Dance of the Seasons

RESEARCH STATEMENT

Dance of the Seasons (Jayalakshmi 2023) is the film output of a 2022 Royal Society of Edinburgh call through its Scotland Asia Partnerships Higher Education Research (SAPHIRE), which aimed to enable research “to include a focus on environmental issues” (Royal Society of Edinburgh, 2023). The film was shot in Bengaluru, India, over the span of six days (from April 8 to 14 2023). Post-production was a long, arduous process with the film being finally completed in November 2023.

My commentary on the film is in the spirit of Glisovic, Berkeley and Batty’s discussion of the relationship between a screen work and the surrounding written text, recommending that the writing should not be merely a “report” but rather, a separate work – “one in which the writing and the moving image work each illuminate and expand one another” (2016, 12).

The Context of the Film

The standard United Nations definition of climate change is “long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns, mainly caused by human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels” (United Nations).

In terms of the dire consequences of climate change, India has already seen its fair share of problems with both droughts and floods. Bengaluru, where our film is shot, is famous as India’s “silicon valley.” The technology-based investment in the city rose from $1.3 billion in 2016 to $7.2 billion in 2020 (The Times of India 2021). But this growth has come at the cost of environmental degradation and climate catastrophe.

There is a second, more hidden cost of climate change – the endangerment to traditional cultures and knowledges in the face of the ecological challenges we face. Transformations in the environment, especially urbanisation, pollution and deforestation have caused a fundamental shift in our ancestral relationship to nature. The practice of being one with nature, of understanding the relationship between the human and the non-human, of maintaining primordial relationships with the earth have all come under pressure. The disconnect between traditional habitats and ecosystems and a modern lifestyle has robbed people of their emotional and mental well-being, leading to a loss of identity, belonging and dignity.

It is culture and cultural artefacts that speak to these themes at a visceral rather than an intellectual level – hence a combination of dance and film. To our knowledge (that of mine and the dancer’s), such a project wherein Bharatanatyam, a South Indian classical dance form and film are combined to address pressing societal issues like climate change has never been done before. Thus, in a time of significant climate crises, it has become essential to hark back to tradition to explore ecologies of care.

Research Questions

Dance of the Seasons follows a long tradition of the use of arts for bringing about social change (Jayalakshmi 2010/2011; Christian Reformed World Relief Committee and Jayalakshmi 2003). Two research questions are explored – (i) questions of aesthetics, and (ii) socio-political questions.

First, the aesthetic question – how do you bring two art forms with their own strong traditions of storytelling to bear upon each other in order to create artistic practice addressing modern day issues?

Secondly, in India, Bharatanatyam and film have both been used as political tools in the context of nation building and nation branding (Bhabha 1990). For various socio-cultural reasons, the British banned Bharatanatyam in 1910 and it became part of an underground cultural movement of defiance in India’s struggle for independence.

Similarly, film (especially Bollywood cinema) has been used as a tool to unite India and as an apparatus for Indian soft-power (Thussu 2013). If both these art forms have been used for socio-political reasons before, can we now deploy them to create a cultural and social context in which to understand climate crisis, societal responsibility and the need for action?

In terms of aesthetic questions, the film itself stands as a lyrical, evocative testimony to the combination of two art forms. The choreographer and dancer, Padmini Upadhya and I worked closely to construct and define the aesthetic parameters in which the performance takes place. Participatory action research within a broadly ethnographic framework has been the basic research paradigm.

Our first challenge was to think of how we could depict climate change over time. Dance has its own affordances, chief amongst them being music. We decided to use an ancient Sanskrit poem, Ritusamhara (Kalidasa 1947), generally attributed to Kalidasa (circa 400CE) as the source text for the music. Since Sanskrit is a polysemic language, “ritusamhara” has two contradictory meanings – (i) “ritu” meaning the seasons and “samhara” meaning “coming together” and therefore “ritusamhara” meaning a march of the seasons; and (ii) “ritu” still meaning seasons but “samhara” meaning “destruction” and therefore, “ritusamhara” meaning a destruction of seasons. Thus, the poem constantly moves between hope and despair, playing on the fact that the seasons are destroyed but also march on, one from the other.

