Every artist confronts her past, and, in the case of the Indian dancer Bijayini Satpathy, that past is both a country and a colonial legacy. Satpathy performs Odissi, a dance style from the eastern state of Odisha which is one of India’s eight classical dance forms. Although Indian classical dance is commonly assumed to be ancient and reverential—and there is a documented history of devotional dancing extending back more than two millennia—all eight of these designated classical styles are modern, post-colonial inventions.
Even before the British formally departed the country, in 1947, Indian authorities had set out to give their emerging nation its own indigenous theatrical arts, and gurus and dancers from various regions began assembling standardized forms out of a dizzying variety of local practices and traditions. By 1952, four of these freshly codified dance styles—bharatanatyam, kathak, kathakali, and manipuri—had been formally recognized by the government, and given an élite Western stamp, “classical,” a word that, as Anurima Banerji points out in her book “Dancing Odissi,” had no true equivalent in Indian languages until British rule. Exponents of Odissi pushed for inclusion and exhibited the form at a landmark meeting in New Delhi in 1958, with Nehru himself presiding over a celebratory reception. Odissi gained official recognition two years later and has since been joined by other newly defined forms.
The dances these gurus came up with mostly privileged Hindu traditions and texts, even though, historically, dance across India was shaped by many religious and philosophical contexts. (Odissi, for instance, also has Jain, Buddhist, Muslim, animist, and secular theatrical roots.) Everything was tightly regulated. There were rules for postures, steps, and musical structures; for textual and sculptural sources; for performance, including what order particular pieces should be performed in. The new national dances were also cleaned up, following the lead of purity-minded British social reformers who had stigmatized temple dancers as prostitutes and tried in some cases to ban them. Others tried to strip the dances of overt sexuality—a fool’s errand, as one glance at the erotic S-curved body in Odissi proves. Caste played a role, too. In some traditions, such as bharatanatyam, from Tamil Nadu, temple dancers were typically of low caste, but, in the remade, classicized version of the form, bharatanatyam became largely the province of bourgeois Brahmin women. Today, a few lower-caste dancers, such as Nrithya Pillai, are trying to take back their art. Meanwhile, some Hindu nationalists have made moves to link Odissi to their cause, in disregard of Muslim and other historical influences on the art form. In 2018, Narendra Modi’s government even nominated the Odissi dancer Sonal Mansingh to the parliament.
Odissi’s codified isolations involve moving the eyes, neck, torso, palms, fingers, ankles, toes, and heels independently and in opposition to other body parts—there are dozens of exercises for the eyes alone—but Satpathy has never been orthodox in her approach.
Satpathy, who is fifty, is no stranger to the ironies of her art. She began dancing as a child and later studied in the style of Kelucharan Mohapatra, one of the male gurus who codified Odissi, in the fifties. Among the techniques she absorbed was the virtuosic “gotipua” style, which emerged during the Mughal Empire and was traditionally danced by young boys cross-dressing to perform female roles. In 1993, she joined Nrityagram, a female troupe based in Bangalore. At Nrityagram, which means “dance village” in Sanskrit, dancers and students live, breathe, eat, and sleep Odissi in ways that recall the immersion of past devotional and temple practices, except that here the devotion is aesthetic, not religious. (Satpathy is agnostic.) In a further spirit of independence, Nrityagram avoids having male gurus; instead, the women are their own collective guru, and, over the years, their art has drawn on a variety of sources outside of those prescribed by the official Odissi form.
Satpathy herself has never been orthodox in her approach. As the director of education and a lead performer at Nrityagram, she supplemented established Odissi exercises with yoga, martial arts, ballet, Pilates, and jogging, and even made up her own exercises to stretch the capacities of her dancers and the limits of her art. A day with Satpathy might begin with a run and then move to Odissi’s codified isolations of the eyes, neck, torso, palms, fingers, ankles, toes, heels—each body part moving alone and in opposition to other body parts. (There are dozens of exercises for the eyes alone.) She also worked closely with Nrityagram’s artistic director, Surupa Sen, to bring a variety of ancient texts to bear on new dances. Yet, for all the innovations Nrityagram introduced, the troupe’s performances maintained a traditional Odissi look and feel, and in 2018, after twenty-five years, Satpathy left this village home to choreograph and perform her own dances.
