In the last five years, as I’ve made plays and performances, I’ve been curious about movement, about the role it plays in my work. In the last couple of years, I’ve collaborated with dancers in my work and they’ve invited me to be part of theirs. I sense I am part of a crossover, a meeting of disciplines and practices. Here, I document fragments of my experiences with dancers through four postcards.

From 2011

I come from a world where we admire your rigour, your training and discipline, and are often envious of it. As someone who is not formally trained in theatre, who is threading her watching experiences with her doing of theatre, I have found the ways a dancer’s journey unfolds very different from my own.

Kashyap Murali

Sometimes, after a warmup that included quick rotations of wrists and ankles and gentle head-bobbing from side to side—all of which led to severe panting—us urban theatre practitioners say, “You should see a dancer’s warmup! This is nothing”.

A hobby-actor, once after a visit to Nrityagram said to me, “The problem with urban actors is that they will never know what sadhana is”. He wasn’t referring to himself.

From 2011-2012

It has been two years since the Adishakti Source of Performance Energy Workshop. Veenapani Chawla, who is a collection of epiphanies, speaks about everything on stage being text—an idea deeply ingrained in Adishakti’s work.

Lekha Naidu

I wrote my first play, and you came in to work with my actors. We discussed ‘embodiment’, an elusive idea at the heart of performance. You were interested in my actors’ untrained bodies and how they would embody characters. You worked with them to understand falls, focus, and fluidity of action.

That was the beginning of our relationship. We had entered each other’s spaces.

From 2013-2014

Theatre as a verb: that was perhaps my biggest learning through the time I spent working as a theatre practitioner—as actor, writer, and director. Theatre, I began to see, was a becoming, a happening. It was the unfurling code within a dialogue, the world of meaning around a gesture, the constant sense of movement even in the static.

From The Retreating World/Last Tuesday directed by Kirtana Kumar.

Some of the most exciting theatre was in works of dance—by Pina Bausch, Akram Khan, Hofesh Shechter, Padmini Chettur—works that used movement as text, movement that spoke to itself, that examined form through form.

Now we were meeting more often in rehearsal rooms. I was bruised from your classes but I was invigorated by our conversations. What were the possibilities of us finding a way to meet? To really meet. Not just for you to speak and for me to move, but for us to dialogue through our practices.

Traditional forms have always used body, rhythm, and text in continuum. We had to — still have to — find ways to meet.

2014-2015

After a few weeks at the Ammanur Chachu Chakyar Smakara Gurukulam, receiving very brief training in some aspects of Koodiyattam—a form through which the actor can understand among other things, gaze, weight, presence—I began working on a short work, A Brief History of Your Hair. Two of you and I met. The lines blurred. We said our first words to each other.

Deepika Arwind

The rest of the year was spent expanding the piece to a full-length piece, negotiating our practices, our time, the ways in which we work. I worked with a delightful cast of actors and you dancers, day after day, for five months, asked critical questions about process to each other. Our findings were sometimes inconclusive, our explorations sometimes without result, but our eyes looked inward at our practices and outward, at each other’s.

This year, we’ve continued to talk. You’ve stepped into my solo rehearsal several times, simply making me walk, helping me with my cartwheels or aligning my spine to become a cat’s. I work with you as an actor in your work, as you negotiate my actor’s body, and my annoying tendency to do impressions. We will train together, ask more questions of ourselves and of each other, and make work in the spaces we make for ourselves.