Whilst we sought to understand issues of climate change through Bharatanatyam, I, as the filmmaker, pursued an appropriate cinematic aesthetic to film all the different seasons and relate them to our current anxieties. Gone was the proscenium arch theatre where Bharatanatyam is routinely performed; instead, we sought locations which would narrate the story of seasons. The filming had to encompass locations which speak to a lyrical past, but which also show transformations through time.

In this, we faced two problems. First, we had only six days to film – approximately one day per season. I was concerned about the film's ability to narrate seasonal changes without a large budget – how would people believe the rainy season or autumn as “a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” (Keats 1820)? Also, April in Kalidasa’s time was spring but in Bengaluru, when I was shooting, summer had already begun.

The dancer, Padmini, was not worried about this, arguing that she would depict the seasons through dance. Her changing costumes and changing hair styles, and her gestures would connote the changing seasons. For me, this was not convincing. I have never doubted her prowess as a dancer but modern-day audiences, even Indian ones, do not necessarily understand the relationship between colour and the seasons; they do not clock that in the summer seasons the hair is worn in a bun to cope with heat, and in the winter, it is allowed to flow loose to warm the neck.

My solution lay in the translator. We have an actor playing Ranjit Sitaram Pandit, who translated the poem into English in 1942. Since we had decided to use this English translation to subtitle the film, I thought it appropriate to use him to deliver the lines of blessing that ends each season and heralds the next one. This would signal seasonal change cinematically, punctuating the dance and allowing for a change in mood.

Pandit’s presence also draws attention to the socio-political dimension of the dance. Pandit’s imprisonment is part of the timespan of the Bharatanatyam ban. Then, in 1947, three years after he died, India gained independence, the ban on Bharatanatyam was lifted and his poem was published. Thus, I could visually use Pandit to serve aesthetic purposes.

The affordances of film, however, posed a different set of problems for Padmini, the Bharatanatyam dancer. The sequence of filming summer on the hot granite rocks of Bengaluru meant that she blistered and burnt her feet. But she refused to wear sandals.

Bharatanatyam as an art form, has its roots in Hinduism. In Bharatanatyam, through the act of dancing, the dancer communes with nature, understanding it deeply and becoming one with it. For him/her, by the end of the dance, when they have moved both themselves and their audience to an elevated state, there is no distinction between dancer and dance, sacred space and profane world, performer and audience. All are transported to a different realm of experience where they “simply understand.”

Therefore, the act of wearing bells on the dancer’s ankles is an act that begins to elevate the mind in preparation for the dance. At such a moment, sandals are profane; Padmini would not wear them. She preferred to dance through her pain, arguing that this is what mother nature too feels as we disrespect her. This chimes with Hindu philosophy’s deep belief that all of nature is worthy of worship and contemplation. Her dance, thus, becomes an act of worship. Therefore, it was important to depict an idyllic sense of the seasons and what they have become. So, for example, the section of forest fires are all images taken from real forest fires like the Yosemite fires. To truly indicate the horror of what has been inflicted upon the earth, I had wanted Padmini to dance on a rubbish heap. This would tie in well with the section on desire and greed. However, she refused to dance on rubbish, producing the counterargument that this would be disrespectful to the religiosity she feels through dance – it would defile it.

But she left the safety of the proscenium theatre to explore how she could truly narrate the story of human disrespect towards nature. Through collaboration and mutual respect, we have used the affordances of film and dance to highlight the contrast between the intrinsic messages of harmony and living with nature on the one hand and climate change and climate crisis on the other.

PEER REVIEW 1

Which aspects of the submission are of interest/relevance and why?

Dance of the Seasons (Jayalakshmi 2023) has a number of aspects of relevance – especially the links between climate change and Indian cities, as well as cultural traditions – and intangible cultural heritage such as Bharatanatyam. Through the medium of dance, this brings a perspective not often seen. The scenes where the dance is performed in contemporary and urban contexts, such as in the middle of traffic with McDonalds in the background, or with the welding, are especially interesting and makes the connections between traditional culture and the impact of urbanisation evident. Here I am reminded of films such as Pina by Wim Wenders (2011), where dances are performed in urban settings.

