In the midst of daily chaos, our bodies have a way of telling us what our minds have buried deep. Imagine a sudden panic attack in the middle of dinner or restlessness in a happy workplace — it’s not sudden, just the body responding to long-suppressed trauma. Vishal Telang’s dance-movement workshop, ‘Emotion in Motion’ conducted in Saket last week, shows how a reconnection with the body can release bottled-up emotions through movement.
Telang has a degree in Modern and Contemporary Dance from New York City’s Peridance Center. He has also trained in theatre and drama in Mumbai. From training actors from the Hindi film industry to doing workshops with students of psychology from Delhi University, he has held classes pan-India and has spent almost 25 years developing a specialised movement technique — not a word he likes — rooted in expressive and somatic practices.
Technique is, indeed, not the core of Telang’s workshops. It’s not about a fixed choreography or training to be a dancer but about the art of letting the body flow to express emotions. He essentially uses two different methods—somatic movements, which are how the movement feels, and intentional movements, which use the idea of metaphors, imagery and personal memories; breathing exercises are an important part of his sessions.
Lockdown changed his method. It was the time when he began to question whether what he was teaching was benefitting people. “When I returned from New York after seven years, I thought I would be welcomed with red carpets, but the
Indian creative dance landscape is very different, I was disillusioned for a while, but I learnt how to crack it.”
What’s different
“My movements are designed to release dopamine, the happy hormone, so that these primary emotions find a release,” he says.
“Whenever a person faces a trauma, there is a change in the body,” he says. Even if one forgets the trauma, the body remembers. “This is the reason why you don’t know why the heart starts palpitating suddenly even in the absence of any visible trigger.” Emotion in motion tries to identify this discomfort in the body, and even though the trauma can’t be deleted, the physical memory associated with it can be modified, and the reaction of the body can be altered, he says. Telang’s sessions rely on “free movements” along with traditional Indian yoga and rasa and bhava from Natyashastra. Keeping in mind the nine rasas, he uses mostly Satvik bhava — involuntary physical reactions to deep emotions, considered pure and originating from an actor’s or devotee’s inner state.
Know your body
Physiological shift can bring about psychological shift; this realisation is at the heart of his workshops. The noise outside can’t be silenced, but the ones within can be, says Telang, explaining how self-doubt is a downer, forbidding a person from finding his/her narrative. The workshop is designed in a way that integrates breathwork with somatic movements so that the pattern of low self-esteem is broken. Passive consumption of social media also triggers fear and pain in the body even when the reel surfacing on the feed doesn’t socially affect a person in any way, he adds.
Telang says a participant in one of his workshops reported a certain anxiety in her daily commute to the office via the Delhi metro. She said that even though she reached the office on time and had been doing so for 12 years, she experienced tremendous anxiety after navigating through the crowd, and dealing with the gazes she had to encounter enroute. The feeling continued even though she had a happy day at work. One of Telang’s movements is designed to help individuals manage social anxiety. This participant got back to him 15 days later saying that she had got rid of her anxiety.
Dance for all
The course has been designed keeping Indian society in mind. When it comes to releasing emotions, popular culture and the Indian family have schooled men to bear it all; “mard ko dard nahi hota (men do not feel the pain)” is how they have been conditioned to be. This is why their bodies store more stress, says Telang. The workshop can be a place to unlearn this — for both genders, he stresses.
Gen Zs are more aware about their bodies and emotions, says Telang. “Millennials are still in the process of taking decisions freely, to follow their heart and let their emotions flow,” he says.
From nobody turning up for his dance classes to workshops packed with people wanting to learn more, Telang has come a long way.