Dance TO Showcase Feature #7 Outspoken, Fiesty and in your corner: Hari Krishnan
He's funny, he's fresh, he's fearless. Hari Krishnan and his company inDANCE are featured in the upcoming Dance TO Showcase performances. Read on to hear his funny, fresh and fearless responses to my Dance TO Showcase-themed questions.
LUCY: Could you tell me a few things about yourself that most people in the dance community wouldn’t know? Anything racy, funny, bizarre?
HARI: I am addicted to the movie
‘Grease’- I’ve watched it at least once a month since I was seven years
old!
My favorite color is purple.
I don’t drink coffee or tea
(My Mom knows why!)
My very last meal would be a
PB&J sandwich.
Gay porn bores me.
I must squeeze the toothpaste
from the middle of the tube every time (it drives my boyfriend Rex crazy!)
Rex and I would kill to have
Stewart Gilligan Griffin for a son along with bitch-Stewie and evil-Stewie!
We still want to kick George
Bush Jnr’s ass, for “breaking” the world.
I am pissed Justin Trudeau is so bland and ill prepared.
I am pissed Justin Trudeau is so bland and ill prepared.
Kathleen
Wynne be MORE fierce
girl!
Up yours Harper!
Under no circumstances,
should Canada take Justin Bieber back!
LUCY: Wow. I do that with the toothpaste too. Drives my husband nuts as well. So other than Grease, what keeps you inspired — both to keep creating and to keep dancing?
HARI: An innate, insane, masochistic, obsession/compulsion death-wish striving for my ‘voice’ to be heard. Of course, this struggle doesn’t pay the bills!
But the standing O, when
justly earned, is just as rewarding as the other big O! Never enough.
LUCY: So the need to have your voice heard, was that the driving motivation to form your own company?
HARI: I feel I have a strong, unique artistic voice. Through experience, I realized I would have to alter, adapt, dilute or
disown that voice if I were to speak through the medium of another artist or
company. Therefore the birth of inDANCE.
My company is an umbrella under which I seek shelter from the common prevailing cacophony (the generic
Indian dance company) that already exists.
My artistic practice, though rooted
in decades of research and training with disenfranchised hereditary dance
communities stemming from critical, often forgotten feminist dance histories,
is further informed by my global lived life experiences, my personal politics
on gender, queer sexuality and eroticism, breaking the rules of what is
considered ‘tradition’, subverting cliché and challenging dominant discourses
on global culture.
inDANCE is instrumental in expanding my personal politics
and practice while interfacing collaboratively with local and international dancers,
musicians, composers, designers, scholars and activists.
LUCY: What is your dream project?
HARI: In a perfect world, I would
sell my boyfriend AND my Mom to work on a 3-way collaboration with the National
Ballet, Crystal Pite and my company inDANCE – ON MY TERMS. Of course, I believe
in Unicorns too!
As far as international
collaborations go, my dreams would seem even more impossible….
LUCY: I guess we'll save those for another interview....Down another avenue: what do you think dance artists can do to improve the health of the toronto dance community?
HARI: On a serious note:
We in the Toronto dance
community should conduct a brutally honest audit of ourselves. Our best are
bailing town and leaving for greener pastures abroad- to the US, Europe, Asia
and then returning only after we’ve peaked. Why is that?
We seem fully content in our
own insulated world.
Unfortunately many of us are
racist, ignorant and tend to Orientalize, while grand-standing otherwise.
The awards committees are a
dance mafia comprised of the usual suspects nominating, adjudicating and
winning! Most jurors don’t even bother to attend most of the shows they’re
evaluating.
There is a xenophobic
aversion on the part of presenters and audiences to support risk taking
cross-cultural work unless the risk taker is a ‘celebrated’ entity. In many
instances, the undeserving mediocre still rule.
Even the dance fraternity
discriminates against its own i.e. artistic directors, dancers and their
collaborators in one genre hardly/rarely exhibit any curiosity to investigate
the output of other artists/genres.
