapped up four schedules (Karachi, Delhi, Karachi, Lahore) by winter 2012. But I waited for my editor to get freed up from a project and that took some months. Then we ran out of money, so we had to raise some more funds. We got support from Goethe Karachi and Goethe Delhi (Max Mueller Bhavan), and the last bit came from crowd funding through friends and family.

There were others like her...
Nahid Siddiqui, a Kathak dancer and former student of Birju Maharaj, is probably the most legendary of the lot. There was also Indu Mitha (who still teaches at 80), and there was her daughter Tehreema (Bharatanatyam) and Nighat Chaodhry (Kathak) among others. However, almost all left at some point during the martial rule to pursue their art in freer environments.

Nahid, for instance, set up a studio in Birmingham. Tehreema went off to Baltimore. Nighat back to London. Sheema, because of her political stance and her desire to fight against oppression, decided to stay back and used her art as a form of protest. Naturally, all of them suffered but this aspect of Sheema’s story drew me to her.

Politics, religion and art...
Everything influences us. This is the classic debate — does art inform life, or does life inform art. I suppose it depends on where you stand. If you ask me, I think no form of suppression is justified. That artistes react to it and create some of their best work as a result of it — as in the sort of work that shapes us and makes us question the human condition, is of course interesting.

I, Dance will be screened in the city this evening.