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The Boy Dance/r

Birendra Pani’s latest show ‘Boy Dancer: Convergence and Continuum’ at the Gallery Espace, New Delhi brings the notions of Death and Life in art forms into focus, says JohnyML

Birendra Pani

Confluence of two art forms always generates a new way of looking at the constituent art forms. When a visual artist (painter) decides to bring in the elements of a performing art (dance), he rather functions as an active agent between two different ways of expression. So far no traditional dance form has captured the essence of a visual artist’s works or life in purely abstract terms. Several ballets (dance dramas in Indian sense) have attempted the portrayal of the life of an artist in sublime and romantic narratives. These dance narratives often depict the artist as an eternal romantic who tries to instill ‘life’ to the ‘female’ form that he has sculpted or painted. The life of an artist is narrated as a series of struggles, his quest for the ideal, love and pure life. He is a rebel and a lover. His aim is to animate the inanimate.

Catching the formal and aesthetic/erotic nuances of a dance form within the linguistic limitations or freedom of painterly language however, is not something phenomenal or novel. Many artists have painted and photographed dancers. Many have captured the movements of dance in purely abstract forms and terms. However, when Birendra Pani attempts to create a dialogue between his painterly language and the language of Gotipua Dance of Orissa, a new discourse is generated. Through his repertoire of paintings, drawings and photographs, Birendra Pani tries to raise certain issues; how far one art form can ‘adopt’ another art form for the purpose of communication? How much authority an artist can exercise over another art form, on which he has only a right of ‘continuous engagement’? What are the levels of engagements possible between two art forms? In this process, does one art form get subordinated to the other? Is it possible for an artist to assume the garb of a missionary who tries to revive one of the dying art forms? Does he hold a higher authority, accepted by the modern cultural discourse, over another art form, which is usually qualified as ‘traditional’?

Birendra Pani presents a series of paintings, to be precise portrait paintings of the Gotipua Dancers from Orissa. Also he presents the portrait photographs of those dancers in their dance costumes and make up. Besides, the artist presents a series of drawings in which the dancers are shown in various acrobatic postures. To understand this ensemble of works, whose theme is culturally detached from the mainstream art lovers who come in a gallery, a bit of backgrounder is needed. Gotipua dance is the boy dance of Orissa. Young boys are trained from a very tender age to dance in the guise of females. They are not only trained in the usual ‘laasya’ (tender) dance movements but also trained in the tougher acrobatic postures. This 16th century dance form is the root of all the classical dance forms (so mainstream) from Orissa. Boys dancing as girls have got socio-cultural and religious reasons, which perhaps is not of our interest for the time being.

What interests me is the interface of two notions about art, which is held ideal in two different forms of aesthetic communication. As mentioned elsewhere, painting, in general captures dance as a form of abstraction whereas dance captures painting/painter as a concrete entity. In painting, the artist kills the dancer in order to get the essence of dance. Meanwhile in dance, the painter is created as a romantic. Painting alludes to death while dance alludes to life (artist instilling life into an inanimate form). What happens when the ‘death’ form tries to rekindle life into a ‘life’ form? Here Birendra Pani engages himself with a dance form which is at the verge of extinction and reclaims its aesthetics to make his painting ‘live’.

Birendra Pani’s attempt could be viewed in two ways; one, he assumes his role as a missionary to revive the Gotipua dance form. Two, he looks for possibilities of confluence where each art form can become a tribute to the other. I don’t think that Birendra Pani has any missionary verve in him. He is a painter and he would like to look for possibilities of confluence. He has been using the image of a razor blade in his painting for the last few years and the imminent threat that this image imparts to the viewer becomes many times effective in this new set of paintings as the portraits of the dancers are painted at the extended edges of the razor blade image. They scream ‘RISK’. The risk factor, of the dance, dancers and even the artists who are unmindful about their own language is very much evident there.

It could be read into sentimental terms, which I would like to resist. RISK is everywhere. If Gotipua is a dying art form so is painting. After four centuries there would be another ‘artist’ who would present a ‘painter’ and his plasma-tized image in a space station saying that there was an aesthetic form called ‘art’ and they used to express their ‘intentionalities’ through a medium called ‘painting’. Coming back from this futuristic projection, I would rather say that Birendra Pani himself becomes a medium (not an active agent) to try out two art forms on the same platform.

Birendra Pani, according to the catalogue writer, has tried to establish a new language. I do not think so. Here you find a language used by Gerhard Richter, Luc Tymans and even Riyas Komu and Shibu Natesan. They all have used portrait paintings with blurred edges that denying them of hagiographic precision. A criminal, a lost person, a worker, a friend and so on become ‘types’ in this process of blurring and through this the boundaries of identities get collapsed. The truth value of representation is contested both in painting and photography. The identities are pushed into liminal spaces of debates and contestations. I would say that Birendra Pani too does the same when he blurs the features of these dancers in his painterly language, which is wrongly qualified by the catalogue writer as ‘mediatic realism’. Birendra Pani does not go for a theoretically complicated argument and it becomes clear when he pays tribute to the dancers while presenting their assumed personalities (as girls) and their own unassumingly rustic selves through straight portrait photographs.

There is some novelty in the whole presentation. The gallery walls are not ‘filled’ with paintings. There are a very few exhibits in the two levels of Gallery Espace. That is really an act of self-control by the artist. The gallerist also should be congratulated for not pressing the artist to ‘cover’ the wall space with ‘works’. The glass wall at the façade of Gallery Espace divides the ‘inside’ ‘outside’ spaces. Outside there are pubs, restaurants, hang outs, gadget showrooms etc. Amidst this din there is a make shift theatre where the Gotipua Dancers (who are the co-producers of Birendra Pani’s show) perform their dance. The urban viewer, ogle-r, passer by, cynic, vagrant, vagabond, destitute, call centre executive, art lover, dilettante, impresario, police man, me-the-most-important type, don’t-you-see-me type, oh-my type, how-interesting type and so on are drawn into the performance. If death is inside the gallery, the life is outside. If life is inside the gallery the death is being performed outside.

Hope Birendra Pani would keep up his engagement with ‘life’ and ‘death’ in art. Let us wish him all the best and congratulate him for presenting a very sincere show. But I cannot stand certain catalogue writings. His catalogue (yet to be published) has a write up. Somewhere it reads like this: Language , here  the living field of communication, of visual  as well as per formative , in the tensions, contradictions of social life of the  gotipua dancers as well as the dance form is in a state of “historical becoming” recalling the past and envisioning the future different from the present as a “historical being”. This approach to language as  people are engaged in different kinds of relations and activities in which distinct genres provide them with a range of resources for coming to understand and articulate their experiences. I prefer to run away from such writings.