Does the submission live up to its potential?

While some of the elements of the dance are engaging and make the interplay between dance and screen production apparent, there are also elements of the film that less clearly articulate the research. As the dance has its own specific language, I often found it unclear what the messages were communicating.

The narrative parts with the translator character are less engaging and distract from some of the other elements, and as a piece. The historical aspect of this component also detracts from the intention to address contemporary issues through the piece. I think a shorter cut could demonstrate the research questions more clearly.

How does the submission expose practice as research?

The research questions are interesting in how to use Bharatanatyam and film to address the climate crisis. While some of this is evident in the film, the research statement does a lot of the heavy lifting in articulating the process and the relationship between the dance and the socio-political dimension of the dance and also the process.

PEER REVIEW 2

Which aspects of the submission are of interest/relevance and why?

Dance of the Seasons (Jayalakshmi 2023) seeks to unite the modern art of cinema with the ancient Bharatanatyam, a traditional South Indian dance form, in the exploration of themes centred on environmental pollution, climate change and “more hidden cost of climate change – the endangerment to traditional cultures and knowledges…” The inherent tension between modernity and tradition as well as the most modern of all environmental challenges remains relevant and a fertile ground for visual artists. In the work we are taken through a journey of the six seasons with the dancer symbolising the earth/mother/creator. The poem “Ritusamhara” forms a vivid, if loose narrative thread and is employed as text for the singer, with each season introduced by the writings of Ranjit Sitaram Pandit, recorded during his imprisonment by the British (Kalidasa 1947).

The elaborate and intricate choreography of Bharantanatyam encodes meanings that presents challenges for unfamiliar audiences, including this reviewer to decipher. It was challenging to discern differences between the choreography for spring versus autumn, for example, and as such at times it feels repetitive to the untrained eye. This is an inherent challenge with employing dance and the filmmaker addresses this by choices in settings and the use of text to frame our interpretation. One wonders if the contrast in the seasons might have been made more visceral with some post processing of the image track. The striking contrast of an ancient dance against symbols of modern excess and industry, in some ways incongruent and jarring, speaks to the themes of disconnection and loss of identity that are described in the research statement.

It would have been valuable to know more about the production process when it comes to music, especially as it is stated that “Dance has its own affordances, chief amongst them being music.” As the central element of the audio track it is not clear how this was integrated in the production process. Was the music recorded prior to production with the dancer hearing it while performing on location? Was it added after, in which case was the dancer performing to music, if so what? Did the composer/performers incorporate musical representations of wider themes being explored? 

Does the submission live up to its potential?

There is potential in this work to make a stronger statement on the themes being explored. At present it feels that there are suggestions of deeper meanings but these are perhaps often too subtle for most audiences to discover.  The sense of the seasons are clear as the text guides us, less clear is what statement is being made with regards to the larger themes of climate change. A traditional dancer performing next to an expensive car suggests commentary about modernity and excess but feels somewhat contrived since one doesn’t get a clear sense of how this is expressed within the dance or the music that accompanies it. On the other hand, the juxtaposition of the dancer within night time traffic, is very effective and there is a strong sense of the dance being disconnected and disrupted (or corrupted) by the modern. It is moments like these the work feels the strongest and its connection to stated research questions most obvious. The length of the film and its individual sections is something worth considering and some shortening would enhance the viewing experience. 

How does the submission expose practice as research?

The research statement articulates two somewhat broad research questions. The first deals with the aesthetics of artistic practice involving traditional dance and filmmaking. The filmmaker outlined an approach to this but I would not describe it as particularly innovative (this is not a criticism). The work does not appear contextualised within a particular social/artistic theoretical framework although the filmmaker alludes to an ethnographic framework it is not clear how this is employed in practice or within the research statement.The author states “a South Indian classical dance form and film are combined to address pressing societal issues like climate change has never been done before.” Whether this represents new knowledge is not clear, certainly the use of traditional dance in this context provides interesting insights into the tension between the modern and tradition. Practice as research in the exploration of aesthetics of traditional dance and film has merit and has a long history. To that end it would have been useful for the author to mention other dance films that might have been viewed as part of the research process.

