Prologue: a woman split

This is an old story. From everyone, everywhere.

Ten dancers lie upstage like logs ready to be loaded on a truck, their faces turned away from the audience, arms extended overhead and feet flexed, crossed at the ankles.

A woman.

Downstage, a single dancer.

And a garden.

She slaps her foot and lifts her left knee high.

A fruit and a pit. Her heart a seed.

Her elbows fold in towards her heart. She cradles an invisible baby between her two hands. Stretching into a long, impossible lunge, she balances her weight precariously on the outside blade of her front foot.

She - a woman split.

Twisting at the core, she extends her left arm overhead. Fingers in the tripataka mudra — her ring finger folded down and other fingers extended. She is taut as a coil, ready to spring.

September 2015

She - a woman split. This phrase from Heid Erlich’s poem echoes in my mind. Perhaps these words are poignant because I am here in the audience feeling like a woman split. My newborn nestled on my chest; his alternating sleep and cries divide my attention between the stage and his needs. I am in St. Paul, MN, for the premiere of Ananya Dance Theatre’s Roktim: Nurture Incarnadine during a yearlong ethnographic study of this contemporary Indian dance company of women artists of color. This study is instigated by my burning questions about the role that concert dance plays in a time of environmental injustice, when environmental “goods” and “bads” are unequally distributed along the intersecting lines of race, class, nationality, sexuality, and gender. Can these inequities and the power dynamics that created them be explored or even transformed through dance? If so, what is this dance and how can it be read?

Ananya Dance Theatre (ADT)’s Roktim occurs in four acts, each comprised of vignettes on the themes of women, land, seeds, and soil. Act I is imaginary mega-corporation ProntoFeedzAll’s laboratories installed in the front yard of the O’Shaughnessy Auditorium at St. Catherine’s University. Act II takes us inside ProntoFeedzAll’s seed factory on the proscenium stage. Act III continues on this stage, telling stories of women’s relationship to land, food, family, seeds, and love. These individual stories weave an epic narrative that intersects environment and social difference; created by combining myth, history, biography, and science—an “environmental justice biomythography.” Audre Lorde’s literary biomythography is a useful construct for reading dances that elaborate visionary tales of personal and societal survival in communities of color (Albright 2001; Carey 2011; Chatterjea 2004). The biomythography concludes in Act IV when the dancers reclaim the front yard of O’Shaughnessy, leading the audience back outside where we dance together.

The following performance analysis was formed during multiple viewings of Roktim over the course of a year, hour-long interviews with ADT company members, participation with the artists in the studio during the creative process for Roktim, and travel with the company on a tour of the production. In addition to my field notes and remembered movement experiences, I used video footage to re-examine specific moments in the work that pointed to issues of critical sustainability.

Through this analysis, I hope to extend existing scholarship from eco-dramaturgy, a corollary of green cultural studies that puts ecological reciprocity and community at the center of theatrical and thematic intent (May 2010a). Eco-dramaturgy emerged in response to calls for the theater to engage with urgent environmental issues (Chaudhuri 1994). In recent years, as Heddon and Mackey (2012) point out, there is no small amount of environmental theater being made, but there is still a lack of critical engagement with this kind of performance. Inspired by the questions a dance scholar would ask (Foster 2003), and in search of what May (2010b) called a dangerous performance reading practice that can explore our ecological situatedness, I use recent scholarship from ecocriticism, dance studies, and environmental justice to build my analysis. The format of this article reflects the still-being-reconciled nature of my reading; literacy arrives in flashes—interruptions of one idea with another.

The intersections of body, culture, and environment are relevant beyond the field of eco-dramaturgy. If it is “in the myriad relationships between material practices and ideas—especially in cross-cultural contexts—that day-to-day planetary life is lived and futures are governed: practices and ideas that are inseparable from issues of representation,” (Huggan and Tiffin 2015, p. 6), then dances like Roktim seem to me to be a crucial future site for theorizing critical sustainability. Dance is a set of material practices and ideas, both a representation of the body and the act of creating that representation (Albright 1997). In unpacking how the material practices of this dance create and represent environmental justice, I hope to bring a corporeal perspective to critical sustainability literature.

