CALM AFTER A STORM
Toronto dance artist turned her experience with chronic migraines and pain into a work of art,
Nova Bhattacharya is not looking for sympathy. If anything, it’s the other way around.
For years, the Toronto dance artist has endured the incapacitating pain of chronic migraines. Now, Bhattacharya has drawn from her experience to make a new work called Infinite Storms that speaks to broader themes: the fragile connection of body and mind and how to negotiate the pains, emotional or physical, passing or permanent, that are an inevitable part of human existence.
“I have an intimate window on the internal storms every human being experiences at some point in their life,” Bhattacharya says. “As an artist, it is my job to give voice to this through my work.”
Last week, in a lofty studio near Toronto’s Junction neighbourhood, the five-woman cast gathered for an early run-through under the watchful eye of Bhattacharya’s longtime artistic collaborator Louis Laberge-Côté.
As rain dripped into buckets from a leaky roof, Bhattacharya was carefully cocooned in bolts of fabric that branched from a braided cord above her, attached to the ceiling.
As she later emerged in the work’s opening sequence, you soon appreciated that Infinite Storms aims to communicate through suggestion and poetic imagery; images of isolation, fear and anguish; also of resilience, acceptance and the power of community.
Composer Ed Hanley’s soundscape draws instrumentally and rhythmically from Bhattacharya’s South Asian musical heritage. The choreography similarly references the Indian classical dance of Bhattacharya’s foundational training, yet its overall tone is contemporary, embracing a variety of movement idioms.
While Bhattacharya’s program notes explain the personal impetus of her new work, Infinite Storms is not, as she puts it, “a literal re-enactment.” How could it be? As she explains, “every migraine is like a snowflake,” unique and intensely personal.
Bhattacharya says it was a huge step for her even to consider making a work that drew from her own experience with pain.
“I didn’t want it to be, ‘Oh, Nova wants everyone to feel sorry for her because she has migraines.’ ”
Karen Kaeja was also intently watching the run-through, taking notes for a blog later posted on the website of Bhattacharya’s company, Nova Dance. Karen is co-founder/ artistic director with husband Allen Kaeja of Toronto’s Kaeja d’Dance.
She was a migraine sufferer for more than 30 years and compares the onset of an attack to “a looming black cloud” that, as it spreads its wings, shoots “lightning razor-sharp daggers or molten lavalike ashes of agony through your skull.”
Artists by nature tend to be driven people. They do not accept defeat readily.
“I used to just try and bull my way through it,” Kaeja recalls, but that’s no easy task, as Bhattacharya confirms.
“I am a high-functioning sufferer. I put on the happy mask and keep going, but there are times I have to tell the artists, ‘If it looks as if I’m going to puke, it’s not because of your dancing.’ ”
A migraine is vastly more than a really bad headache. An attack can be devastating and disorienting.
It’s recognized medically as a neurological condition — estimated globally to affect about one billion people, a large majority of them women — but the cause remains largely a mystery.
Even migraine symptoms, acutely experienced by sufferers, are largely invisible to outsiders.
Bhattacharya is an acute sufferer, for several years chronically so.
There were moments, she admits, when “I just wanted to die.”
Despite trying every kind of treatment — mostly pharmaceutical and ineffective — she grasped that the only way forward was to relinquish hope of a cure and come to terms with living with and managing the pain.
There’s a photo on her website of Bhattacharya lying face down in snow, a diversionary tactic she found helpful.
Her experience has made her appreciate in ways most of us do not, the precarious connections between body and mind, now imaginatively evoked in Infinite Storms.
“We can all find ways to live, love and laugh despite what life throws at us,” Bhattacharya says. Infinite Storms is at the Theatre Centre, 1115 Queen St. W. Jan 26 to 29; theatrecentre.org or 416-538-0988.