Stilling the Waters: A Conversation with Padmini Chettur

A spine—a curious yet centred one—is significant to Chennai-based contemporary choreographer-practitioner Padmini Chettur’s contemporary dance practice. This doesn’t simply speak to the backbone demonstrated in charting her own course in contemporary dance. It’s also striking because it’s the first anatomical region that she paid special attention to, and remains structural to her contemporary dance vocabulary.

In the late 90s, the early years of developing her own movement vocabulary, she recalls “working unhurried” because there wasn’t any money, nor residences or festivals for contemporary dance. But she did have free access to a physical studio space. This allowed for the rigorous exploration and experimentation with various emerging approaches to contemporary movement arts: its practice, presentation and performance, along with Krishna Devanandan, a long-time colleague and collaborator. “It was Krishna and I going to a studio for five hours every morning, every week for years, working [on movement and techniques], watching each other, thinking, reading, watching [dance] videos together at the Goethe-Institut’s library, hungry but also doing any and every class or workshop in Chennai and coming back and processing it together in the studio space,” she remembers. “Making sure we made it our own.”

One of this duo’s first joint projects in their studio: re-aligning the curvature of their spines. They had both trained in bharatanatyam, Chettur for a decade with Padannallur Subbarayya Pillai (1977-87). And they had both worked as members of the troupe choreographed by the trailblazing dancemaker Chandralekha for another decade (1991-2001). Chettur, over months in the studio, realised that in order to establish her own trajectory in contemporary dance, she needed to recover her spine. After more than two decades of being a dancer, her body had been moulded into achieving the aesthetic parameters set by her choreographers. In order to begin her own choreographic work, she wanted to achieve a body that was neutral in terms of its physicality but not necessarily neutered from its previous pedagogies or philosophies. But to get her body to this place, she needed to undo the curvature created in her spine from bharatanatyam, and also, from the further hyper-curvature of the spine expected from the dancers’ bodies within Chandraleka’s context.

Part of this unlearning was to draw from other movement practices that were exciting—yoga, swimming and pilates—and then adapting the practice to their context. “It wasn’t as easy as looking at our phones,” she jokes. After months of research and study into pilates, borrowing books from libraries and photocopying pages, Chettur and Devanandan developed their own take on it. “It isn’t German pilates,” she stresses. Instead, “it’s a pilates through which a bharatanatyam dancer can re-learn their spine”. The choice of veering away from the German technique is simple for her, because the entry point into this practice is different. Over the years, her approach to yoga too—while rooted in Iyengar Yoga—has been configured to give dancers what she thinks they are lacking: an attention to alignment. These are just some of the ways in which Chettur prepared her body, and she applies these same learnings to dancers she works with.

Slowly and steadily, Chettur studied, internalised and adapted these different techniques and systems. Then, she allowed for all of this to churn and then, navigated through it with great honesty to arrive at a body and a mind that had something to say as an artist. She knew that she didn’t want to “keep repeating history in dance”, to continue articulating dance from the position of her previous dance experiences alone. She wanted to cut her own line forward; to speak to the ideas emerging from her own investigations into the body and movement. 

Chettur worked that out through her in-studio process as well as research-based learning, unlearning and relearning. “For a choreographer, the body is the material, it is the starting point,” she states. And for this reason, for Chettur, the choreography and the choreographer “must choose and define their vision for the body”. They must be clear about the way the body must be treated and the way the body should look within the context of their work. Therefore, according to her, good and interesting choreographers start with thinking through and asking the question: What is about the existing body that I disagree with? Disagreement, for Chettur, doesn’t mean rejection alone. “It means to critically think about these things to become aware of the points of departure in one’s practice,” she says.

What’s Contemporary about Dance?

Over the past two decades and more, with each work, Chettur has proposed newer ways of experiencing contemporary dance; as producers, practitioners and participants. My first encounter with Chettur’s choreographic work was the Attakkalari India Biennial 2009, where she presented Pushed with herself, Krishna Devanandan and four other dancers. It was fresh, unlike anything I had seen in Bengaluru before, or in dance until then. It adamantly demanded the audience’s attention. At the beginning of the performance while introducing the work, Chettur even casually gave the audience permission to leave in-between the performance but to do it quickly and quietly. I took her announcement as a challenge and was determined to stay till the very end of it. 

Initially, the slow, studied movements—still characteristic of Chettur’s choreography—were hard to fall into. The music formed from collaboration (now twenty-five years) between Chettur and Maarten Visser, Dutch saxophonist and composer, didn’t draw a line through the dance. And the stagecraft was purposefully unspectacular. But each one of these choices intrigued me. With time, the deliberateness of the movements became beautiful, I was drawn to even the smallest of gestures. The music which “completes and complicates the image” is in constant conversation with the choreography. And the stage design is stark but in the service of highlighting the body. In the end, this work—Pushed—that explicitly claimed to be about emotion but restrained from exposing itself as such moved me.

Hooked by this first encounter, I have since travelled across the country to see more of Chettur’s work. I’ve taken a train to Chennai to watch Beautiful Thing 2 (2011), a solo work that positions “the body almost as an architectural object in an empty stage” at Sir Mutha Venkatasubba Rao Concert Hall. And here, alone in this auditorium the size of a blue whale’s womb, Chettur contracts and expands with such control that I was reminded that the body bends space to make dance. I’ve flown to Delhi to experience Wall Dancing (2012) at the Instituto Cervantes, where Chettur “frees the audience from the tyranny of viewing” by installing dancers performing sequences of precise movements that subtly shifted with each repetition against the walls of a gallery. Over this three-hour work, I, the audience, was free to move in and out of the performance space, but staying put, searching for links between these chaptered sequences was rewarding. 

