A dance into the past

Photo Credits: pg 3- appnavop

A visit to a museum usually entails a heavy oral lesson in culture and history with the help of the objects present there. Yet, unless repeated visits follow, much of what we learn many a times is forgotten soon. But a dance oriented lesson into our cultural past is definitely more memorable.

And that's exactly what young artists Gautam Nima and Pushpanjali Sharma will be performing when they begin Apnnavop ( to make your own), an interactive dance/movement installation at the Goa Chitra Museum, Benaulim on May 16 in commemoration of International Museum Day which is celebrated on May 18.

The seven day durational performance which combines dance and somatics will grow and evolve each day will be on the theme of ‘Museums and Cultural Landscapes’ with Gautam Nima and Pushpanjali Sharma highlighting the link between museums and cultural heritage and thus enhancing the idea of museums as territorial center’s involved in actively protecting the cultural landscape.

“I have been in Goa for the last two months and the longer I stayed the more convinced I was that I wanted to stay here further and learn and explore an artistic life here,” says Gautam Nima, who hails from Mussoorie and has been a dancer, musican and singer for quite a few years and who thinks of himself as an ‘artivist’, invested in using movement art to excavate buried stories of the past and voice the unprivileged stories of the present.

It was while he was looking for ways to assimilate into the culture of Goa that the two artists happened to pay a visit to the Goa Chitra -Chakra Museum, two weeks ago and came away impressed. “ The space was so charged with so many untold stories and we felt that it was a nice place to explore these tales in an unconventional way as we are artists that communicate through dance,” says Nima, adding that learning where the ancestors came from is important. “It is important to know where we came from or the future will be confusing,” he says.

For Margao born Sharma on the other hand this was an opportunity to return to her roots. A performing artist and research-scholar in Somatic Education and Transformative Creative Practice, Sharma admits that although she lived in different parts of the country and in New York, Goa always stayed with her. “ For me this is an opportunity to get back to Goa as a new person with new eyes and to revisit and to fortify my memories,” she says. “ While the older generation here in Goa were much more rooted to the culture, we, the younger generation perhaps owning to lack of time, don't completely register the stories of the land the way the older folks used to and thus don't understand Goa completely.” However, she believes that although the younger generation is not much exposed to this, the moment they delve into this area, a lot of things about the culture open up as has been her experience.

Through this performance, Sharma states that this is a way of learning about the objects and culture in a different way. “ When you go to a museum you only learn about what the object is and where it came from. You don't experience the object- the wear and tear of the rubber, why it was created etc. But through this performance we want to experience the objects differently without the conditional experiences and see what new places it can take us,” she says.

By having this performance in a musuem instead of a set stage also allows for less rigidity and more freedom of expression.At the same time, the artists want the audience to contribute to the performance as well. “ There will be musical instruments placed which members of the audience can pick up and play. This tune comes from the soul and history of the being and is this important in ur research,” says Nima. “ They can also read some text and thus lend their voice to our research. In this way they will be living inside our work.”

Through this performance, they also want to promote the possibility of taking dance beyond just being a mode of entertaiment to a practice in research where the meaning is acquired through empathetic understanding rather than through words and music.

We want to show that dance is a language through which we can see and understand the world. Thus the performance is not about entertainment. We want it to evoke questions and so after every performance we will be having a Q and A session,” say Nima, adding that this is the first time that they are doing something like this. “We are taking a risk here by showing a research that is still in practice and still raw rather than a thoroughly researched planned performance,” says Sharma. “But at the same time we believe that this vulnerability will help the audience to open up to us in a new way.”