Satpathy’s much anticipated first piece of solo choreography, “ABHIPSAA—a seeking” (abhipsaa is Sanskrit for “seeking”), was delayed by the pandemic, but finally had its New York première at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, where I saw it this fall. It will go on tour to various U.S. cities in the spring. (Full disclosure: Satpathy and Banerji have been in residence at N.Y.U.’s Center for Ballet and the Arts, which I founded and direct.) The work is made up of four dances, with original compositions by a team of musicians, including the extraordinary singer and composer Bindhumalini Narayanaswamy, who is trained in both Hindustani and Carnatic music. The four dances unfold with a clear trajectory, moving from youth to death, from form to formlessness. The first is a narrative dance inspired by an ode attributed to the eighth-century philosopher and poet Shri Adi Shankaracharaya, which Satpathy interprets as being about the “oneness” of male and female sexual organs and the presence in a young girl’s body of both masculine and feminine, human and divine. We continue with two movements that reveal the “seeking” of the title (“Vibhanga—broken and rebuilt” and “Virahi—in longing”) and conclude with “Vimukthi—the final dance.”
The performance begins in semidarkness, and we see Satpathy planted in a deep lunge, low to the floor, hands and arms undulating, as if searching the air around her. Bindhumalini’s aching, chantlike voice seems to move through jagged halftones in veering exploration of rhythm and tone. Satpathy is calm and clad in Odissi dress—elegant silks in deep mauve and bright blue, with wrist and ankle bracelets, hair pinned back, heavy makeup, and a large red bindi on her forehead. She deepens the lunge and eventually moves into a standard Odissi position, on one leg, the spine curved in that distinctive erotic S shape. She’s been standing here for decades and her body seems totally resolved, but—and this is where her seeking takes her—she doesn’t stay. Even when Satpathy is rooted, something in her body—arms, fingers, back, shoulders, neck, eyes, eyebrows—is always moving. When she turns and stands to show us her back, for example, her stillness is disrupted by waves of movement travelling up, down, sideways, through muscle and bone.
I kept trying to pinpoint the motor or source of her movement, which seems to come from everywhere at once, and to circulate through her body like blood. Her abdominal core—a common motor in dance—is hidden in folds of fabric and in the extreme Odissi arch of the spine, which throws her pelvis back and chest forward. She later told me that the motor is the foot. Not the muscles but the way the foot hits the ground, which sends energy up through the body and out through the head, limbs, and eyes. This is physical but also a matter of mind—the movement ends only when the intention driving it has exited the eyes and reaches us. The journey can be slow or fast, even instantaneous: this constant cycling of energy through the body is why her movement never appears static or doll-like, as Odissi can. Her lyricism even has a familiar Western modern-dance flow, which seems surprisingly natural in her Odissi body.
After twenty-five years as a star of the Odissi troupe Nrityagram, Satpathy has begun to choreograph and perform her own dances. Her new show is called “ABHIPSAA—a seeking.”
There are Hindu stories in these dances, but they are hard to follow unless you are versed in the meanings assigned to each pose. Dancers memorize these meanings in their training, but part of what Satpathy is up to, I think, is abstracting feelings of jealousy and love so that we feel them without any narrative or religious grounding. It is enough to watch her body and being slide between male and female, object and subject, to become fully absorbed in the dance. Ruptures in tradition and additions to it are interwoven, as if form were not set or rule-bound but malleable and absorptive. The second dance in “ABHIPSAA,” for example, uses a Carnatic musical genre, the thillana, that is common in bharatanatyam but not in Odissi. Moving to it, she breaks further from Odissi’s formal poses: a hand loses its shape and falls to the floor; a Pilates-style reclining position is held insistently long.
