Chennai-based dancer Preethi Athreya approaches all her new work with an intrinsic belief that "we carry, inscribed in our bodies, the markings of our deepest emotional journeys." For her, getting to know one's own body is a meditative act. This is the line of enquiry that she further wishes to explore in her new work 'Light Does Not Have Arms to Carry Us'. With this grant, Preethi will create a new performance piece that interweaves dance, music, mime, video and voice, in an attempt to discover the body through different perspectives.

The performance is based on a composition for the piano by French composer, Gerard Pesson. Pesson wrote the piece for his friend and fellow composer, Dominique Troncin, shortly before the latter's death in 1994. The music for the piece was inspired by the writings of Pierre Albert Jourdan, whose one-line poem 'La lumiere n'a pas de bras pour nous porter' (Light Does Not Have Arms to Carry Us) forms the title of the musical composition.

Preethi explains that Pesson's composition is a very rare bit of music. Although a composition for the piano, it is played very rhythmically with the use of fingernails scraping the keys to produce a percussive effect. Most importantly, Preethi recognises the composer as someone who is interested in the body of the musician. He instructs the musician to scrape the keys softly or knock them with force, use the wooden ends of the piano, scratch, strike, caress and glide, which are very much like instructions given to dancers.

Inspired by this composition, Preethi had earlier collaborated on a project with a pianist and a foley artist. The pianist played the composition on a table instead of a piano, thus allowing its rhythmic pattern to resonate on a different surface; Preethi, through movements—like a scraping heel, a floating foot, a sliding arm etched the music in space; the foley artist mimicked filmed versions of herself moving in time to the music. The three interpreters kept passing the composition among each other, often taking the action beyond the actual music.

Preethi has now embarked on a solo project. Retaining the musical composition, she will now study bodily identity, not just physiologically, but also through memory, experience, habit and training. The music will initially be absent in the performance as Preethi attempts to express the music through movement. The viewer will access the music little by little at various stages in the performance. The entire composition will be played only at the end. Through this, Preethi hopes to get the audience to reflect on sensorial experiences. "We live in a very fast-moving world where the visual image on television and media is moving at a speed that leaves little room for thought or reflection," she says. In response to this, Preethi envisions the performance somewhat like a silent movie, but with occasional musical effect. She believes that this will enable the audience expand their imagination to absorb a rich collection of visual detail without worrying about what it means. Therefore this solo work is an attempt to capture the poetry of silence.

In doing this, Preethi's exploration will extend into the idea of translation. She will create narratives with movement, text and mime based on the structure and composition of the music. In other words, she will arrive at a visual rhythm based on an aural experience. This is an idea that is based on Delueze's theory of haptic vision, where the boundaries between the body and the space become fluid and the inside and the outside becomes permeable to each other.

After an initial round of discussion, the IFA team decided to seek expert opinions on the proposal. The two external evaluators, theatre director Sunil Shanbag and dancer and actor Arjun Raina, placed great trust in Preethi's ability to work on this challenging piece. Sunil particularly valued her 'creative irreverence'.

Preethi plans to premiere the performance by the end of March 2013 in Chennai.

 

This description is part of the institutional records created by IFA at the onset of the grant. The project may have changed in due course as reflected in the deliverables from the Grantee.