Act I: caught in the ProntoFeedzAll mesh

“Our scientists have split the seed and added a new gene…” declares my guide into his megaphone. He is leading a group of us towards the steps of the imposing stone façade of the theater, a cold drizzle overhead. Two dancers slowly rotate on the dais, displaying white t-shirts printed with “ProntoFeedzAll” and a seed logo. “Fat-Away Squash™, eat anything you want and still lose weight instantly!” He cheerfully continues. The dancers inflate bellies and hips with hidden balloons, rotating like gyro meat on a vertical broiler. When a dancer unceremoniously squashes her distended abdomen with her elbow we laugh. Overhead, the herald of a triumphant march signals us to follow our guide’s white lab coat to the next exhibit in the ProntoFeedzAll laboratory.

Three dancers draped over pillows lazily scoop imaginary rice out of a bowl with two fingers, a karthari-mukha mudra. “These people were starving in their own countries, so they volunteered to become our test subject pioneers!” A dancer lethargically raises her iPhone to take a selfie, an odd dance to the buzz of other tours happening simultaneously along with the noise of shuffling crowds. Our guide grins: “You can view them here, in their habitat, or follow them on Twitter and Instagram!” “You can view them here,” echoes from the other side of the cage, as another guide repeats these same words a few seconds behind our guide. A nervous chuckle erupts from the audience, gazing at these three brown bodies. One of these bodies begins to gag and shake, hacking up a long piece of plastic. Throughout the lab all the dancers begin vomiting plastic. The tour abruptly concludes, our guide anxiously ushering the audience inside to the proscenium. “Nothing to worry about, just a standard glitch. And what fun! We have so much to learn from our glitches.”

Roktim is an unconventional example of an environmental dance in both content and form. Environmental dance, the “umbrella of performance and somatic techniques concerned with the relationship of the human to the other-than-human landscape,” (Stewart 2010, p. 32) often seeks to explore how dance may generate new ecological knowledge and reconnect people to a sense of unity with an imagined pristine landscape. Recent literature describes environmental dance as an eco-phenomenological act (Stewart 2010), a performance of an ecology of place (Lavery and Whitehead 2012), an effort at re-indigenization (Walla 2018), and a way to transform the body into a gathering place, able to listen and respond to the field of forces in the landscape (Allinson 2014). Environmental dance practices pioneered by artists Anna Halprin and Jennifer Monson engage the imagination of participants in remaking, repairing, or rediscovering a place perceived to have been damaged by culture (Handschuh 2014; Smith 1995). Contemporary artists in the West who undertake environmental dance often do so through an improvisational, natural dancing body trained in somatics forms like contact improvisation, authentic movement, body mind centering, and Bartenieff fundamentals.

These somatics practices developed in the USA during the post-modern dancing era (1960–1980) and remain deeply intertwined with current modern dance aesthetics and training. Early practitioners considered somatics as a utopian practice that could uncover a natural bodily logic (Duncan 2014) through kinesthetically pure movement. Though positioned as a rejection against codified forms, somatics’ search for a natural dancing body has a deep history in Western modern dance forms. The mother of modern dance, Isadora Duncan (1877–1927), rejected codified ballet techniques attempting instead to map the harmony and divine continuity she found in nature onto her natural body (Daly 2001). Duncan passed her search for a natural body to Martha Graham (1894–1991) and Doris Humphrey (1895–1958), for whom natural movements were based on the use of breath in choreography and their stylized, codified techniques. In the subsequent post-modern dancing era, dancers rejected these techniques in favor of improvisational practices to create a natural body that danced with “action undistorted”—a unique and idiosyncratic personal movement vocabulary derived from everyday movements (Banes 1987, p. 41). In order to achieve these natural, everyday movements, somatics practitioners used choreographic modes such as including non-trained dancers as bearers of natural movement (Banes 1987) and imagistic exercises in the studio based on scientific observation of nature interpreted through the body (Fensham 2011).

As the post-modern era evolved into the current contemporary dance era, the economics of the 1980s–1990s shifted how dance was funded in the USA. There was now a need for entrepreneurship on the part of the individual dancer (in order to survive) leading to an increased emphasis on individuality and idiosyncrasy in movement and choreography (Banes 1987; Duncan 2014). Universities and other dance-training institutions were similarly pushed to be cutting-edge, which they attempted to achieve by employing teachers and artists who had produced successful choreography and could attract students via their idiosyncratic practices. Somatics thus transitioned from an anti-establishment practice juxtaposed against codified forms to the dominant model in the academy, and it is from within the academy that current ecological dance scholarship built on the somatics tradition emerges. Though imagined as individual expression, dancing naturally has always been constrained by specific cultural ideas about what natural dance looks like.

