Compelling moments marred by broken promises
Amina Khayyam Dance Company brings a double-bill to The Place, combining live music and contemporary Kathak to tell current stories. While there are compelling highs, both pieces struggle to land.
You&Me tells the story of a man’s repressed sexuality. While he yearns to be himself, the opportunity presented by a chance encounter with a fellow man, he is tethered to his normative life and the shackles of his Ghungroo bells. Shyam Dattani and Giacomo Pini play our two men, their differences represented by their different dance styles–Kathak and contemporary, respectively–which they teach to each other. It’s cute, as we see the tentative first steps of a growing connection which is then cruelly denied (don’t worry, it has a happy ending).
Bird is a group piece exploring women stuck in abusive relationships, their desire for escape, and the power of solidarity. Incorporating a silent scream motif, the choreography shows us many different yet connected, and sadly familiar, examples of suffering. The dancers–Jane Chan, Jalpa Vala, Abirimi Eswar, Mohika Shankar, Selene Travaglia and Amina Khayyam–endow each character with a welcome specificity and precision, and seem keenly aware of the responsibility of telling stories like these.
The biggest triumph of the night is Jonathan Mayer’s music, played by Mayer (sitar & subahar), Iain McHugh (cello) and Debasish Mukherjee (tabla) in near-darkness behind the gauze. It’s in one moment thumping, flooding the stage with energy and electricity, and the next soft, eerie and disconcerting. As a score, it deserves high praise for masterfully complementing the choreography and both leading and following the dancers oft-tricky sequences.
Unfortunately, the pieces fall flat in two major ways. The first, perhaps slightly more forgivable, is in the obviousness of the choices. In You&Me, we have a simple story of a man who is repressed, meets a man, struggles, they teach each other something, and finally they can be together. Dattani removes his bells (it’s a bold, slightly uncomfortable choice to have this cultural symbol be his shackles) and is free. This story is lovely but the choreography is often on-the-nose and feels like they stopped at their first choice for each moment. Bird suffers from a similar problem, where the examples of abusive relationships seem surface level and the dance feels like a missed opportunity to explore subtler and more complex issues and their embodiments. Indeed, I worry there is something harmfully reductive in portraying all the women as victims who all manage to escape by accepting help: a very narrow and inaccurate view of the majority of women’s experiences of domestic abuse.
This brings me to the less forgivable issue with this double-bill: what was promised. Bird’s description seems mostly appropriate, although it does feel as if the piece isn’t quite tackling (at least explicitly or implicitly enough to be recognised) some of its stated ideas. However, the handout for the evening describes You&Me as containing a “reversal of rūpānusāriṇī when a man plays a woman,” and as following a “female perspective”–since the piece started from a workshop with a women’s group. This leads the audience to expect a story from the perspective of a woman with a woman playing a man, neither of which we receive. At best, it fails in its delivery. At worst, it comes across as erasing the very perspective it reports to be led by.
Amina Khayyam Dance Company is clearly renowned for a reason, and not all art has to push every boundary. But for a company with its mission statement, I couldn’t help but be disappointed in the simplicity of what these works had to say. Queer people deserve to remove the shackles of their culture (and can quite easily in this case) and be themselves freely, and the suffering of domestic abuse victims is bad. Where’s the promised subculture?