The second research question is concerned with the socio-cultural context of Bharatanatyam and film within India and how this might apply to action on climate change. This question relates to the first but it is unclear to what extent it is explored within the film or production practice. This could have been elaborated on.

PEER REVIEW 3

Which aspects of the submission are of interest/relevance and why?

The short film Dance of the Seasons (Jayalakshmi 2023) addresses the pressing issue of climate change through the fusion of Bharatanatyam and cinema. This project integrates traditional dance with filmic storytelling, aiming to connect emotionally and intellectually with audiences. The filmmaker and the dancer, Padmini Upadhya, successfully employ participatory action research within an ethnographic framework to define the aesthetic parameters of their performance. This collaborative process helps them explore and emphasise the differences between living in harmony with nature and the ongoing climate crisis.

The narrative is enhanced by the use of the Sanskrit poem "Ritusamhara" (Kalidasa 1947) as a metaphorical backbone of the film. The poem’s themes of seasonal change and destruction appropriately mirror the dualities of “hope and despair” associated with climate change, adding an interesting layer of cultural and historical depth to the performance. The decision to film in diverse natural locations, moving away from the traditional proscenium arch theatre works well.

Does the submission live up to its potential?

While Dance of the Seasons captures the aspects of cultural expression and environmental activism, its potential is not fully realised due to its limited understanding and engagement with the complex history of cultural appropriation within Bharatanatyam. While the discussion around Bharatnatyam’s ban by the British is a valid and an important point, the oversight of Bharatanatyam’s Brahminical imperialism, which to many is problematic, should have been considered.

The research statement could benefit from a more critical engagement with the dance form’s history of caste-based exclusion and appropriation. By acknowledging and addressing these historical tensions, the project could offer a more inclusive and critically informed narrative.

Referencing recent works by artists such as Mallika Sarabhai, Revanta Sarabhai, and the PANAS! Project in Malaysia, who have integrated Bharatanatyam with climate change themes in their performances, would provide valuable context and depth to the study.

How does the submission expose practice as research?

The submission explores how practice can be used as research by combining Bharatanatyam dance and cinema to explore important questions about climate change. It effectively uses Kalidasa’s poem "Ritusamhara"  (Kalidasa 1947) to show the beauty of nature and the threats it faces from climate change.

RESPONSE TO PEER REVIEWS

I thank the peer reviewers for their very thoughtful and considered comments. These have provided me with an opportunity to explore further my own status as an ethnographer and into related aesthetic aspects of the filmed output of this experience.

My first observation is that the dance obviously speaks to issues of climate change, which the reviewers have kindly acknowledged. In that sense, the film has been successful.

Less successful, though seem to be four related aspects, where the reviewers have sought more clarification. These can be categorised as: methodological issues; questions surrounding the innovativeness of the project; cultural differences leading to a lack of understanding; and issues surrounding the cultural appropriation of Sadir attam/Sadir natyam by Bharatanatyam.

Methodological Issues

Our main research method has been participatory action research. The project started when I watched Padmini Upadhya dance a classic Bharatanatyam piece in a theatre in Bengaluru shortly before the Royal Society of Edinburgh call came through. I approached Padmini, and we decided to collaborate.

For my research, I kept a reflective diary focusing on three aspects – the practical issues that influenced the filmmaking process as it happened; the aesthetic decisions we made throughout the filmmaking process; and the delicate relationships we built with each other and others along the way. Since making the film, I have added a fourth strand that gauges audience reactions to the film through a survey questionnaire distributed after each screening.

Padmini and I had weekly Microsoft Teams meetings on Sunday mornings.  These were very important as I was a researcher in the United Kingdom collaborating with an artist in India.  I have kept the recordings and use them where appropriate.  We also had many informal conversations, short videos taken by crew that they shared with us, and informal photographs of the filming.

These conversations, especially the early ones, had important implications for the film.  One concerned how we would use Kalidasa’s (1947) poem. It was too long to be used in full and had to be cut down. It is also very erotic and sometimes feels crude to a modern sensibility.  Alongside this are passages which talk of the march of the seasons and how one season gives way to the next one in a comely manner. And of course the poem had to be set to music for the dance.