I’ve bussed to David Hall in Fort Kochi to sit through daily showings of Varnam (2016) for an entire week. Chettur’s contemporary composition of this central piece of a bharatanatyam recital reframes the dialogue between narrative and dance set out by traditional expressions. She employs this shifting between story and sinewy movement (like in a varnam) to tell a story of love that doesn’t always cast women as waiting, wilting figures. I’ve ducked in and out of my responsibilities to follow Women Dance (2023), where Chettur and three other dancers responded with their bodies to the Museum of Art & Photography’s exhibition Visible/Invisible: Representation of Women in Art. Through their subtle, statuesque movements, these dancers echoed, elaborated and extracted emotions from these artworks, allowing audiences access to another layer of meaning to journey with.

“To truly think about the body as the material for choreographic practice, then it is important to start thinking politically, aesthetically, and imagistically about the body; and also about the movement quality. One really has to find some values for oneself,” she says. And with each of these works, Chettur returns to the start, revisiting those early days of unlearning in the studio, rigorously developing a process of returning to a neutral body from which to build the particular aesthetic needed to conduct the body investigations she undertakes. Quite early on in her practice, she realised that as a choreographer if she was going to create movement phrases, and then teach them to the dancers, it would simply end up being a classical way of teaching and learning dance. “The dancers would just try to imitate me”. And she didn’t want the dancers’ role diminished to trying to move in ways that come naturally to her body. And so, she ensures that all the dancers are a part of developing the movement vocabulary, so that the language belongs a little bit to each of them. And Chettur’s role as choreographer is to thread all of this together into a dance performance. “Everything I do with the material [the body] and the movement developed, processed through its relationship with time, space and structure—are all things I take responsibility for as a choreographer,” she says. 

This studio process is integral to her choreographic idiom, Chettur clarifies, “it’s not just improvisation, ad libitum, and then some kind of postmodern mix of many aesthetics” but her development process allows for the possibility of an individual’s anatomical expression. She explains, “Like how much one dancer can move an arm in a particular direction might be different from another. And since there is always space for that, each dancer has some kind of connection to her movement which is very specific”. And so, critically thinking of the place of the individual within a collective became central to Chettur’s choreographic approach a couple of decades ago, before it became more widespread in contemporary dance spaces in India.

Making Time and Meaning

Another core to Chettur’s choreographic approach is that she doesn’t want dance to be destructive or to damage the body but she does “need it [the body] to create a sense of internal tension, sometimes even discomfort” in its journey to find comfort in the final form. “I’m more interested in what a dancer’s body, which is trying to perform or show off all of the time, can’t actually do,” she explains. Chettur believes, “this is to actually think about the simplest way of being present, in a way that also isn’t absent”. This process gives rise to the minimalist, abstract and formal movements which are signatures in her choreographic work. Chettur’s vocabulary consists of “the least things required” for an audience to notice the movement. And the search for these ‘least things’ in her choreographic idiom is motivated by an idea common to the forms that she finds exciting. 

“There is this idea that it is only through a series of very controlled adjustments that the body actually finds form,” she says. “The body doesn’t just jump into a form or fall into an asana. Rather the body fills up an asana. You aren’t a dead body while staying or holding an asana. Your body is in continuous thought, it’s doing the asana through a process of very miniscule, constant adjustments towards something,” she adds. It is about stripping down, or more accurately, it is about “detailing movement” to “an essential, anatomical investigation”. This prioritises a sense of “tension over emotion because I’ve never quite understood the need for the body to be narrative. The artist I learnt everything about dance from, Chandralekha, often said, just dance, meaning will follow,” she adds. 

This quality, and attention to movement in her choreographic work has been frequently described as slow. But more accurately, Chettur is actively “looking for the energetic”, she isn’t interested in slowness for the sake of it but rather, sees it as “taking time”. The audience, much like the dancer, in Chettur’s choreography is tasked with finding “great liberation through the detailing”.

Another cornerstone in Chettur’s practice: context. “Looking to deliberately define what Indian contemporary dance is—in our political climate of hyper-nationalism—is dangerous,” she adds. Chettur sees the tacking on of ‘Indian’ to ‘contemporary dance’ as a means to prop up and propagate these hyper-nationalistic values. And this prefix allows for contemporary dance to be understood as “sticking on a mudra at the end of movement, a kalaripayattu kick going into a slow roll, or a bharatanatyam adavu” to make it ‘Indian’. Her choreographic idiom speaks to a resistance to simply admiring and accentuating the beauty and virtuosity of the body; the dancing body “isn’t just a moving machine” in her work.

Within Chettur’s choreographic idiom, dance becomes the potential of a body to do something else with space and time itself. Unlike a body just moving or performing acrobatics, Chettur’s goal is to have the audience see the stage as a whole and not just the dancing body that dances.

Chettur’s choreographic practice of arriving at this very original, critical, detailed approach to contemporary dance has grown from “grappling with one’s baggage, looking at one’s habits, one’s tendencies”. And then, doggedly investigating them through her own chosen raw material: the body.