Pioneer of contemporary dance in India, Astad Deboo’s unique vocabulary continues to hold audiences in thrall, writes Arati Rajan Menon

 
Sometimes, being a journalist has its perks. Like scoring a private performance by Astad Aderbad Deboo. He doesn’t merely pose for photographs, he dances — as he did for Harmony at photographer Ashok Salian’s studio in Mahim in suburban Mumbai. ‘Dance’, though, is a bit tame to describe what this man can do. As a warm-up, he powers through a fiery guitar track by flamenco artist Jesse Wood with a light step and rapid pace. Then he switches to the lyrical strains of Japanese composer Yoichiro Yoshikawa in a set of controlled movements that challenge his sense of balance. While the limbs speak of intense discipline, the mobile face — eyes, eyebrows, mouth, lips — displays a series of emotions. Through it all, the pace never flags, and Salian, no slouch himself, laughs out loud with the thrill of keeping up with the sheer unpredictability of each move. Deboo ends with a flourish, a flash of feral smile, head held high in arrogance.

There’s no trace of this hauteur, though, when we meet him for a chat at a hotel coffee shop. The 60 year-old ambles in wearing a yellow shirt as cheerful as his grin, his salt-and-pepper “hairscape” cut in a swirl. He sits down and proceeds to conspiratorially point out a gaggle of Page 3 ladies lunching on the next table. It’s surprising just how accessible Deboo is; he answers his phone, replies to email promptly and works his schedule around to accommodate interviews and photo-shoots.

Not that he has time to burn. This past year, he has held performances and workshops across the world, including the US, Czech Republic, Spain, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and Manila. He has recently returned from Art Summit Indonesia in Jakarta, where he danced with Manipuri martial artists who specialise in a technique called Thang Ta (literally, the sword and the spear) — a collaboration he has fostered over the years. In January, he will be felicitated at the 100th anniversary celebrations of Tata Steel in Jamshedpur. There, he will also premiere Rhythm Divine, showcasing another set of Manipuri artists, Pung Cholam drummers (another pet project), who will play the pung (drum) while executing acrobatic feats. Deboo will show Rhythm Divine in Bengaluru in February and hopes to schedule a performance in Mumbai in March. Later in the year, he will perform at the Festival of Granada in Spain and in Berlin.

Further, he has been commissioned for a work for the Hong Kong Arts Festival 2009, where he will work with friend and collaborator Danny Yung, a renowned multi-artist, and a piece for Tokyo Wondersite, a foundation funded by the city of Tokyo, for a festival in 2010. He’s also in discussions with Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for a piece to celebrate the opening of its new Islamic gallery.

How does he keep it all straight? “I’m my own manager and secretary and my office runs out of my head,” he says. “I focus on taking it one day at a time.” Right now, he’s excited about Jamshedpur. It will be a sentimental trip; “my father worked for Tata Steel and I grew up there”.

He also started dancing there, as a six year-old. “My parents sent me to classes, probably to get me out of their hair!” he says. After years of learning Kathak from gurus like Indra Kumar Mohanty and Prahlad Das, he moved to Bombay for a BCom degree from Poddar College (his father’s idea). That’s where he saw a performance by the Murray Louis Dance Company from the US — “I was astounded at their supple bodies, the stagecraft.” During the same period, he worked briefly with Uttara Asha Coorlawala, who was studying at the Martha Graham Centre of Contemporary Dance in New York.

Inspired by the possibilities that lay ahead and enchanted by the tales of a school friend who had just returned from a hitchhiking trip in Europe, in 1969 a 22 year-old Deboo boarded a cargo boat at Bombay Port, sat amid goats and vegetables, and set out on a voyage of discovery across the world — his first stop was Teheran where he slept in a gurdwara.

Over the next eight years, Deboo says he travelled through 45 countries, thinking on his feet, sleeping in parks and youth hostels, relying on people’s generosity, and absorbing the cultures of the world. He danced for soldiers in Vietnam and the police in Turkey and sold his blood in Greece. He traversed Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam and Japan. In London, he taught Kathak for classes at the London School of Contemporary Dance. When he finally returned to India, dance critic Sunil Kothari suggested he study Kathakali to learn the use of facial expression. “I started learning from E Krishna Pannikar, the only guru with whom I had a guru-shishya parampara.”

From everything he saw and learnt, Deboo evolved a distinct vocabulary, characterised, as one critic wrote, “by an economy of movement allied to tremendously impactful narrative”. People began to pay attention. Pina Bausch, the famed German choreographer for the Wuppertal Dance Theatre, saw him perform in 1979 and invited him to join her theatre; and designer Pierre Cardin commissioned him to choreograph for the legendary Maia Plissetskaia, prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet. He even jammed with rock icons Pink Floyd at the Chelsea Town Hall in London to one of their early albums, Meddle.

