| U of M Alumni Association | U of M Twin Cities |
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7/9/2003
Architects create buildings, bankers facilitate financial transactions, and artists create visions. I do political theater, using dance to tell ordinary stories about ordinary people and to address violence. I'm interested in being someone who has something to say, to inspire social change, to invite people into political thought. I am an assistant professor of dance in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota. I also am the artistic director for Women in Motion, a performing company of South Asian artists who create political theater and perform in community-based and other artistic forums. I was born in India and began studying classical dance before I was 5. Sometimes I think I dance with the desire of generations because both my mother and my grandmother were interested in dance, but there were no opportunities for them. Part of Indian dance is storytelling, making a statement about love or spirituality, and weaving a hugely metaphorical statement. I became a well-known performer in India and specialized in Odissi, which is very sculpturesque, dominated by gestures. My father urged me to go into teaching, so I earned my bachelor's degree in literature at Presidency College in Calcutta, one of the best colleges in all of Asia. I love literature, so I studied English and American literature and earned my master's degree in literature from Jadavpur University, also in Calcutta. I was also performing during this time—classical dances, creative and folk dances, all of which are a huge part of the cultural scenario in India, and I was learning a lot and questioning. The world was a mess and I thought, "How can I dance this dance about beauty and spirituality when I see what is going on around me: violence, patriarchy, class hierarchy?" I had to understand my body, because the body is the tool for creating my language. I came to America to break out of my context, to look back. I got a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City in 1989. I got a master's degree in dance education in 1991 and started dancing with the Asian American Dance Theater company in New York City's Chinatown. The company toured traditional dance from Asian cultures as well as works by contemporary choreographers from these cultures. I also got married. My husband was my boyfriend from India and we had come here together. In grad school, I met interesting people from all parts of the world and my politics became very radical. I also started working as a volunteer with Manavi, a shelter for battered women in New Jersey where I literally saw the global proliferation of patriarchy and violence against women. Everywhere I looked there was violence, especially against women. There is historic injustice against women across the world, and that moved me very deeply. Always I have been looking for ways to address contemporary issues, but I thought, "How do I jibe that with dance?" They don't fit together. I wanted to dance about issues that really move me, but what I found here was the same as in India: a bias against political theater. In India there is a sense that, if you do what we called "committed theater," there is less artistic value in your work. Some South Asian people were saying, "Where were you all these years?" But some said, "You're washing dirty laundry in public." They thought people would think India is so terrible. I said, "No, I'm showing how Indian women resisted violence." For example, when I did a piece about Rameeza Bi, a poor woman who was gang raped by policemen, I framed her as a survivor and showed how the entire community rose up in protest against her treatment and created a furor. Women from different strata of society and different classes were foremost among protesters. I had to find the dance language to address those issues. I wanted to look back at what my traditions were and to create a different technique. I couldn't keep the language of the body as it is and tell the stories I wanted to tell with contemporary dance. I started taking ballet and modern dance lessons and my whole thinking opened up. Exposure to different ways of doing things enabled me to think through what I knew from my own cultural context. I also wanted to create a very strong vocabulary for women, so I started looking at the lines of yoga and found I could really understand my body in a different way. Yoga and Kalari, an Indian martial arts form, are very non-representational forms, have a very internal focus, and work through a focus on breath release. All of the dance forms I use are based in my cultural context. After teaching at the Boston Conservatory of Dance at Wellesley for a year, I did my doctorate work on a Russell Conwell Fellowship at Temple University in Philadelphia. The focus of that work was studying the choreography of women of color. I earned my doctorate and certification in women's studies in 1996, then taught at Temple from 1996, when my daughter was born, until 1998. Then I applied for a position at the University of Minnesota. I was hired as a dance scholar and in January 1999 began to teach dance history and philosophy and aesthetics here. I love my job and my students. They are future artists, and I have a very serious responsibility. I get into these young minds and want to open them up. The department respects that agenda. The University has a very good dance program and it is growing. The dean has hired an amazing faculty. My students ask hard questions and don't let go. They're very important to inspiring me and making me rethink things. My choreography and my scholarship focus on how being an artist might enrich their lives and expose them to different ideas. They get excited and sometimes frustrated, but we help each other grow. This community means almost everything to my projects. I literally see what the issues are here. It's important for me to connect with women of color by involving them in projects I do about self-esteem and performance, dancing about their issues, and bringing those issues to my students. Their support is very validating for my work. I also use text in my performances. Sometimes I write it; sometimes I take images of women and rewrite their stories. I did that with Sita, the central female figure in the epic The Ramayana. She is clearly committed to peace, but the story is much more about her husband, whom she dutifully follows into the forest where he is banished for many years. I turned her into an underground activist for peace. In A Wife's Letter—for which I received a special events grant from the McKnight Arts and Humanities Endowment in the College of Liberal Arts—I wanted to make that project about South Asian women and women of color who don't have many opportunities to work on issues of self-esteem. It was based on three letters written by a 17-year-old Indian woman who committed suicide after suffering abuse from her husband and ridicule from her in-laws. Her letters were published in a journal in India, and they grabbed me and stayed with me. I wondered, "Why is she blaming herself?" I said, "My God, we do this so often. Women's relationship to violence is such a complicated thing." Before the performance, I asked women I met in grocery stores and on the street to write responses to her letter. I wanted brown women to get a chance to work on these issues. Twenty or 30 women wrote responses, and we created a display of their letters in the lobby of the Barbara Barker Dance Center at the University. This was a few days after the attacks of September 11, 2001. It was surprising how many people came and were rejuvenated and given a sense of hope. My work is not glamorous work. It's very minimalist in some ways. I do not use pretty costumes and jewelry, because I find them very disempowering. They get in the way of the message. I'm not trying to seduce people with pretty costumes, so the work has to be technically excellent. It's an amazing experience. Sometimes there is rejection. People might think, "Who do you think you are to dance about my life?" One woman in Toronto said, "I was angry with you during the performance, because you were forcing me to think about things I didn't want to think about." Another woman said, "My own life flashed before my eyes. Thank you; I don't have to be ashamed about this." I perform around the world—Delhi, Bombay, London, Texas—and work with other choreographers, because I am interested in understanding the works of other artists of color and artists from the third world. I'm working with an Indonesian choreographer, and I'm working with Hari Kirshnan, a choreographer from Canada, on a piece about ruptures in sexuality and identity that will premiere in Toronto in March 2004. I'm also working on a piece with Laurie Carlos, an eminent Twin Cities performance and theater artist, that we will be performing in October at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis. I'm also writing a book that interprets the choreography of two women artists: Chandralekha, an Indian choreographer, and Jawole willa jo Zollar, a black choreographer. The book, which is being published by Wesleyan University Press and should be out this fall, is called Butting Out, because the linear spinal arrangement that is typical of Western dance is alien to many black and Asian cultures, where the curves of the spine are valued and the butt is held loose. I'm now starting research for a second book that will look at what it means to create this kind of work. In it I am going to study the works of Sardono Kusumo, a contemporary choreographer from Indonesia who works with issues of communities and environment, and Rennie Harris, a hip-hop choreographer from Philadelphia. I am an artist and an activist. Violence against women exists all over the world in different forms—some obvious, some subtle—but the violence is everywhere. It is like a many-headed serpent; you get rid of one head and another grows in its place. This is my life's work, and I pour my heart and soul into it, because I want to inspire social change. Vicki Stavig is a freelance writer who lives in Bloomington, Minnesota. | |||||||||||||||
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