Padmini decided (and I concurred) that we would express the eroticism of the poem not so much through explicit translation as through the medium of dance. Sensual body and eye movements, hand gestures and gracefulness that are thought of as classical Bharatanatyam would be used to evoke the seasons. But when it came to portraying human action that has brought about climate change, her dancing would change subtly from a classical form to incorporate more folk traditions of dancing such as Yakshagana.

The choice of passages to illustrate the six seasons and the cutting down of words fell mostly to me, but setting the pared-down Sanskrit text to classical music, hiring musicians and recording studios, and working with them to make sure she could choreograph her dance to the music, fell to Padmini. Often our weekly meetings would lead to Padmini trying out some of her dance movements in front of the Teams camera. We discussed the Sanskrit text, its translation, and what Padmini could do to bring out our mutual interpretation of the text through her dancing.  This was a long, laborious process but it meant that when we came to film, we had all the music in place so that Padmini could use it as playback music to dance to.

Innovativeness of the Project

For Padmini and me, the film is innovative in that Bharatnatyam is nowadays usually performed in proscenium arch theatres, whereas we took it out of these twentieth century confines and used my documentary film experience to create a film that spans many different locations. In this, I was inspired by films like Corey Baker’s Antarctica: The First Dance (2018), which, though short, is highly evocative and takes place in-situ.  The film’s stark minimalism, its contrast between a blue aesthetic and the red of the dancer and its alone-ness are strikingly different from Dance of the Seasons, which has a voluptuous aesthetic, several changes in costume and, even though the dancer is alone, she is enveloped by the immediacy of surroundings. However, both films take advantage of the filmic medium and address similar concerns.

I am also aware of the work done by choreographer/dancers like Mallika Sarabhai but there are two major differences between her work and ours. First is the relationship between film and dance. In Sarabhai’s work, prominence is given to the theatricality of the dance; film is present largely as a recording device. In Dance of the Seasons, we have actively used the affordances of film – for example, in-situ filming and editing techniques that create story “in the blink of an eye” (Murch 2001) – and meaning is created in the active interaction between two different art forms, where neither form is privileged over the other.

The second difference lies in the tradition of storytelling. Bharatanatyam has traditionally always told stories of Gods and demons, valorising one and condemning the other. Sarabhai breaks with this tradition in one manner and we do so in another. Sarabhai says, ‘...within the very strict traditional format of lyricising in Bharatanatyam, I am writing about gender, I am writing about violence, I am writing about human rights, I am writing about the environmental issues and always bringing in the gods, but questioning them” (quoted in Rao 2019). In contrast, Dance of the Seasons is a secular piece of work. Kalidasa’s original text, “Ritusamhara” (1947), makes no reference to the Gods.

Thus for us the project is innovative in the manner in which meaning is derived – through an active, creative collaboration between two art forms that enables one of the art forms to escape its traditional 20th century confines of a proscenium arch and the other to use documentary techniques in telling the story of the most important issue of our times through dance.

Cultural differences leading to a lack of understanding

In the Indian screenings, there have been no issues with “understanding” Dance of the Seasons and the message it sets out to convey. However, it has been suggested that some Western viewers will not understand all the nuances in the dance.

I would like to make two observations about this. First, I would not expect either Western or Indian audiences to understand the dance completely, any more than I did myself without some explanation. From time to time, Padmini would explain the subtleties of a particular sequence – the way she subtly moves her body, the gestures she makes with her hands or the look she gives as she moves her neck – that I had not fully understood. But this does not prevent audiences – Indian or Western – from appreciating the dance and grasping its essential meaning.

Secondly, however, I do accept that a knowledge of Hindu culture would add extra layers of meaning. In Kalidasa’s poem, he constantly and simultaneously plays with notions of the erotic and of nature. This was something that spoke deeply to Padmini. Her interpretation of the text intertwines the sensuality of the Earth as Woman and the Sun as Man – they circle each other in love and passion, sometimes getting close and hot and sometimes distant and seeking comfort – that creates the seasons (Personal notes, 26th February 2023). Sensuality and spirituality are united, not separated as they sometimes are in Christian thinking (Coorlawala 2004).