Performed by highly-trained bodies using the kind of codified aesthetic rejected by somatics practitioners, Roktim is not about nature in the way that environmental dance generally has been. The inclusion of the industrial food system in Act I unworks nature, exposing the hidden labor of the mesh of beings—human and other-than-human—behind this romanticized ideal. Foregrounded, the cheerful chatter of a white, male scientist/tour guide in his lab coat, an ode to expertise. Backgrounded, black and brown dancers vomiting plastic. Juxtaposing these bodies against each other, choreographer Ananya Chatterjea clearly communicates that the global industrial food system sits on the backs of men and women of color. The dancers are mechanized and depersonalized—exhibits rather than humans. At the same moment their material personhood is emphasized—skin color, sexuality, (lack of) agency. The foreground and the background blur together, the scenery becomes a player as well, the squirrels and birds looking on bemused. At first, the dancers read as human, then they become Monsanto marketing materials, then genetically modified organisms, then human once again, all the while I am audience, complicit consumer, outsider, and insider.

This dizzy spiral catches me unaware in the mesh, ecocritic Timothy Morton’s metaphor for the interconnectedness of all things—a concept that displaces the person attempting to conceptualize it. He explains, “The mesh is vast yet intimate: there is no here or there, so everything is brought within our awareness. The more we analyze, the more ambiguous things become” (Morton 2012, p. 40). My reading of Act I is the kind of destabilizing ecological thinking that Morton describes. From my first reading until now layers of uncertainty unfold themselves and entangle me. Where once I was a stolid audience member shuffling along the path, now I am ------. The dance weaves me as human/other-than-human into ProntoFeedzAll and the O’Shaughnessy yard itself, whose mesh expands beyond a backdrop for my experience. Through my reading I become what Morton calls a strange stranger—a being interdependent with these other organic and inorganic beings, yet different from them, exploring the fissures of identity with and between these categories. I am odd to myself, disoriented by the dance and my place within it. We cannot ignore the realities of global food, nor go back to an imagined primal unity, the only way is forward. I stumble into the theater for the remainder of the show.

Act II: critical interruptions

The curtain rises on a hanging grid of long fluorescent bulbs. Brriing!! The sound of a factory clock signals the march of workers in perfect unison. Syncopated rhythm pounded by their feet, arms form diagonal lines that slice angrily across the body. A dancer whirls like a top, feet shuffling quickly and arms carve in, encircling the right eye in a small keyhole. An impossibly loud slap as her right foot drops and hands jab out, driving her body backwards. The pounding music threatens to overtake the dancers but they remain together in a painful unison.

Brrringg!! The factory shift ends. Black out. On stage right a dancer appears in a small box of light. Head bowed, she props herself up with a wood staff. Brrringg!! Factory begins. Factory ends. Stage left—another dancer. Arms clasped, reaching skyward, her whole body convulses. Brrringg!! Factory begins. Factory ends. A dancer appears center stage, catching a smell in her cupped palm. Following it around the stage she sniffs loudly, frenetically trying to locate its source. Dancers enter from stage left. Bent over the earth they plant seeds in straight lines as fast as possible, their backs contracted to reach the soil. One by one these dancers too catch the smell. They are overtaken and collapse on the ground. Black out.

Act II of Roktim feels like a slideshow that was dropped, mixing up the photographs. Brief solos seemingly unrelated to the ProntoFeedzAll world disrupt the recurring seed factory scenes, transporting me between realities. The unison of the seed factory, though oppressive, would be satisfying on a kinesthetic level after spending a week in studio watching the dancers struggle with these complicated steps and sounds. The narrative eruptions prevent me from enjoying it. When I sat down in the theater to watch Roktim, I and the rest of the audience committed ourselves to viewing a narrative work unfolding in a linear manner. Through these disruptions in Act II, the dancers break that agreement.