All of this harms the impetus
to create work that is original and otherworldly. Innovation is welcome only if
names/brands are bankable and this mostly ensures repetitive redundancy.
Others have proffered all of
the above complaints several times over the years and their solutions put
forward are very similar to the ones I have to offer. Unfortunately, it all stops
at the level of JUST TALKING.
In any case, at the risk of
probably losing some old friends and making fewer new ones, here is my
perspective:
I strongly recommend our
fraternity keep coming together in person, en masse, regularly in a round table
brainstorming session to admit these issues exist and consider various options
to address them, because there are many, many perspectives, as there are
solutions. These meetings should provide a safe, nurturing environment for all
attending to be authentic and honest, thus proving to be a productive forum for
all.
While I understand that
financial resources are a constraint, we should consider the option of inviting
our peers (on a complementary basis) to see each other’s work as often as
possible to foster a fair exchange of ideas, and understand each others’s genres
on a more equitable basis. With that awareness, we should all be considered
Canadian and not necessarily culture or community specific, even when some
forms do not fit pre-conceived paradigms of what dance is or should be.
Reciprocally, the invitees
should be respectful and curious enough to accept the generous invitations
extended to them, to build bridges to kinship.
Hopefully this would help
constitute a truly more inclusive integrated dance community.
I call for a bolder, more honest,
TRULY progressive mindset amongst artists, presenters and audiences.
Dance artists living in the
city must think about what excellence is and how that is defined in dance
globally. Without this panoramic and self-reflexive attitude, the quality of
dance-making and art-production in the city is going to deteriorate even
further and not qualify to be showcased on international platforms.
A truly world class global city
like London (UK) or Madrid (Spain) nurtures a multitude of representations in
contemporary dance. Artists taking risks and making incredible work come from
various ethnicities, specializing in non-European dance styles and embracing
differing cultural influences. Many of these artists are the face of
contemporary dance in Europe. They are nurtured and supported by arts agencies,
arts councils, the dance fraternity and by the community at large. Hence their
work is current and representative of a 21st century global world mosaic.
Sadly, I do not see this kind
of support and representation in Toronto and yet we pride ourselves on being a global
world-class city for the arts. I call on presenters in the
city to cast a wider net and look at artists of various genres and styles who are
making excellent work and are taking risks grounded in this excellence.
Art should not always be
about financial profit.
In all fairness, I should not
fault the artists and presenters alone, because audiences also play a crucial
role through their patronage and perceptions of dance in the city. I appeal to the
city’s audiences to partake in all kinds of dance while applying democratic
standards in their evaluation of the artist’s unique voice.
Whether the artist is working
in singular or diverse styles and genres, I encourage the audience to see their
work with a fresh, open mind and not judge or dismiss them as irrelevant on the
basis of their name, skin colour or dance genre.
As in most TRULY
international cities, I dream of audiences in Toronto who patronize and nurture
all kinds of dance with an open mind and heart.
LUCY: Again, wow. Thank you for your honesty and incisiveness. I think some of us are scared to say how we really feel sometimes, but you've shown me that with a good, open heart you can be critical without being cruel in this light.
Ok, final question: Can you tell me about a performance that was a game-changer,
art-changer for you — something you were part of as an audience member — who
was it, where, when, why was it impactful to you?
HARI: Hands down it was being in
the audience, watching Sylvie Guillem’s farewell performance, “A Life in
Progress” at the Sadler’s Wells in London this May. It was an absolutely life
changing experience as an artist and human being. Here is a dancer TRULY deserving of the much
bandied about phrase “sheer poetry in
motion”.
Articulate. Precise. Terse.
Haunting.
Aspiring to bask in her
shadow makes my artistic Sisyphean life worthwhile.
all about Dance TO Showcase: http://www.dancetoshowcase.com
all photos courtesy of Hari Krishnan/inDANCE
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