Body of Evidence
Following 71-year-old Astad Deboo’s performance at the Serendipity Festival in Goa last year, another major Indian classical dancer excoriated his more hidebound contemporaries for not acknowledging his genius. “The classicists are digging their own grave,” the dancer said. “[Deboo] is the man with a new idiom.” In honouring Deboo with its Yagnaraman Living Legend Award recently, the Krishna Gana Sabha echoed that sentiment. Foundations devoted to the arts must support reinterpretation in order to keep tradition alive. Awards are nothing new for Deboo, who received the Sangeet Natak Akademi award in 1996 and the Padma Shri in 2007. And neither is breaking new territory. Considered the pioneer of modern dance in India, he created his own peculiar form by employing his training in Kathak and Kathakali and has performed around the world with the likes of Pink Floyd and Alison Becker. Naturally, he prefers to talk about what he’s working on now—a retrospective of his work titled, ‘An Evening with Astad’, choreographed by Rani Nair, which recently opened in Sweden and South Korea. “This is something really special, an amalgamation of dance, theatre and photography which brings together glimpses of my unrecorded choreography from the 1970s and
’80s. What is really challenging and fascinating is how much do I remember of my own body from that time. How much can I reproduce faithfully?” he says. Though the thought of showing his retrospective to home audiences is giving him the adrenaline rush, it is tough for Deboo to mask his frustration about the pathetic state of contemporary dance in the country. “Very few classical dancers can afford to make a living here. To survive as a contemporary one is even tougher, even in these times when everyone pretends to be open to ‘something novel’.”
Long before he received the award, he recalls that a major Japanese dance critic he met on the streets of Tokyo kept calling him a living legend. “I didn’t know how to react,” he said. “In my 48 years as a dancer, I was still struggling for grants and commissioned work in my own country.”