This disorienting choreographic structure uses the vignettes as a critical interruption, embodying a rhetorical strategy used by other environmental justice activists (Pezzullo 2009). Critical interruptions challenge taken-for-granted narratives and practices that sustain environmental oppression, opening up stories in order to allow for alternative endings (Pezzullo 2009). In Roktim, the seed factory’s satisfying unison is interrupted with the cost of this efficiency on these hyperreal bodies. The interruptions break through the narrative, demanding the audience to see the dancers’ shaking, sweat, and pain.

Some of the vignettes foreshadow longer scenes from Act III, others dissolve not to be seen again. The stories are unfinished, a sequence of events that is not complete and thus could have a possible alternate ending. A few moments read more clearly to me than others. The dancer propped on a staff seems a clear nod to the current Syrian refugee crisis, but the smelling solo confuses me and it is only later I learn that this section of the dance represents the death of four workers at a DuPont chemical plant.

These narrative disruptions echo the role Yorchha, Ananya Dance Theatre’s contemporary Indian aesthetic, plays on the proscenium stage. Yorchha “intersects principles from the classical Indian dance form Odissi (from the eastern Indian state of Odisha), yoga, and the martial art form Chhau (also from eastern India)” (Ananya Dance Theatre 2015a). The lines are curvilinear, bent at the elbow and wrist, with circling arms. The dancers travel with fast footwork in an angular lower body formation called chauk—a deep bend in the hips and knees, loose ankles, and released butt hanging from an emphatic curve in the lumbar spine. The upper body has a dense quality, as if shaping the space under the skin as well as around the skin in the circles that the arms and torso are making. There are spirals of energy flowing from feet, hands, and heads of the dancers. These spirals create practically tangible currents of light that emphasize the height of the stage. Underpinning these kinesthetic components are the principles of Shawngram—daily struggle and resistance, Daak—call to action, and Aanch—the heat produced when Shawngram is crossed with Yorchha (Ananya Dance Theatre 2015b). A marginalized movement aesthetic in contemporary concert dance, Yorchha lives between the labels traditional/ethnic and contemporary (Chatterjea 2010). The hierarchies of western dance place modern dance and its attendance somatics forms at the top, and “ethnic” forms such as Yorchha at the bottom, suitable for entertainment but not serious training (Robinson and Domenici 2010). This unequitable space the company claims as a site of empowerment, resistance, and knowledge production (Chatterjea and Wilcox 2013). These interruptions—of narrative and form—connect the political economy behind food systems to its human realities, reminding the audience that these stories are unfinished, and inviting us to connect our own stories to the work.

Act III: marigolds, meat, & materialities

“What did you think of how we used the marigolds this time?” a dancer asks me over drinks. Held in her hands, placed on the tree set piece, laid before her as she slides backwards into the splits, resting in front of a pile of bodies; upon her question this vivid gold garland becomes an integral part of my memories of Act III. During my first encounter of this act, the flowers were negligible, the whole a blur of stories and speaking and singing, tangled tales of recovery and relationship between women, seed, and soil. I felt adrift in the stories, unable to find something upon which to hang my reading. Six months later, while on tour with the company in Southern California, the marigolds become corporeal for me. They are made of fabric and thick—much more substantive than I had realized. I carefully wrap them up and pack them in the prop suitcase. Later that night, she and I discuss the history of the garland and how she uses it in her solo, marking to me a connection between her histories as a Tamil woman of the Midwest and my interception of Roktim as a white woman of the Mountain West. Now that I have held the garland in my hands, the metaphor becomes material.

Much of Act III comes from the dancers’ own histories. Ananya Dance Theatre’s creative process weaves these sharing of stories and research into justice issues with improvisations in Yorchha, creating raw material that Ananya shapes into the evening-length work. The process lasts a year. A critical part of this year is the inclusion of personal history and personhood of the dancers into the work (Wilcox 2009). Over and over the dancers told me that if you do not do your own work on your identity, to discover and claim your positionality within these stories, you will not have the emotional stamina to do the dance. Through my interviews I explored the dancers’ histories of land and how they brought those histories into the performance. These sacred moments sparked my own reflections on my histories, and as I entered into writing the performance, became a multi-year process of grappling with my positionality in the work.

