Amidst the “delicious chaos of Margazhi”, and for the third year in a row, Chennai-based Anita Ratnam dons the curator’s garb to present in collaboration with the Kartik Fine Arts and her Arangham Trust, a conference titled Purush; last year, the focus was Epic Women and the year before, the festival celebrated the Mad and the Divine. As a curator of a conference in a city like Chennai, smack in the middle of Margazhi, located in Mylapore, and housed in an auditorium like the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Ratnam is cognizant of the many challenges and limitations of the general ad-hoc informality that invariably punctuates any attempt at serious curation. “I know the atmosphere isn’t exactly conducive to serious academic discussion; I know the crowd is drifting; I know attention spans are limited,” Ratnam says, “But within those givens, my attempt has been to use these conferences, to bring to Chennai, as many styles, disciplines, artistes, scholars and in a sense offer people a platform for information dissemination and the possibility of accessing, engaging and sharing thought and knowledge.”
This year, likewise. A diverse menu that is packaged in a format that attempts to put the spotlight on Purush: The Global Dancing Male, Ratnam and her co-curator Hari Krishnan, a dancer based in Canada, clarify the conference isn’t a “comprehensive assessment of male dancers in India. It can’t be, given the time and the nature of the audience,” Ratnam says. What it is though is an exploration and investigation of the space and position the male dancer occupies in India, through a series of performances, presentations, and discussions. “In the process, we are also attempting to chronicle change, the passage of time, the was and is in the world of the male dancer in India,” Ratnam adds.
The conference is a lot like Ratnam; multi-faceted, multi-pronged, multi-lateral, multi-spaced. A happy marriage of her own interest in performance—and dance being only an aspect of it—and combined with her own liberal mindset to encourage the novice with the expert, the conference will also crackle with a jostling of talent; the tried and the tested, like Astad Deboo, Pt Birju Maharaj, Navtej Johar along with the aspirant Anuj Mishra, Sinam Basu, A Lakshmanaswamy, just to give you an idea. This year, on December 21, the conference steps out of its closed environs and travels to the Nageswara Rao Park (in Mylapore) where an all-male folk ensemble from Purusai (a village near Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu) will re-create the story of Draupadi and the Vastiraparanam. On December 18 and 19, the Alliance Francaise of Madras will become the venue for the premiere of two plays from Puducherry. “See, I’ve been really keen for the festival to foray into the city and not remain an exclusive of a certain kind of people who frequent a certain kind of space,” Ratnam says.
What is interesting also is the fact that even though an array of stars — international and Indian — participate and partake of the conference, including Ratnam herself, whose contacts and camaraderie stretch far and wide, across the world, the conference is strictly about the subject of conversation and not really about the people. “I think the idea is the star, the hero,” Ratnam says. It’s best that way!