Symbolism is very important in Hinduism, the religious underpinning for Bharatanatyam.  So for example, spring is associated with Holi, the North Indian Bacchanalian festival of colour, love and passion. Instead of colouring the dancer’s face, which we thought might look crude, we decided to use the rich background of pink and cream flowers as well as the lushness of the spring dance costume to convey the sensuality of lustful desire.  

However, desires can lead to greed. It is “a season for Manmatha to churn our hearts.”  Manmatha is the Hindu God for erotic love and pleasure. To convey in dance the sense that climate change is caused by human greed, which in its turn is caused by our desire for pleasure is a complicated project. While I was wondering how to achieve this, I happened to read Amitav Ghosh where he writes, “Culture generates desires – for vehicles and appliances, for certain kinds of gardens and dwellings – that are among the principal drivers of the carbon economy” (2016).

So we decided to depict these ideas by showing desire in the chocolate shop and for a luxury car. There is an irony here. In advertising, a woman is often shown beside a car, but there the “male gaze” is meant to associate the woman with the car as objects of desire, whereas here it is the woman herself who desires the car.  So subject and object become united in desire – one of the factors behind climate change.

Similar is the symbolism of autumn, which is traditionally a “marriage season” in South India. Padmini’s playing with the male and female dolls signifies autumnal celebrations. I am aware that many people would not appreciate the connection, but it was important for Padmini and me, especially in the context of the stifling of the promise of a new generation, illustrated by the traffic fumes Padmini encounters. The movement from a single evocative lamp in a temple to the single bulb on a car that pulls out to reveal the traffic is an example of how one can use the medium of film to convey a powerful message.

The cultural appropriation of Sadir attam/ Sadir natyam by Bharatanatyam

The history of Bharatanatyam is a history of cultural appropriation, as Coorlawala explains in her article, The Sanskritized Body (2004), I became aware of this as I began to research Bharatanatyam as an art form for our film. I realised that a combination of Brahminical patriarchy (prominent in Indian nationalism), the creation of a new middle class by the British in India and their adoption of Victorian morality all served to undermine traditional temple dancers (Devadasis) and drive their art form – Sadir attam – underground (Binoy 2024). This also enabled its appropriation by Brahmins during the fight for Indian independence and the subsequent re-naming of the dance form as Bharatanatyam.

As I wondered about how to address this issue, I came upon Ranjit Sitaram Pandit’s translation of “Ritusamhara” (Kalidasa 1947). I decided to combine aspects of Pandit’s Brahmin background, Indian nationalism and the puritanical banning of the dance form by the British, as an ironic commentary on the dance form itself. I do accept, though, that unless people are aware of both the Indian National struggle and of the history of Bharatanatyam, the full significance of portraying Pandit in the film may pass them by.

As I researched more, I myself began to develop an uneasy relationship with the dance form and felt that it was important to allude to this within the film itself. This was not least because both Padmini and I are Brahmins. I also decided to ask my actor son, Hari Mackinnon, to play the part of Pandit. This was mainly because I knew I could work fruitfully with him in the short time available, but it also seemed appropriate that he is the product of a British-Indian marriage – something that would not have happened had there not been a complex shared colonial history.

There was another irony we encountered during the filming process. Sadir attam, the precursor to Bharatanatyam, had been practised in Indian temples. But although we were readily given permission to film in the 9th century Nandi temple, Padmini was at first not allowed to dance there. The Brahminical temple authorities shared the Victorian idea that this would bring the temple into disrepute, even though such temples traditionally housed devadasi Sadir Attam dancers. To allow her to dance there required extensive negotiation. After the filming, when I asked Padmini which aspect of the filming she had liked best, her immediate answer was – dancing in the temple (Personal notes, 15h April 2023).

However, I did not write about these issues in my first research statement as I was keen to emphasise the relationship between Dance of the Seasons and climate change. I am grateful for being given the opportunity to explore them further here. 

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