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VOLUME 2. ISSUE 2.
A Love Letter to Karachi:
Joshinder Chaggar’s Contemporary Dance Drama.

Zoha Husain responds to Joshinder Chaggar’s recent Karachi performance

Conversations, A Love Letter to Karachi (performed 23-27 November at the National Academy of Performing Arts in Karachi), is a beautiful exploration of the different facets of life in the city. Exploring themes of gender, diversity, violence, and personal growth, Joshinder ‘Josh’ Chaggar’s contemporary dance drama provides an intense viewing experience.

For most of the first half, we don’t see Josh at all. We see the city instead. The city is male-dominated (the cast consists of only two women), loud, erratic, ever-changing. And then we see this girl, Josh, enter the city’s chaos.

In her solo performance, we see Josh (who moved to Karachi 10 years ago) grapple with adjusting to her new environment. At first, her movements are precise, almost stubborn. She holds her head high, determined, with her feet firmly planted. And then her movements start to change. They become looser, freer. Through these movements, Josh explores the many internal struggles, of community and diversity, that come with living in a city like Karachi. Each performer plays with a different language. We hear a monologue in Punjabi, a few musings in Sindhi, and several different dialects and accents. Finally, we see Josh’s character start to acclimate to this environment.

The first person to join Josh after her solo is Shabana Hassan, the only other female in the troupe. She picks Josh up, tries to heal her, checks her hair for lice—women supporting women in hard times. And then the men return, and Josh suddenly becomes part of the larger synchronised dance taking place. She no longer swims against the tide; she is a part of it.

This love letter to Karachi is incredibly layered. Through dance, Josh explores how different people react to the city’s violence and unrest. When speaking to Josh after the show, she told me that she doesn’t try to make these statements consciously. That with dance, so open to interpretation, the piece can mean so many things to so many people. Conversations is such a piece. It will speak to anyone who has ever seen the terrifying beauty of a city like Karachi.

Zoha Husain is a filmmaker and a spoken word poet currently living in Karachi, Pakistan.

VOLUME 2. ISSUE .
TABLE of Contents
Dissent and Content

In October of this year, during its annual IGNITE! dance festival, Gati Dance Forum launched the much-awaited Tilt. Pause. Shift: Dance Ecologies in India. The book’s various essays consider how we in India might generate a localised, yet internationally-aware, vocabulary to discuss, describe, and push back against the various modes of contemporary dance practice in this country. The first of its kind, the book took three years to complete and anchored IGNITE!’s three-day conference themed Form. Identity. Dissent. The conference, with panels that ranged from “Activism and Sexuality in Performance” to “Pedagogical Modes of Transmission Emerging from Classical Dance”, raised many questions that run through the book: What is contemporary dance? How does it, or should it, speak to a classical or colonial past? How can it negotiate its present? What aesthetic form must that present take?

These questions, along with various performance works (such as Sujata Goel’s Dancing Girl, Daniel Kok’s Cheerleader of Europe, and Preethi Athreya’s Conditions of Carriage - The Jumping Project) that formed IGNITE! 2016’s lineup have helped shape Ligament’s November 2016 issue.

Through interview, essay, poetry, and photography collected from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, this issue attempts to unravel the aesthetics and politics that surround South Asian contemporary dance and its makers.

Deconstructing Intimacy: In conversation with Mandeep Raikhy
Mandeep Raikhy

Choreographer Mandeep Raikhy speaks with Ranjana Dave about his latest work, Queen-size.

It’s Not My Revolution If I Can’t Dance To It
Richa Bhavanam/ Naomi Kundu

Photo Essay

A Different Genre of Politics
Surjit Nongmeikapam

Surjit Nongmeikapam talks about his current projects, as a part of "From somewhere in the middle"

Nationalism and Dance: In conversation with Sadanand Menon
Sadanand Menon

Sadanand Menon, art critic and photographer, speaks with Ligament’s Editor, Poorna Swami, on the history of dance in India and the history of India itself.

Jasmine and Pepper
Karthika Nair

A Poem By Karthika Nair

Let us change the world! : Slogan-raising bodies in the JNU student protest
Meghna Bhardwaj

Meghna Bhardwaj, dancer and PhD scholar at JNU, reflects on ‘spirals’ and Euphoria in the JNU protest.

A Love Letter to Karachi: Joshinder Chaggar’s Contemporary Dance Drama
Zoha Husain

Zoha Husain responds to Joshinder Chaggar’s recent Karachi performance

Methods of Defiance
Venrui Perera

Choreographer Venuri Perera discusses dissent, dance, and community with Asim Siddiqui, as a part of "From somewhere in the middle"

Writing On Dance Laboratory - Open Call
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03-12 February, 2017 : 10 AM to 4 PM
(this does not include evening performances)

About

To pick up and run with a magazine that has had another life is never easy. There are those conflicting desires to find close continuity and to just scrap it all and start anew. Ligament 2016-17 reemerges from a half-way point. We want to build on the investigations and insights of the magazine’s past contributors and also find ways to say what they perhaps had wanted to say but could not, or forgot to, in that moment.

Ligament was founded to facilitate the articulation of an evolving language that encompasses the impulses of contemporary dance. The idea of “contemporary” is inherently bound to time, to a sense of history, rather multiple histories unfolding. In its 2016-17 iteration, we hope that Ligament can grapple with the idea of how dance might hold a place in-step with the patterns of active and forming histories, rather than remaining a canonised and pondered response to a bygone world. We’d like to embrace the immediacy of “contemporary”, and invite contributions from dancers, choreographers, arts practitioners, scholars, audience members, readers. In this way, we hope to reach for the intimacies, resistances, and fragilities that permeate the developing field of South Asian contemporary dance.

Articulating a medium as visceral, visual, and ephemeral as dance requires making connections to methods of thought and critique that lie outside evaluative language. So for Ligament 2016-17 we welcome, of course, the critical essay, but also audio, photographs, ekphrastic poems, interviews, and hybrid media of various kinds that might speak to us about dance, carefully and proximately. Like the anatomical connective tissue for which it is named, Ligament, we hope, can help us locate dance in tandem with the many bodies that produce and encapsulate it.

To those who find themselves here for the first time, welcome. And those whom we have met before, we are glad you are back.

—Poorna Swami, Editor





Get in touch with us at ligament@attakkalari.org