VIKRAM IYENGAR

Read this FIRST, not last

Learning, life experience, knowledge, wisdom, memory… where does all this live? As dancers, we don’t (hopefully) see, experience, and perhaps even understand the body and mind as separate entities. Perhaps even the soul and spirit (defined as we individually prefer) are part of this holistic being. We literally embody knowledge – we ‘know’ in our bones; our muscles are carriers of emotions, our flesh and skin imbibe and transmit information. The mind inhabits every pore of this body, and the experience of the body permeates thought, action, remembrance, and communication. This is how we live and possibly how we die. But sometimes the mental and the physical seem divided. Sometimes, one of them remembers while the other forgets. Sometimes how we live ruptures from how we die.

Watching my mother’s journey through and with Alzheimer’s Disease – as a son, a primary care-giver, and a dancer – I note the dramatic changes and shifts in physical, psychological, cognitive, and mental expression and ability over time. Sometimes gradual, sometimes precipitant – always in a downward spiral. Sometimes recognisable as coming from the person I know / knew as my mother, sometimes absolutely not. Identity and relationships are thrown into constant and often tumultuous flux, both for her and for those around her. Body/mind, self/other, fact/fiction, memory/illusion, past/present, here/there are all in conflict – a conflict that constantly shifts relationships within itself. Until – strangely – everything settles again, so we can repeat the question - Learning, life experience, knowledge, wisdom, memory… where does all this live? And (how) does all this die?

Last(ing) Lessons

There is something that can’t quite be classified so easily under the physical, psychological, cognitive and mental – it can’t be classified under expression or ability either. It has to do with pure existence - the way one inhabits time and space, affects them both while being (perhaps) affected by them in turn. It has to do with shining brighter as one inexorably fades away; it has to do with presence-in-absence, with arrivals and departures, with unbecoming. It is – it must be – a strange, unsettling journey to what is often described (inadequately) as regressing to a child-like state. It is inadequate because that state lacks the quintessential child-like quality to learn – and remember.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps my mother is learning – learning to forget. 

KD called today to wish us [happy new year] and asked after Ma. I asked Ma – do you remember KD? Without hesitation, she said – of course! Deep connections, quiet friendships – can these really disappear so easily? 

Ma Journal, 31 December 2021

Vikram

Biktam

Viktam

Bikram

She suddenly calls out my name from her regular morning seat at my window. I go to her, ask her what she wants. But I’m not sure she registers me – or ME as Vikram. She holds my hand, and repeats the sound of my name. It is heavy in her mouth – the familiar become unfamiliar. She moves the word around with her tongue – feeling it anew, cherishing the sound – it seems to give her peace, calmness. Having now found it, she releases the name again.

Ma Journal, 25 February 2022

It was such a gift to see you emerge like you did today – present, interactive, curious, interested. Your eyes were bright and alive. They took in people, responded to them, watched the road, the trees, passers-by avidly. You sat straight in the wheelchair, your hands reached out to us to hand us things, ask for things – reached out to the balcony railing to help you stand… You did not want to go back to your room. Once there, you spoke clearly, sensibly. Answering, commenting, interacting. Your eyes still bright and alive with intelligence – they were YOUR eyes after a long time. But they had a shadow of confusion – as if they had awoken after a long sleep and could not quite recognise what was around them. Perhaps you wanted to drink this in more, perhaps that’s why you did not want to succumb to sleep.

Ma Journal, 8 September 2022

How do you choreograph forgetfulness – and remember the moves?

 As dancers, remembering choreography is a skill we are trained in. It is one of our core strengths, this ability to recall. And if we are able to recall and repeat with freshness, that’s an added bonus. Even when improvising, the body remembers technique, it remembers in flesh, blood and bone how to ‘do’. Forgetting, for us, is an embarrassing trait – we are trained to remember. Forgetting makes us vulnerable and fragile in ways we do not want to be. The body and the rigourous training we instil in it, is all we dancers have (or is it?). 

The concept of the ballet body and the concept of the kathak body are markedly different as are the principles of movement, expression and improvisation the two forms are based on. It is these deeper, more essential differences rather than the surface similarities that are more interesting for the workshop conductors. It is here that the participants will face the tensions of opposing understandings of the body, movement and space assumptions, dynamics and essence of dance itself. It is also here that the appropriateness of improvisation techniques will be tested to the extreme – tested, abandoned, modified, evolved, redefined. Therefore, it is here that the participants will discover the most about themselves, about each other, and about the two forms through a creative, often contradictory, dialogue.

