'I Call Myself A Contemporary Classicist...'

Dancer, choreographer, television personality, arts presenter, transcultural collaborator, writer andcultural activist… Over a three-decade long career as a performing artist, Anita Ratnam has worn many, manyhats. And in each case, with distinction. Her media work in the US in the early 1980s won her Emmy and Aceaward nominations, and she was honoured as "TV Ambassador" for enhancing American awareness of India. Andwhen the Festival of India was held in the US in 1985, Ratnam wowed television viewers in India with herbubbly, vivacious reporting style.

These days, Ratnam’s creative energies find form in another kind of festival - The Park’s The OtherFestival. This unique effort, held every year (alongside the celebrated annual festival of music and dance inChennai), is billed as an avant-garde arts festival and showcases talented artistes from India and abroad.

Since it was first staged in 1998, The Other Festival has provided a platform to display new vocabulariesin the visual and performing arts and has reached out to a crossover audience. This year's festival, held fromDecember 1 to 7, includes poetry-reading by Zohra Segal; a contemporary dance by the Taipei Li-Yuan ChineseOpera Theatre from Taiwan; and a puppets, mask and actors' performance by Brigitte Reveili and A. Selvaraj.

Excerpts from the interview.

V. Venkatesan: You’ve positioned The Other Festival as a "path-breaking, icon-shattering,ground-shaking" expression of various art forms. Since the Chennai music and dance festival is associated inthe popular perception with the preservation of decades-old "tradition", is The Other Festival making aconscious statement against musical and art tradition?

Anita Ratnam: No, we are not adversaries here. There is no confrontation at all. There is no thumbing one’s nose attradition at all. I believe tradition is always evolving - like a flowing river. But we have manipulated it tosuit our ends. We define tradition as what we can easily identify with, what makes us comfortable. Todaytradition is treated like a pond: stagnant and dull.

India has so many different realities, so many different strands of thought and perception. I believe today’sBharatanatyam dancer is a contemporary person approaching her art with today’s sensibilities. There is nowar between tradition and contemporary. There is only good art or bad art.

In fact, a lot of my work is billed as contemporary, but till date they have not been been presented at TheOther Festival, which is a forum for contemporary art forms. Instead, I perform this work every year at thetraditional music and dance festivals in various sabhas (performance halls).

Chennai has been hosting traditional music and dance festivals for the past 75 years and becomes a hub ofactivity in the month of December. Weather-wise, Chennai is comfortable only then. We have timed The OtherFestival for early December because it is convenient for visitors coming in for their vacations, people getfestive and want to go out… it makes business sense. 

As a corollary to the previous question, do you find ‘traditional’ forms of dance expression toostifling?

No, not at all. I only find that the modes of presentation today lack imagination. There is an inherentlaziness to think and present work differently. But as a dancer myself, I cannot present a classical varnamanymore. I cannot be the traditional woman who is a suffering and pining victim… the spineless types. It isa question of repertoire, not form.

I call myself a contemporary classicist, because I use tradition as a springboard to other things in myart.

What inspired you to conceptualise The Other Festival?

My years of living in New York, my travels, seeing modern expressions of music, dance and theatre.Sitting together with a group of international Chennai-ites one evening in Chennai, over a cup of coffee, wediscussed things and asked each other how about bringing a bit of this into Chennai and that’s how itstarted…

Has the popular, rasika-level response to The Other Festival been as good as the critical acclaim it haswon in the past five years?

I am very pleased with the response: that such a new idea is gaining popularity slowly but surely amongthe citizens of Chennai is a positive trend. It is surely a sign that this is an idea whose time has come.

Your use of the term ‘rasika’ seems to refer to the kind of audiences that come for classical music anddance performances at sabhas. I won’t say that we have an audience of that nature. Instead, we have broughtin a new audience that had stopped going to the sabha festivals - a sort of crossover audience who were boredwith the usual fare and wanted something different. There are a lot more young faces and curious minds at TheOther Festival.

The Other Festival is known to give a platform for avant-garde art. How well has this gone down with theaudiences? Has there been an informed appreciation of the various art forms that are showcased?

The avant-garde attracts a niche audience, for sure. But that term is so European and can mean manydifferent things. We are not trying to present this festival in its Europeaninterpretation. The term avant-garde can be a double-edged sword: the audience either likes new work or hatesit. We are consciously trying to present it within an Indian context of cutting-edge work, work that is aheadof its time. So, The Other Festival attracts a curious, questing audience who knows this is not going to bespoon-fed entertainment but something they have to meet face on, with an open mind.

