CHENNAI: It was in the late 1970’s, right after television services were separated from radio, that dance and music began to enter households. Forget learning the art, even watching a live dance performance, was considered a luxury till then. But today, almost 50 years later, dance has become a part and parcel of our lives — from the traditional Bharatanatyam to freestyle dance, the city’s performing art enthusiasts have gone out of their way to add multiple feathers to ‘namma Chennai’s cap.
For International Dance Day, City Express chats with a few full-time dancers-cum-choreographers in the city who took to dance full-time and some others who had to juggle between a career and their passion.
While taking up dance as a career might be the ultimate dream of most performers in the city, the challenges that follow tend to hinder the final leap. According to Arun Srinivasan, founder, Salsa Madras, societal pressure is the number one challenge when you decide to pursue styles like salsa that requires a dancing partner.
“The city is opening up to modern forms of dance but the pace is slow. There is also the added stigma attached to having a dancing partner. It makes both men and women cringe at the prospect of dancing in pairs. Media is to blame largely for portraying ‘western’ dances as ‘bad’. When a dancer talks to his or her parents about taking salsa as a full-time career, you know what their answer is going to be!” says the performer who has been promoting the art for the past eight years. “Initially, it was difficult for me to convince people to let go and just enjoy the dance routine. However, things are slowly changing now…at least some people are getting the idea. And when I took it up as a profession, I didn’t wait for opportunities to come to me; I created them.”
For Jeffery Vardon, founder, Hot Shoe Dance Company, to convince his family that he wanted to be a dancer was quite the task. “Back then, dance was not considered a career…it wasn’t a big industry. Therefore to choose dance over anything else was in itself a big thing. I had to juggle between a conventional office job in the morning and dance classes in the evening and weekends,” he recalls. Gradually, he gained the confidence to start a formal dance school in the city.
“When I had honed my skills, I decided to a start a western dance school — at a time when there was no other!” he says.
In the last five years, the dance scene in the city has changed dramatically, paving way for novel dance styles, workshops and competitions. Maryann Ranjini Vincent, a graphic designer, and founder of Afrontal, the first and only Afro-Caribbean dance crew in the country, says she enjoys the best of both worlds. “I want to showcase my skills to the entire country but there are several challenges. The style is new; so people are hesitant to try it, but we are getting there,” she says.
Though a lot of dancers have come up in the city, Jeffery opines that most of them rush into the process of becoming choreographers/mentors instead of focusing on being excellent learners first. “You need to have a strong base before you step into teaching. You can’t learn an art for two or three years and immediately jump into starting a studio,” he points out.
For Alisha Ajit, co-founder, Jelly Fish Dance Company, choosing dance was not ‘gutsy’. “People often tell me I had the guts to choose this path, but I feel it was a very natural process. Dance has shaped my life in a big way,” she says.