Excerpt from the ‘Imagining Improvisation’ research proposal

I’ve been working with Australian director and dramaturg Sally Blackwood on a creative development called The Aesthetics of Ageing, drawing from our experiences of caring for our parents (her father, my mother). One of my movement improvisations responded to specific physical images that we had talked about. When watching it, at a certain point Sally remarked on moments where she suddenly saw an able-bodied dancer rather than a physical fragility. So how do we learn not to (or learn to forget to) draw on our dancerly strengths, and yet use the physical ability of our strong, controlled and trained bodies to communicate physical fragility?

In Get a Revolver, [Helena] Waldmann explores forgetting as a positive, liberating function of the human brain, sensing that the secret to happiness might lie there. With the superb dancer Brit Rodemund, she has created a grotesque yet humorous work, a reflection on restraints and the efforts to overcome them, using ballet as a symbol for the rigours that life demands of us. During the 60 minutes of the performance Brit Rodemund becomes her own twin – a classical ballerina with dazzling presence, and then a searcher for whom everything, even her own body or a plastic bag, is a source of wonder.

(Stuttgarter Nachrichten, Stuttgart, Germany, as quoted on https://www.dansedanse.ca/en/helena-waldmann-get-revolver)

The wonder of first times/ wondering about last times/ wandering in time

The first time on stage – like first times of anything – is special. And forty years down the line – now as professional performance makers – that has moved into stories about the last time we performed: ‘last’ as in ‘previous’, not as in ‘final’. How would we know when it was the last-as-in-final time that we have the ability to do something, move a certain way, speak, sing, dance? And – if we had that knowledge by some miraculous and daunting insight – how would that change how and why we ‘do’ it? How would it change our relationships with our own bodies, with the people and objects around us? And (how) would we remember them? How do you notice a ‘last time’ approaching? And is a ‘first time’ always easily identifiable?

I try and recall the first time Ma noticed something was amiss / we noticed something was amiss with Ma? It’s not so simple to pin down. There are many first times that only become cumulatively clear in hindsight. With a creeping and silent disease like hers, the early symptoms are so easy to miss, ignore, adjust to, and navigate through – even for the one experiencing the onset of the disease. We all do this unconsciously, subconsciously – automatic pilot kicks in. The truth is unthinkable, unimaginable.

I did not think at first that I could live through it. Music is the heart of my life. For me, of all people to be betrayed by my own ears was unbearable.

At first, I did not realise anything was wrong, though people seemed to be mumbling a lot, especially on the phone, and I began to sense that I was using a heavier touch on the keyboard. I wondered once or twice why I did not hear the birds sing so often, but assumed that that year we were having a quieter spring. I wasn’t playing with other musicians at the time, so catching my cues was not an issue. And when I listened to music I simply turned the volume up.

It was probably getting more difficult for me to hear the piano, but so much of what one hears is in the mind and the fingers anyway. The truth of it is that I don’t think I understood what was happening. How could I imagine that I was going deaf in my twenties!

Vikram Seth, ‘An Equal Music’, p. 150

For dancers / performers our extensive training supports our physically demanding practice, but can also create habits that allow us to negotiate through a performance on autopilot – we come to know it so well. And that can make us (and the performance) jaded. I once had a young actor tell me he had had enough of a role after the premiere run of merely five performances, and that he was bored with it. He needed something new, something that he would be doing for the first time again. While this works in the world of film where a performer delivers a role just once, this is completely impractical and impossible in live performance – whether dance or theatre. So how does one communicate a first-time-ness or a last-time-ness through the body in performance? Are the two necessarily mutually exclusive? How do we insist on a here and now, every single time we perform – even if we know it will be the last time?

