A dancer stands, slowly pushing her belly forward while walking in a circle of white light. Following her, another dancer enters the scene, dressed in a short garment in shades of red, arms stretched back as she walks backward, piercing the space thickened by the sound score of breaths, whistles, and screeching sounds created for Korean instruments by Marteen Visser. Thus begins Pushed by Padmini Chettur, one of the most interesting Indian dancers today. A dance that is a tribute to slowness, to the almost tactile listening to the friction the body feels while moving in empty space. As if the air continued to push and demand stubborn resistance. Two dancers become four, bodies slowly twisting before pairing up, two by two, a duo that plays with the idea of the double, back to back. Side steps, with arms swinging in parallel, locking into the tension of the rhythm. Pushed is a work that seems to revive the construction of musical and choreographic scores in minimalism. The dancers become six, four in blue and two in red, rigorous in their gestural development, a feminine India that, with necessary differences, we might associate with the early Rosas of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.
However, Pushed was born in Korea and is inspired by the seven emotions theorized in Korean philosophy: resentment, pain, pleasure, joy, sadness, love, and envy. The result is evocative and disorienting, almost abstract, developed along a non-narrative line. Transitions from one body to another where the subjects give way to a static objectivity, yet within which a collective tension can be felt. "The intention," states the choreographer's presentation, "is to blur the lines of emotionality (...) Emotion is our ability to find balance but also to lose it."
Padmini Chettur danced for ten years with the Chandralekha company, which focuses on the deconstruction and reworking of Bharata Natyam. Since she has been choreographing on her own, she has independently and non-decoratively explored the reduction of movement, pondering for a long time how the dancer approaches work and creation in the body.
