Waking the Sleeping Giants

Our modern world is built on efficiency, sameness, routine; it demeans the world of feeling-our-feelings as too great a price to pay. Art builds a world where this expenditure must be made

“Bahut achcha kiya. Ab bhaav ke saath karo.”

Well done. Now do it with emotion.

I’m in the airy, window-clad, wood-floored classroom with my Guru, Pratibha Jena Singh. She is seated cross-legged on the floor, hands akimbo over the mardal, waiting for me. I’m trying to not keel over, sweating, panting, staring at her. I just managed to dance the most difficult sequence of my life so far, something she taught me ages ago, and something I have taken a few years to straddle. I thought I had finally mastered it. She just told me I was ready to begin.

It’s a familiar scenario. When I first began learning Odissi from my Guru over twenty years ago, I hadn’t a tiny clue that I would have to meet the icebergs called emotions in the dance class. For the first few years I focused pretty much on my body being able to survive the dance – not falling, tripping, dying of fatigue etc. Over time I learnt to smile while I did all that. But as we progressed, my guru wanted me to emote. Apparently, that was the point of it all. The style that I learn from her, created by her father Guru Surendra Nath Jena, is known for being “bhaav pradhaan”, where emotions – in all their candour and variation - are primary, much more important than beautiful bodies moving skillfully through space.

I was 18 when I walked into my Guru’s classroom for the first time. I was drawn to Odissi because I loved its perfect contours. I thought dance was about mastering the body. Perfection, control, glamour: these were the things I was after. But as I traipsed further into the interiors, it became clear to me that the power of this dance, if at all I wanted to master any of it, was none of these things.

It was emotion. With a capital E, let’s just say.

Well, this shouldn’t be hard, I thought. There was a reason I was called ‘rondumal’ through my childhood. I felt too much; I cried all the time. When I felt a lot of love, I cried; someone looked my way, I cried; someone said nothing to me, I cried. When I was ten I saw Salman Khan’s Love and cried a river over few days (and ruined a romantic date a few years later spectacularly because, well, we went to watch Titanic). Not a single relationship fight that hadn’t been aborted by me screaming into a barrage of tears and the non-possibility of any conversation after that. I could never be witty or cool; I never had a comeback line, I just blew up with indignation.

 “Do you have to take it so personally?”

“What’s there to get sad about?”

“Anger is like holding hot coals; you’re hurting yourself. Don’t be so angry.”

This is just some of the casual chiding – in parental admonishment, spirtual pravachan, lover’s quarrels - I had received for decades of “feeling a lot”, for having emotions that really show. Well, this is going to be easy peasy, I thought, when my Guru told me to “baahar nikaalo” my emotions in dance. Just be yourself, hai na?

My failure to emote in dance, however, was astounding. Sometimes my emotions were too large (I forgot all the steps, got so carried away, I didn’t know where I was), sometimes they were petty, rather than lofty (“you look like you’re killing your mother in law, not Narsingh killing Hiranyakashyap”), sometimes they were too pat (“sikhaaya hua lag raha hai”). 

Emotions-that-show were also, severely inconvenient. I realised that this was the hardest thing in the world: when ‘just be yourself’ isn’t about doing/ achieving things, and more about feeling-your-feelings. Very often I found myself deflated for days after a performance; it was as if the emotions were coursing through my body in place of blood, an intensity that took its own sweet time to wither. Catharsis was high-maintenance, the enemy of productivity. I couldn’t be #girlboss #hustlinghard while also feeling all that I felt. Overall, this wasn’t very good for my To Do list – how is one supposed to get shit done while also going through big, strong emotions?

“All the emotions in the universe can be whittled down to nine; they reside in your body in supt awastha, a sleeping state. They are not out there in the world for you to find, they are not merely in your life’s experiences. Look at the outside world so you can stoke the sleeping emotions inside of you.”

These words, spoken by my Guru with a smile, as a casual aside, were the most surprising for me to hear. They were also, as an aftertaste, the most comforting. It was a relief to know that there was a handle for the overwhelm I was scared of: these nine emotions or navrasa of mirth, compassion, love, courage, wonder, anger, disgust, fear and tranquility sorted for me the complexity of the world and made it tangible, graspable, playful. Like the zodiac signs that ease introductions to strangers. Like nine beautiful, colourful katoris in a thali laden with multiple flavours and textures, each incomplete without all the others.

Ever since, dance has been a space not for flailing arms and legs and learning rhythm and control in the body; but for doing all that physical work so I can free the emotions within. I practice control until I am not afraid to lose it. You learn this revolutionary act by failing at it regularly; this is a new feeling for me, a tenth rasa, you could say. Failure frees my fear from its comically large shadows. 

When I give myself permission in dance, to show my emotions (and fail at that everyday), eventually it also shows me this: The child in me was never wrong. This Odissi of emotions affirms the rondumal in me, who felt a lot. Who didn’t try to stuff her emotions into watertight compartments called words. All I needed to remove the dams holding back my river of emotions, was a witness.

My first witness was my Guru; over the years of dancing under her gaze, alone, in our silent, empty, tree-enveloped classroom, I developed a safe ritual of being seen at my most vulnerable. Of being seen through when I was trying to hide. Of being quietly accepted for whatever I could manage on that day. This was no productivity drill. 

From my Guru then, I learnt how to be a witness to my own emotions. This is a process I never learnt in any other subject of my academic career. Emotions need an act of seeing, they need an arena for performance, they need a world that is willing to see, hear, feel. Odissi made that world possible for me.

Our modern world is built on efficiency, sameness, routine; it demeans the world of feeling-our-feelings as too great a price to pay. The job of art is to build a world where this expenditure must be made, where you feel compelled to do what no one wants to do: reckon with the emotions that lie within not just us, but also in the going-ons of our world. From the world of Odissi I’ve inherited, I’m learning to see the elephant in the room and do the unthinkable: wake the sleeping giants in supta awastha. I’m also learning that I need to do this with my body, not my mind. I need to look at everything in my crazy world and ask not “what do I think about this?”, but “how does this make me feel?”

So dance, my friends, is all I really have to say. Move your body and free the sleeping giants; find the power in seeing the loch ness monster everyone has heard of, but never seen. Dance is a safe ritual to enjoy the terror and joy of doing something like that. It will make you familiar with the curious child you once were; be assured that life will never be the same again. Ab bhaav ke saath karo.

(In the next essay, I trace how we went from the dancing body to the thinking word, and how I find that we are again aching to return to emotions in a post-pandemic world).