The research professed by Shobana Jeyasingh – a choreographer originally from Madras, who has been leading one of the most curious London Companies since 1988 – nourished by the comparison between the classical style of South Indian dance, Bharatha Natyam, and a Western-style approach to choreography, proposes an experience of contamination between distant cultures that reflects, from an artistic point of view, the multifaceted reality of today’s multi-ethnic society. From Configurations (’88) to the recent Polimpsest (season ’96 / ’97), Jeyasingh uses Bharatha Natyam as the grammatical basis of her dances, to overturn their rhythms and forms in the light of a choreographic dynamism stimulated by constant collaborative relationships with European artists such as Michael Nyman, Kevin Volans, Richard Alston. Relationships established, as critic Judith Mackrell rightly points out in The Guardian, in the form of curious affinities: an example is the score of Configurations, commissioned by Jeyasingh to Michael Nyman, by virtue of an analogy felt by the Indian choreographer between the numerical laws of Bharatha Natyam and the mathematical system underlying the musician's compositions. Winner of the Prudential Award for the Arts in 1993, Romance ….with footnotes is danced to the original score performed live by Glyn Perrin, alternating with spoken rhythms by Karaikudi Krishanamurthy. The author explains: “Romance ….with footnotes does not have a story, but a plot, a design. The characters of this plot are the dancers, time and space; together they create intentions, moods and meanings. A novel is distinguished from a manual because in it the author is free to give body to his personal landscapes. The footnotes, on the contrary, belong to the world of facts and verifiable information. In the show the principles of Bharatha Natyam are the footnotes that form the basis of this particular novel”. For his part, Glyn Perrin specifies: “The starting point of Romance ….with footnotes is a collection of jathi – series of syllables composed specifically by Karaikudi Krishanamurthy – which act as rhythmic footnotes to the main text of my music”. Polimpsest is the fruit of the collaboration between Jeyasingh and the composer Graham Fitkin. Jeyasingh works on the idea of reusing ancient parchments, thinking of the dancers as custodians of experience, hidden or visible as are the overlapping writings of the palimpsests. Fitkin explores the rhythms of Indian music and Tamil – the language of southern India and Sri Lanka – signing a stratified score that in its structure ideally connects to the title of the creation.
