The power of silence

When the public address system announced the dance performance going to be staged was silent for a better part of its nearly hour-long run, I was both intrigued and worried. The latter was not about the dance-guru, choreographer and artistic director Sumeet Nagdev whose body of work commands huge respect, but about my rather poor attention span.

You see I'm the types who'll choose vocal music over instrumental any day. So, when the usual announcement asking people to ensure their phones were silent also said parents of young children/babies either go out before the performance or sit nearer to the exit, so the performance is not disturbed, I actually contemplated to leave. What could a silent performance convey and more importantly hold my attention, I wondered.

But I had a nice seat and had watched riveting act after act put up by students of Mumbai's dance company/academy Sumeet Nagdev Dance Arts (SNDA) as a part of their graduation day presentation. Within the first five silent minutes of Jan-Jaati (JJ), I was so drawn by the production that it would've needed some effort to pry me from my seat. It turned out to be one of the most evocative choreographic creations.

While raging over prevalent divisive sociopolitics, JJ never once tries a cop-out with feel-good escapism. Gender, caste, exclusion and the dogma of religion are all taken on head-on by this contemporary-jazz mix. This is definitely not for those who want to sit back and enjoy. Nagdev's choreography left me squirming in my chair through the act and rankled a long time later with the questions it raises. This marriage of art and social responsibility which forces you to reflect proactively and do something.

Later, backstage, Nagdev calls the production "a distillation of everything I've ever learnt in dance." Elaborating on the germ of the idea that created JJ, he says, "I often think about what's happening all around us. What if we create a dimension of inventiveness between the indigenous juxtaposing millennials? A dialogue between regularity and extemporary, orderliness and spontaneity, uniformity and equanimity may occur but can anyone answer when do we stop? In our dissension who pays the price?" he says and adds, "In JJ, I was trying to find an answer to these questions."'

The silence he says evolved organically. "No music or sound conveyed what I wanted to as powerfully as silence." He admits the struggle to surrender was huge. "While I like to think of the dogma outside, what about the one within? I realised I was also approaching the production from within the stranglehold of what I already knew and had done. After a month of practice, I trashed it all and began again," he explains. His companion all along was Rumi's Elephant in the Dark, which inspired him. "I wanted to create a work that gives people a chance to contemplate. I am not here to change people's spirits. It is the lack of space for shared opinion that is at the root of so much that is wrong with the world today."

That will require some mulling over. Silently, of course.