I entered the project with a kathak trained body. Indeed, this training – now second nature more than anything else – is the core of the piece. Not just in terms of technique, but also in terms of aesthetics, approaches, taboos, and exclusions – what does not get trained, knowingly or unknowingly. The vertical stance of kathak is unique in Indian classical dances. But the very first question I encountered was – what does it mean to be vertical? What is the body aware of? And what is it not aware of? Our daily sessions of intense physical training introduced me to ideas of alignment, minute body awareness, core muscle control, and a lengthening of the spine (and therefore the body) which I had not encountered before. Bringing these into a bodily muscle memory through constant correction and repetition took me back to what it must have been like when I first started learning kathak. At that point, one becomes gradually aware of everything since it is not ‘natural’ to the body. Second nature takes a while to emerge and take over. And there lies both the achievement and danger: it becomes easier, it becomes natural, but it also becomes more and more difficult to pinpoint, articulate and remember all the tiny details every time one performs it.

Excerpt from my interim report on the process of making ‘Across, not Over’

An object had to justify its being to itself rather than to the surroundings which were foreign to it. [By doing so, the object] revealed its own existence. And when its function was imposed on it, this act was seen as if it were happening for the first time since the moment of creation. In The Return of Odysseus [1944], Penelope, sitting on a kitchen chair, performed the act of being “seated” as a human act happening for the first time. The [physical] object acquired its historical, philosophical, and artistic function. (Lesson 1)

[quoted in Kobialka, Michal. “‘The Milano Lessons’ by Tadeusz Kantor: Introduction.” TDR (1988-), vol. 35, no. 4, 1991, pp. 136–47, https://doi.org/10.2307/1146169]

It’s called the long goodbye. Rapidly shrinking brain is how a doctor described it. As the patient’s brain slowly dies, they change physically and eventually forget who their loved ones are and become less themselves.

Excerpt from a Facebook post on Alzheimer’s Disease by my friend UAC, 9 January 2022

I’m learning to redefine everyday what memory, recognition, and love are and where they live in a person, because while my mother moves further away from us, she is also – in a strange way – drawing us close to her.

It’s not a disease – it is one of the ways our bodies age and prepare for departure.

Excerpt from my response to UAC, 9 January 2022

Do we even know how and where memory is stored in the body?

What about memory and its relationship to trust?

If I am a product of my environment and experience, it’s all to do with my memory of that. What happens if that is suddenly gone? If that disappears, who or what am I?

If the past is unreliable, the present is unsure…

‘The Aesthetics of Ageing’ notes, 22 December 2021

My mother’s experience of life currently is only of the here and now – no past, and no idea of the future. So is everything she does being experienced for the first time and / or the last time? But she still ‘knows’ how to lift her hand, how to hold onto or release an object, how to turn her head, how to open and move her eyes, how to swallow – and yet she doesn’t, the muscles have to be constantly reminded, cajoled into remembering. Sometimes they recall, sometimes they don’t. There is no past, so there can be no cumulative learning in this process of doing, forgetting, reminding, and forgetting again. Where indeed, does memory live in the body when the so-called cognitive, conscious mind has forgotten it? When is / will be the last time one remembers?

On what would turn out to be Katie’s last good day
she asked to be wheeled outside & helped
into the Lazyboy her brother dragged out back
no one even bothering to remove the tag
from Costco that flapped, wild as a trapped bird 
before the wind surrendered
to a thin cardigan of mid-December sun
as all afternoon we watched
her sleeping while the sky hemorrhaged
quietly down & the small hills of dogshit
arranged along the graying cedar fence
did not blaze into anything
like golden stones, but her hair had grown
back a half inch or so & so glowed
in the last of that tinny glare
& if I thought briefly then of medieval manuscripts
where everyone important grows a halo
it wasn't quite like that either
although the bones of her face did appear
as if at low tide to surface
smooth as driftwood where the injured
bird might light in the moonlight, holding on
for some measures longer than expected.

‘Late Fermata’, Jenny Brown

25 December 2021

Before she goes to bed, Ma spends some time in my room doodling and listening to Kanika Bandopadhyay’s Rabindrasangeet. She joins in once with the title line of Amar Mallika-bone with the perfect pitch she and her sisters have. She has not sung since. Is / was that the last time? 

Yes, that was. That will be. That is. Though I did not know it then.

How long does time last?

