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DECEMBER 6, 2001 PADMINI CHETTUR “Fragility” Trained in Bharatanatyam, Padmini Chettur has been a part of the movement to modernise Indian dance for the past twelve years. She has worked as a dancer with the Chandralekha group while at the same time developing her own identity as a soloist and a choreographer. Her work is always to do with bridging the gaps between our classical memories and our contemporary selves, to do with redefining form.

The work explores fragility at a conceptual and formal level - the moments of abandoning strength to confront weakness, the moments of recognition that speak more clearly than words, this performing world of held breaths, trembling muscles and implicit emotion - fragility.

Co-production: Schaubuhne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin Theatre de la Ville, Paris
Choreography: Padmini Chettur, Music: Maarten Visser, Lighting: M Natesh
Dancers: Padmini Chettur, Krishna Devanandan, Malini Srinivasan, Sujata Goel.

What language was used for the words in the background?
It's no particular language, just gibberish. They are spoken by Kalairani, an artiste from the Koothu-P - Pattarai who does Tamil theatre, who worked with me and partly created the script with music, gibberish, instrument and her voice.

The gibberish sounds like German. Was it intentional?
No, it was not intentional.

Do you see a contrast in the fragility and the tremendous amount of physical control in the dance?
I think that for me it will be too simple to connect fragility and the concept in terms of finding a way of dance that would make the body fragile. Through that very control, what I tried to do is to create movement that suggested fragility, movement that actually made the body fragile. At the end of every incredible tension is always that moment when anything could go wrong. For me that was the interesting thing to really walk that border of control and the possibility of losing that control. The motion of repetition is to voyage emotionally, it's very subtle, but I tried to create the notional concept of the work but not an individual body so the dancers know clearly what they're doing and that's important for me. I wouldn't compromise that, whatever the actual concept. I tried to explore that concept much more than the level of choreography, the emotional input that I gave and must get back from the individual dancers themselves.

Can you comment about the progression of movement from your last piece and this one?
For me, as a dancer, it's not interesting to keep doing what I can do well already and am comfortable with. For me the big challenge is to push my body into areas that I'm actually not familiar with and the process of even finding a way to start training my body to tackle a different form and different kind of movement...for me that's the most interesting part of the work, more interesting than finishing the actual piece, to put my body during the process of choreography, to put my whole body really on the line and say I want to do something else.

More than fragility, there was complete disconnection between the movements of the dancers. The music by itself seems connected but...
I make certain choices in terms of the way I want to conceive my own work. As for music, Maarten also made some choices. But really the dance came first and the music came later and we tried somewhere to work the piece without overpowering and yet maybe it did create a sense of being the fabric underneath. Why we made those choices is not an intellectual decision. It's something that grew out of a really long process. I disagree when you say the movements seem disconnected with our bodies because I felt the movements were affecting our bodies in a very clear way. But it's true that I did want to create a sense of the dancer being isolated.

e-mail: pchettur@hotmail.com


The Other Festival Q & A: Audience Artist Interface