Deboo enjoys collaboration — apart from his recent work with artists from Manipur, he has forged creative partnerships with the Gundecha brothers, exponents of the Dhrupad style of Carnatic music, and puppeteer Dadi Pudumjee. More recently, he choreographed a promotional video for Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2006 hit film Omkara, featuring the Manipuri martial artists and drummers. It was Deboo’s third foray into Bollywood — he had earlier choreographed a piece for Sanjay Khan’s Abdullah (1980), which “got cut on the editing table”, and worked on M F Husain’s Meenaxi (2004).

Most significant for him, though, is his work with the deaf, which began with the Action Players, a Kolkata-based deaf theatre group and extended to deaf dancers in the US, Hong Kong and Mexico. “I wanted to give them an audience,” he says. His association with Action Players was to last 14 years before it “died a natural death”. Now, he works with Bharatanatyam dancers from the Clark’s School for the Deaf in Chennai. “I am a hard taskmaster and there are lots of crying sessions,” he says. “But when they receive all the accolades, they realise it was necessary.” In fact, Contraposition, a work performed by dancers from the Clark’s School, was part of the opening celebrations of the 20th Deaf Olympics in Melbourne, 2005.

Deboo counts that show as one of his most memorable, along with his performances atop the Great Wall of China, and at a festival in Champaner. “In Champaner, I invited the local villagers to come and see the rehearsal as the main show was reserved for the hoi polloi,” he recalls. “They came with open minds, unlike so called seasoned critics, and their comments about the movements were so profound.” During the actual show, Deboo performed one of his pieces on a 40 ft high wall — while the elite audience was on the inside, all the villagers and drivers were able to enjoy the show from the outside.

“Astad’s construction of images is remarkable,” says theatre actor and director M K Raina. “He is so experimental and uses traditional and modern themes to equally good effect. And he’s still growing as an artist. While his earlier work was more dramatic and ritualistic, he is now more sublime and avant-garde.” Notwithstanding such acclaim, Deboo rues the fact that it is still hard for him to get sponsorship for his work in India. “It’s frustrating to be in this position even after performing for 38 years,” he says. “Companies with a turnover of Rs 500-600 crore give you a lakh as if they’re doing you a favour.” His ire extends to the cultural bureaucracy, the “joint secretaries in the Ministry of Culture”. “I can write a whole book on the humiliation I’ve gone through,” he says. “In my early days, one of them told me, ‘Mr Deboo, you will get recognition posthumously; pioneers have to suffer’. I didn’t let it defeat me. Rather, I took it as a challenge.”

Another challenge was to get dance purists to accept his unique brand of work. While he was not considered Indian enough overseas — festival directors would urge him to stick to Kathak and Bharatanatyam — in India, he was considered too western. “The post-Independence mindset was to deny anything that came from the colonial power,” says theatre director Sunil Shanbagh, Deboo’s friend and collaborator since the 1970s. “Unfortunately, contemporary dance was bracketed in that category. Even western classical musicians in India suffered the same fate. But the remarkable thing about Astad was that he persevered. It was a lonely battle but he fought it.”

Deboo recounts how a famous Kathak guru (who he doesn’t name) once scoffed, “He just moves one hand here, one leg there, and calls it dance.” Ironically, a few years ago Deboo was asked to dance in a documentary made on the same guru — “they wanted me to do a sequence, likened to a whirling dervish overseas, which actually stems from classic Kathak chakkar; it was poetic justice, I guess!” Deboo’s own Kathak guru dismissed his work and refused to have anything to do with him; in contrast his Kathakali guru, who encouraged innovation, was extremely supportive.

A breakthrough came in 1990 when he was invited to perform at the Khajuraho Dance Festival in Madhya Pradesh — a first for a non-classical dancer. Winning the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1995 also helped some gurus acknowledge his work. For Deboo, though, the Padmashri — he received the award in April 2007 from former president Abdul Kalam — was validation that he didn’t need to kowtow to achieve recognition. “It was a question of delayed, not denied,” he says. “People had told me to lobby for the award in Delhi but I could never play the role of sycophant. Lots of juniors, and of no high merit, received it but I waited. When I finally got the award, so many people sent congratulatory messages saying it was long overdue.”