28 September 2022

My sister posts on Facebook marking two months of our father’s passing: Time flies / Time Hardly Moves – she says. And I think of the memories that social media reminds us of repeatedly – what we did, who we were with, the friends we made on this day last year or several years ago. A barrage of images that we may or may not want to recall – we no longer seem to have a choice in that. I remember my mother this time last year – memory affected, but still able to talk, walk, eat, comprehend, communicate: overturned in the space, in the time of a year (though it seems like an eon ago). And I think of the nature of time – how it can rush, how it can stand still, how it can pause, how it can repeat itself, how it can (can it?) go backwards… is it the nature of time or the nature of how we experience time? Is time linear, or not? The jury is still out on that one, I think.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is one of the most extraordinary ventures in the entire history of catering.

It is built on the fragmented remains of an eventually ruined planet which is enclosed in a vast time bubble and projected forward in time to the precise moment of the End of the Universe.

This is, many would say, impossible.

In it, guests take their places at table and eat sumptuous meals whilst watching the whole of creation explode around them.

This, many would say, is equally impossible.

You can arrive for any sitting you like without prior reservation because you can book retrospectively, as it were when you return to your own time.

This is, many would now insist, absolutely impossible.

At the Restaurant you can meet and dine with a fascinating cross-section of the entire population of space and time.

This, it can be explained patiently, is also impossible.

You can visit it as many times as you like and be sure of never meeting yourself, because of the embarrassment this usually causes.

This, even if the rest were true, which is isn’t, is patently impossible, say the doubters.

All you have to do is deposit one penny in a savings account in your own era, and when you arrive at the End of Time, the operation of compound interest means that the fabulous cost of your meal has been paid for.

This, many claim, is not merely impossible but clearly insane…

Douglas Adams, ‘The Restaurant at the End of the Universe’, p. 80-81.

To be still in motion, to move with stillness – Time has quintessentially dancerly qualities. And when thinking of time – as a dancer – I can’t help thinking of space too. The same questions… what space / what time does space inhabit? And what is my place within that? Memory is about space as well – seeing something across time, and across space. Remembering both the where and the when. And noticing the tricks our minds play on us.

When my mother was still able to remember (after a fashion), she recalled her younger sister only as a child, and could not / would not believe that she was now a grandmother. She moved between times and periods as we move between rooms, with an un/easy ability to inhabit more than one such simultaneously. Right now, though – time for her seems to have paused indefinitely as she exists in the same moment – moment after moment – trapped in her body, in her hospital bed. And as she goes through cycles of marginally different better and worse days, drifting in and out of worlds, we give her the comfort we can (or is it ourselves that we are comforting?). All the while we wonder, how long will this limbo last – and why?

“We are now in the departure lounge”, once quipped my mother’s dear friend referring to their advancing age. “We are all in the departure lounge, even if we are ten years old”, laughed another much older friend of mine recently.

Passengers are to be kept in temporarily suspended animation, for their comfort and convenience. Coffee and biscuits are served every year, after which passengers are returned to suspended animation for their continued comfort and convenience. Departures will take place when the flight stores are complete.

Douglas Adams, ‘The Restaurant at the End of the Universe’, p. 70

For us dancers, isolating each muscle, each part of the body to enable us to create extremely specific and directed movement is a matter of rigorous training. For my mother – in her incapacitated, broken, failing body – to move her right hand an inch, to open her palm, to clasp my finger is nothing short of a supreme act of will that spans a time-space that I cannot comprehend. It states / queries –

Here I Am –

(am I here?)

H E R E     I       A M      N O W H E R E

She was not exactly waiting, she felt. No one else she knew had her knack of keeping still, without even a book on her lap, of moving gently through her thoughts, as one might explore a new garden. She had learned her patience through years of side-stepping migraine. Fretting, concentrated thought, reading, looking, wanting – all were to be avoided in favour of a slow drift of association, while the minutes accumulated like banked snow and the silence deepened around her.

Ian McEwan, ‘Atonement’, Pg. 150

Self Gathering

A pause that remembers

What is yet to come

Sampurna Chattarji, ‘Self Gathering’

A presence of absence / an absent presence / the present is absent

There is a bitter-sweetness when Ma surfaces from the world she inhabits. There is a slight, gentle confusion in the eyes – and a sense that she is seeing things from far away – seeing them crumble. The sand is running through her fingers. She is not watching life flash past, she is watching it drain away.

But in that moment that she recognizes loss and losing, she also recognizes us, holds and clings on to us.