Is The Other Festival a commercial success?

The Other Festival has not been a commercial success to date. We never expected it to, so early on. Butlast year, we covered almost 90 per cent of our costs. The deficit has been financed by my collaborator -Ranvir Shah - and I. Costs rise every year and artistes want five-star treatment too: we don’t mind givingthat at all, but we certainly cannot afford to meet international travel fares as well as artistic fees andtechnical costs. So we have tie-ups with the British Council, Max Mueller Bhavan, Alliance Francaise and USPublic Affairs, to help us co-present artists from their respective countries.

The number of people coming to The Other Festival has been growing every year, and daily passes are almostsold out every day. We notice that tourists and NRIs who are coming for the December ‘season’ in Chennaiare advancing their dates to make it for our event too! Festival directors of international arts festivals arecoming here to check out the contemporary Indian talent and several performers from The Other Festival havebeen invited abroad for contemporary performances there.

Corporate sponsors are certainly noticing the festival and its growing audience. But there are very fewsensitive corporates who are willing to let us do our work without large ugly logos appearing on stage and inall our publicity. We are lucky to now have a Brand Sponsor in The Park chain of hotels who understands thenature of this festival and supports it so keenly. We have also received great support from HSBC and Airtelfor the past three years.

On what basis are the performers in The Other Festival chosen? Are there certain artistic/aestheticstandards that you look for, or do you see it as a platform for any new art form or artist?

Since The Other Festival is very nascent, we are very conscious that we have to maintain a certainlevel. Yes, we do look for unusual work; even if it is only 15 minutes long, it finds a place in our schedule.We insist on a video with excerpts of work, we take reliable recommendations from fellow-artistes, we try tomake it a balance of all the genres that we want to present: music, dance, drama, art. Sometimes, we find thatunknown names have been a big hit, while established names have failed to impress. That is the unusual natureof this festival - that element of uncertainty!

Having said that, I still feel there aren’t enough new artistes with interesting contemporary work inIndia. They have grandiose ambitions but don’t understand what contemporary means: they think by taking anold theme and putting it in new costumes, they have a contemporary work. I think it will take a good 10 to 20years before this movement gains momentum and finds its own place.

Has your positioning of The Other Festival as a platform for iconoclasm rankled ‘traditionalist’practitioners of the arts? In what ways have they responded? How do you respond to their criticism?

Instead of anger or rankled feelings, The Other Festival has garnered curiosity, praise and evenadmiration from traditional practitioners. They seem amazed at the media interest with this event and thegrowing buzz it has generated. In fact, traditional gurus and senior dancers have even started attendingselect evenings and that speaks for itself.

What is the most valid/valued criticism of The Other Festival that you have faced? Are you making aconscious effort to temper the pitch of The Other Festival in response to such criticism?

The audience is very particular that we have an artist-audience interface at the end of every show, nomatter how moving or boring it may have been. We find that this has become a most looked-forward-to part ofthe show: the performance may have been for only 20 minutes, but the interface goes on for more than an hour!We don’t insist that everybody has to stay on for it: the questions may be from a select few in the audiencebut the rest stay on to just listen and absorb.

Another request has been a growing demand by the artistes to be able to meet and interact with fellowartistes - away from media or public attention. Some want to stay on for the rest of the festival and watchother performers. But we find that accommodation and local hospitality demands for seven humongous days ofwork stretch our budgets and infrastructure too tight. We are trying to find homes from well-wishers who canput up artistes for a few days, guest houses etc. It hasn’t really clicked, but we are trying.

Is there any reason to believe that The Other Festival has inspired more such thought-provoking,debate-stimulating art festivals? Or has there been a backlash in defence of tradition? Also, has itinfluenced mainstream dance and other art forms in any way?

It has definitely stimulated the imagination of a lot of young dancers; they write to me asking foradvice or for an opportunity to perform. A young dancer from Kolkata who came in to perform at The OtherFestival has also started an international contemporary arts festival in his city called Interface.

We have received enquiries from artistes to take The Other Festival to other cities but we want toestablish it in Chennai first and not try to grow too quickly. We don’t want it to be used forself-publicity by a presenter in that city. We want to retain the democratic nature and tone and tenor of thefestival and for it to resonate from Chennai itself.