Another bunch of congratulatory messages came in more recently, when he turned down the Gaurav Puraskar conferred upon him by the Gujarat Sangeet Natak Akademi in 2007. “Initially, I accepted it,” he says. “And later I found out it was from the Modi government. I had no choice but to reject the award.” In his letter to the Gujarat State Sangeet Natak Akademi, Deboo wrote, “The violence perpetrated upon the people of Gujarat under this government leaves me with no choice except to disassociate myself from all its actions… I believe in an inclusive India for all Indians irrespective of their caste and faith.”

This belief also prompted him to sign — along with hundreds of people across India, including authors, artists and journalists — an open letter by Vikram Seth in September 2006 for the overturning of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalises consensual sexual acts between adults of the same sex. “Astad is a humanist,” says Shanbagh. “And as a humanist, you have to take a stand against the polarisation in India today.”

“There is all kinds of intolerance prevalent today,” says Deboo. “Husain sahib is in exile, Tasleema Nasrin is being hounded; one innocuous line in a film song gets a chief minister all riled up.” Can art, then, make a statement against intolerance? “Yes, it is a powerful platform,” he responds. “But you have to use it wisely, whether you are sending a political message or a social one.” In the past, Deboo has used dance to communicate his anguish at the horrors of war (a piece called Bomb and After inspired by a trip to Hiroshima) and drug addiction — in Broken Pain, he defined an addict’s descent into hell, banging his head on the floor and even mainlining on stage (with an empty syringe).

“His style is unique,” says Shanbhag. “He remains in a class of his own at a time when even classical dancers are desperately trying new ideas to stay relevant in changing times.” In fact, Bharatanatyam dancer Alarmel Valli has spoken out against the “what’s new” syndrome, “a politically fashionable endorsement of experiment for its own sake”. Deboo sees her point. “Some dancers think that just by not having Carnatic music they are being different,” he says. “I was shocked by one dancer who put on Bollywood music and made her dancers do Bharatanatyam steps to it.”

In Deboo’s opinion, the “true” tradition of innovation is being carried on by choreographer-dancers like Daksha Sheth, Aditi Mangaldas, Padmini Chittoor and Navtej Singh Johar. “There is also a young group from Kerala called Samudra; they are doing good work with kalaripayattu.” However, Deboo believes contemporary dance doesn’t get the exposure it deserves. “Only the written media keeps our work alive,” he says. “On cable, there’s no room for anything meaningful; it’s all these Boogie Woogie Shoogie shows where they make little girls do Bollywood moves.”

Despite his concerns, Deboo has no plans to open an academy of his own. “It would tie me down,” he insists. “I’m still a free spirit that needs to go where my work takes me.” He admits this nomadic existence has left him little time for other relationships. “There have been moments I’ve put dance before other important things,” concedes Deboo. “But those closest to me understand.”

These include his ‘think-tank’, which comprises Shanbagh, architect Ratan Batliboi, who has designed many of his stage sets, Raina, and playwright, writer and actor Satyadev Dubey, with whom he did his first stage show in Mumbai, at Prithvi Theatre in 1978. And, of course, his family: his active 91 year-old mother, and his two sisters. His father died three years ago. Deboo lives with his mother, younger sister and nephew in Shapur Baug, a Parsi colony in Mumbai.

“That’s the only ‘real’ home I have,” he says. “When I am travelling, I stay with friends all over the world.” Leisure time is spent trekking (Machu Picchu; Alaska; Galapagos), watching alternative cinema (Indian and English), admiring art (“I only look, never buy”), and reading magazines like Newsweek, Esquire and The Economist. “I don’t read books as often as I should,” he adds. “The last one I read was The Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini and I loved it.”

The one thing Deboo does take time out for is fitness — he works out five days a week. “I do stretches, swim, walk a lot.” He eats everything — from sambar to sushi — and enjoys a good wine, all in moderation. “You can’t take your health for granted,” he says. He speaks from experience. In 2000, Deboo’s knee gave in after a performance; the doctor told him the cartilage was thinning out and that he may not be able to dance anymore. “Luckily, glucosamine tablets did the trick,” he says. “Now, I just do exercises to strengthen my knees. And I refuse to let age catch up with me. There’s too much left to do, too much fire in my belly.”

Deboo’s wish list includes performing in Indian cities like Thiruvananthapuram, Lucknow and Varanasi — “cities with a rich cultural tradition where I have yet to perform” — and hosting an international dance festival. “For me it’s always been about using my art to connect to people of different regions, cultures and nationalities,” he says. “That battle continues.”

Photo: Ashok Salian
Featured in Harmony – Celebrate Age Magazine
January 2008