Her eyes are far away. She seems to be waiting, preparing for her next departure – but she has chosen to wait with me. That has to be enough.

Ma Journal, 30 August 2021

What is this mysterious thing we performers call presence? Who has it, who doesn’t? How can one create it, share it? When is it conspicuous by its absence? And when is the performative presence created precisely through absence? What is it that makes a performer compelling to watch?

The performer acquires primacy when she cultivates a qualitatively different presence on stage from that of daily life, a presence which has an enhanced energy and an enhanced consciousness. […] Energy becomes consciousness when it moves from the physical to the psychological realm. The actor must expand her inner focus progressively to increase her inner awareness. This is not done so that the performer can bring a kind of Stanislavskian psychologism to her performance, but because it enables her to bring a concentrated, multi-layered simultaneity of consciousness to her performance. A quality of ‘hereness’.

Veenapani Chawla, ‘Space and the Actor’, The Theatre of Veenapani Chawla, p. 118-119

Playing with Marcello was like nothing else I have experienced in life. Particularly when we had no idea what we were doing.

He was at his most brilliant with the unforeseen, the unknowable, the chaotic, with what was invented on and in the moment.

To be able to do that you have to be here. To be as present as a fox, as quick as a rat and as agile as a fish. He was so utterly present. Always. So utterly present was he, that now I cannot refer to him in the past. I cannot conceive of him in the past at all. It feels impossible. He is here. Somewhere. Just around the corner. Ready for the unforeseen. The unknowable. Ready to play so freely. So lightly. So free. He is here somewhere.

"Ariel", calls Prospero in his penultimate speech "… to the elements Be free…" Yes. He is still somewhere here. So free.

Simon McBurney’s tribute to performance maker Marcello Magni, on his passing, Complicite emailer, 20 September 2022

I have seen your mother once. I did not know in the beginning that she is your mother , but I remember her magnetic personality, her grace , her intelligent eyes and her bindi .

And she has such a presence , I remember looking at her multiple times.

A response to a Facebook post by my sister carrying a photograph of our mother

To be here, and to not be here as well – in the world of performance, it is perhaps puppeteers who embody this most clearly, as their practice is based fundamentally on breathing life into inanimate objects and making themselves (the givers of this life) disappear. They disappear sometimes literally behind screens or puppet stages that reveal only the puppets. Or – like Bunraku puppeteers – they remain fully visible to audiences, and yet direct their and our full attention into the puppets (or objects) that become people and characters. And it can happen anywhere, with anything. Dadi Pudumjee in a lecture demonstration in Bhopal (1998) covered his hand with a dupatta, and before our eyes there was a woman peeping out from under her veil; Anurupa Roy visiting my workspace in Calcutta (who knows when!) carrying her Bunraku character Gul Badan, and effortlessly making her a living, interacting part of our conversation. And then seeing Anurupa’s About Ram in performance, that adapts the Bunraku technique to Indian movement to make us believe in the puppet Ram even as we are un/able to invisibilise the three handlers who breathe life into him.

For we have a multiple consciousness, or diversified spaces within us, each possessing a different quality and degree of subtlety, often pulling in different directions. We conveniently cover all these spaces under the blanket of ‘mind’, to provide a cohesion or homogeneity to these differing movements within us. We flow from one space to the other like water without control; and sometimes, like water, we are in all the spaces simultaneously, but in a kind of haze. The conscious, energized performer will, through a daily practice of self-observation, bring to her performance a concentrated consciousness of her multiple inner spaces, as well as and as much as to her external space – her body.    

Veenapani Chawla, ‘Space and the Actor’, The Theatre of Veenapani Chawla, p. 118-119

As performers, we are – we become – able to create our own special performative presence, channel that energy to or through another (person or object), make the experience of space and time visible and visceral. It is the training and honing of our multidimensional consciousness that allows us to arrive at such a point, and take our audience with us. It makes us larger than life.

But what happens when this life is ebbing away?