I think the stories shared with me, and the work of the Ananya Dance Theatre artists are inscribed into my body. This is figurative and literal as I have been negotiating my body into and out of Yorchha with its deep hip openers and quick footwork during my fieldwork. Yorchha is very different from my own training in Western forms like ballet, somatics, and modern dance. The training has changed how my body moves, which as a dancer, I knew to expect. What I did not expect was how my engagement with Roktim would change my body outside of the studio.

Coming from a sustainability background and a farming community, I am aware of the issues the work explores: sustainable agriculture, food justice, seed sovereignty. Despite my knowledge of these issues, actually changing how I act and particularly what I eat remains complicated. Recently an image of a woman at one of 2018’s marches popped up in my social media. She was holding a sign that read “Ugh, where do I even begin?” Working in the sustainability field sometimes feels exactly like that image, no individual decision is quite enough to create social change, and yet undertaking these actions requires monumental energy.

I was surprised to find that through entering Roktim in this research, my body—my appetite—has changed. What was once a weekly burger craving disappeared. In this small example, I found my body beginning without me, running ahead of my mind, of my good intentions, and my mental fatigue and cynicism into action. This appetite shift is a very small and perhaps silly thing in relationship to broader oppressive systems, but sparked as it is by an inexplicable change in my physiology instead of my thinking, this shift feels radical to me. As researcher, audience member, and participant, the stories I dance in community begin to act upon me. In my own body, the metaphor of Roktim has become material.

Act IV: where we dance (ecologically) together

She - a woman split. Erlich’s poem does not end at this line. It continues; life grew from it. A seed to grow must split. The husk cracks and the green shoot emerges.

The dancers encircle a tree in the middle of the stage. Their arms are extended to cross each other, protecting this piece of their land. “Reviving Chipko,” the final piece in Act III is “a slow meditation… we build up to it” (A. Chatterjea, personal communication, September 17, 2015). In the center of the circle lies a pile of sticks the dancers collected from farms visited during their research for the piece. “De, Da, Dim” they chant, slapping feet turning them counterclockwise as they stare straight ahead. This circle expands to include the audience as they lead us out to the front of the proscenium for Act IV, where we dance together.

I have searched for a way to read Roktim not just through context, culture, description, but also through the impact of these stories on my own body. What is it to physically participate in the environmental justice movement of another community? How do I recognize the influence of their work without consuming or appropriating the stories (dances) of women of color? How do these bodies uniquely construct ideas about the environment, and about their bodies as environments? What is the intersection of this work with the political economy of dance? These questions, I think, could be foundational additions to the kinds of questions asked by dance scholars (Foster 2003), additions that open up the possibility of a corporeal critical sustainability reading.

What I call a corporeal critical sustainability reading may be the same as ecocritic Timothy Morton’s (2012) ecological thinking; a dizzy spiral of possibilities and disintegration of the boundaries between what is outside and what is inside. In the ecological thought, nature is not ever really “out there,” except as an idea of untamed wilderness which never really existed. Nature is in here, it is with us, it is us. Morton calls for art to help create the ecological thought with images that break down problematic idealizations of nature and expand our conceptions of the environment. Within critical sustainability, creating these new kinds of metaphors is a fundamental task (Cachelin et al. 2015) and a way that dance may be uniquely able to contribute.

Roktim demonstrates the radical interconnectedness new conceptions of the environment require, overturning the pre-established ideas of nature pervasive in most environmental dance aesthetics. Rather than an idealized natural dancing body reconnecting with wilderness, Roktim explores the relationship between the individual and the political economy, local action, and global impact. The dancers’ bodies craft space and time, shaping transition, energy, and flow to communicate unfinished stories of environmental justice. The dance brings a tangible, intimate, creepy thereness, requiring a focused presence and my own body within the work.

For Morton (2012), the act of writing is a similarly embodied way of making ecological art. He points out that like a body, the page is composed of cells, of entities with agency, and placing text on these cells employs a muscle memory and an attention to structure, poetry, and syntax. Bringing Roktim to life on the page becomes a way of dancing together with the performers. In my remembered writing of the performance, an ecological act of its own, I explore what critical sustainability looks like as it is corporealized. As I unpack the content of the dance, its impact on my body and those of the audience, and the material labor of those behind the work, the dancers and choreographer, this reading requires me to look not just at the dance but back at myself. Roktim: Nurture Incarnadine is not just about something, it is actually doing something, and it is doing it not just in the world but, also, in me.