You appear in snatches: sometimes in the depths of a focused gaze, in the tenacity with which you clutch my fingers or the hospital bed rail, in the habitual furrowing of your brow. But otherwise this body before me now seems uninhabited by anything but physical strain and pain. We check parameters repeatedly – blood pressure, temperature, oxygen saturation, pulse rate – all those markers of life. But where is the person who defined the life of this body? Your life now – if it can be called that - is a purely biological phenomenon. You have vanished: or, like a snail or crab, are able to recede so far into your home that we can no longer catch a glimpse of you. Or have you achieved the ability to leave and enter this home at your own will? Do you now already live around us rather than in the body I see before me?

Where is your life, Ma, and (why, how) does it still exist!

Ma Journal, 25 June 2022

The presence of your absence is palpable!

Leaving with grace / Left with Grace

16 October 2022

I return to writing this last section five days after you are gone, and I know I have seen you for the last time. My earlier notes for this segment have dwelt on the fragile beauty of flowers, the difficulty in defining grace, and aesthetic principles of performance that relate to both these intangibles. But now recalling your departure, I think of how easily you embraced fragility, grace, beauty, intangibility all at once in that last hour as you faded away, and how you retained the essence of all those over the last difficult years with a gentle graciousness that invited us to do the same. Thus, we sang to you, whispered to you as you left – which left us tranquil rather than bereft, allowing us to experience the rasa of sorrow in a detached, contemplative manner, rather than experience merely deep sadness and personal loss. So as I grieved, I was also able to ask myself – how does one find and offer grace, how does one find and offer Grace? – in the very moment that you found and offered both to me (again) for the very last time.

Your journey begins, as mine winds down -

Between the two of us, life flows on ||

Your lamp burns bright,

and you are surrounded by companionship

I am surrounded by darkness,

                  with the night stars for company ||

You stand on solid ground,

                  while I float in water

You may remain still,

                  I must move on ||

Your hands sustain [life]

                  [life] wilts in mine

But you are still fearful,

                  while I have left fear far behind ||

[translation is mine]

Yesterday, Ma – sitting in her chair and lucid before bed – reacted to this song. A memory, a recognition, a smile, a contentment.

Where she is now, she could have sung the last line to me quite truly.

It is bitter-sweet – for her to be there, for me to be here. And to be able to sing to each other – sometimes through words, sometimes melodies, sometimes silences – as she winds down as gracefully as she has always lived.

Ma Journal, 31 December 2021

For choreographers and dancers, the physicality and physical presence of bodily grace is a recurring concern. The words ‘physical’, ‘physicality’, ‘bodily’ sound strange in connection with a quality that is so incorporeal in itself, but finds expression through a corporeal presence. During the ‘Imagining Improvisation’ workshop in September 2016, my co-facilitator Anika Bendel urged us to refrain from using the word ‘grace’ as something definitive, because it is so personal, so much to do with the individual. Instead, to approach the idea/s of ‘grace’ as qualities of movement, presence, performance. We define it in so many ways: each form has its own principles of grace – what constitutes it, how one embodies it, how one communicates it, how one teaches it… if, indeed, grace can be taught! Or is it one of those things that is either inborn or imbibed?

To establish a central concept of beauty, Zeami [the founder of Japanese Noh Theatre], chose to use the word hana, flower or blossom […] thereby creating a unique aesthetic theory for Noh. In his study and thought on hana he brings to light a causal relationship between the inner, expressive beauty of the performer and what is perceived outwardly as visual beauty by the audience; he includes in the idea of hana what is novel or interesting; and […] the Buddhist concept of mujokan, the impermanence and transience of all things, which sees the blossom as beautiful because it dies. Zeami’s theory is not an expression of a facile aesthetic consciousness that simplistically likens beauty to a flower; rather, it is an investigation into the true nature of beauty.

Komparu, ‘Three Stages of Beauty: Aesthetic Fulfillment in Noh’, Noh Theatre

Last year when the hollyhocks bloomed, you tore them from their stems and left them in my room. I think you wanted me to have them.

This year you have barely noticed them, though they look in at your window beaming every morning.

Ma Journal, 7 March 2022

SP pulled up the last hollyhock plants today before I could say goodbye to them – for me, for you. They bloomed beautifully till the very end, powered by your love and generosity. They will bloom again next year, and every year after – carrying the vibrant colours of your memory.

Ma Journal, 7 July 2022

Rõjaku (Quiet Beauty)

Rõ means old and jaku means tranquil and quiet; thus rõjaku can be thought of as the quiet beauty of old age. There are very few forms of theater that treat in as great a depth as the Noh does the inevitable aging of the human being.

The ultimate aged character is the old woman. […] These pieces are considered the most mysterious, profound and challenging in the Noh repertoire […] because of the permeating intent to seek ultimate beauty in state of kotan (refined simplicity), wabi (subdued elegance), and sabi (unadorned beauty), a kind of beauty that can be expressed by a flower blossoming on a withered bough.

Komparu, ‘Three Stages of Beauty: Aesthetic Fulfillment in Noh’, Noh Theatre

I think of the stholpoddo shrub (Hibiscus mutabilis) in our garden whose flowers bloom a milk-white early in the morning and then gradually blush into a deep pink over the course of the day. The pink then gradually turns to brown as the petals change from velvety to papery, finally disintegrating to dust. I think of the process of wilting, and the time it takes to wilt, the space it takes to wilt – it is so much more visible than the process of budding, of blooming. Do we notice erasure more than we notice birth?

Zeami answers the question, “What is hana?” thus: “After you master the secrets of all things and exhaust the possibilities of every device, the hana that never vanishes still remains”

Komparu, ‘Three Stages of Beauty: Aesthetic Fulfillment in Noh’, Noh Theatre

Kantor defines abstraction as

‘the absence of an object […] The ultimate essence of abstraction lies in this absence of an object; in the absence of a human body. It is as if we crossed the threshold of the [human] ability to see. It is as if invisible forces were players in an ancient tragedy. […] If something disappears, this does not mean that this ‘something’ dies out, but that it lives, moves, pulsates in a deeper [reality]’.

[quoted in Kobialka, Michal. “‘The Milano Lessons’ by Tadeusz Kantor: Introduction.” TDR (1988-), vol. 35, no. 4, 1991, pp. 136–47, https://doi.org/10.2307/1146169]

Next week on 22 October, I will dance for you. I will dance [a] disarmingly simple piece. It plays with space and time as only a kathak artist can – laying out time in space, and then filling it precisely, with care, with joy, with wonder, with gratitude for the opportunity to do so. And for the opportunity to share the creation of that jigsaw abstract world with an audience. We build worlds – that’s what we do!

I thought of only space and time and how they structure each other when I imagined this piece. But when I dance it for you, I will think of the foundations that are laid for us to stand on and build on / from. And how those foundations – like you – often become invisible [but can never vanish].

Ma Journal, 14 October 2022

6 November 2022

The morning after you left, people – more and more people – keep gathering around you to bid farewell, to be in your presence one last time. Because while you may be gone, you are still astonishingly present – silently drawing out tears, memories, and even laughter from all of us. There are many who have not met you for years, but carry you in their hearts, as you – in your capacity to embrace everyone – must have carried them in yours. We sit with you as the flowers collect around you, and soak in their fragrance – your fragrance. (“People are like fragrances” said VAH on her visit. “You can’t hold on to them.”) A soft smile plays on your lips, you look strangely refreshed, happy in our company.

We have wrapped you in one of your favourite saris to take with you, leaving all else behind. There you lie, still exuding and embodying the grace, beauty and gentle but solid serenity that drew – still draws – people to you. There you lie, resplendent in red. There you lie.

At peace.

At last.

Read this LAST

Listening to music together, I hand Ma a red felt pen and this notebook. She seems to have asked to do something, I feel she wishes to express herself. As the songs continue, she doodles slowly. I see shapes reminiscent of some Bangla alphabets – taw, thaw, haw… several versions of S, s, s… They may be something else to her entirely, but she keeps at it – doggedly, as is her nature. There is a beautiful, serene focus and unhurriedness. She takes her time, choosing pages, choosing areas. After about 15-20 minutes she chooses to stop. Hands me the pen, shuts the notebook. She has finished.

Ma Journal, 25 December 2021

Vikram Iyengar is an arts leader and connector based in Calcutta, India, and working internationally. He is a dancer-choreographer-director, curator-presenter, and arts researcher-writer. Co-founder and artistic director of Ranan Performance Collective, he also initiated and leads the Pickle Factory Dance Foundation – a hub for dance and movement practice and discourse. His scope of work spans practice, discourse, critique, ideation and management, and revolves around the central tenet of creating deep connections with and through the arts.