Yearning and chaos

Photo: Geoffrey Dunn

When uncertain times come upon us, we yearn for certainty. We become nostalgic for a time when things seemed more known, stable, and comfortable. Of course, this nostalgia is based on hindsight!

I often yearn for my life before I embarked on the “migrant” journey. I remember my childhood and youth and it feels as if I was more certain of who I was at that time. I am nostalgic about a sense of belonging, of being amongst people who, I believed, largely shared similar cultural and social values.

I have spent 35 years of my life outside India, even though I have had long spells of living in India during those years. I have lived on two continents and worked and performed in many more.

I remember one of the babysitters we had for my children in the Netherlands telling me that she felt I would be at home wherever I lived. I thought to myself that I was a good actress in that case!

However, many more years after that remark, I have realised that my “nomadic” life can be credited with coming into the intelligence of ritual dance, especially the chaotic heart of the practice which holds the unknowable space beyond all labels. The only way I was able to continue to be heartfelt and creative was to inhabit that space of shifting sands, the space between labels of Indian and other nationalities, and all that this implied at a visceral level.

And so artistic practice becomes, as one of the women in my Individual Program so wisely said, an “exploration”. It is an exploration of my Yearning, its sentimental nostalgia, its pain, its desire to express itself in its utter loneliness, and the beauteous wonder of this expression. All in equal measure.

The exploration is not to arrive at certainty or destinations, but simply to propel the Yearning, as the ancient Apsaras or ritual dancers, did, into the world in the most beautiful ways I know.

When I first left India at the age of twenty-one, I felt the ground taken away from under my feet. And I have danced in chaos since that time.

Dancing the chaos is a very useful intelligence. Ancient Goddesses were Chaos invocations, their dance the only possible expression where words could not help language sensations beyond dualities. Here chaos is not the opposite of order, it is the great waters that eternally laps just beyond the fragile borders of our ordered cosmos.

It takes dancing in the chaos to sense these waters and the fragility of our seawalls against them. Perhaps in these times more that in any other, we may begin to smell the great waters as we navigate times when our edifices of certainty lie in ruins around us.

Chaos is the Rasa or essence of artistic expression. The task of a Rasa artist is to manifest the chaos with beauty, passion, ferocity, and presence. It is to explore all of its mystery without conquering it with mechanistic and reductionist knowledge. The Rasa artist expresses this exploration with its open-endedness. This is the infinity of the Divine for, how can the Divine be a closed destination!

If the great waters of Chaos has a sensation, it is Yearning. The waters Yearn- perhaps to flow over the walls we have built. Or to touch our own Yearning which pulsates within us. The primordiality of Yearning can be terrifying, and so we sentimentalise it as nostalgia or ambition. This is to keep that Yearning within the walls of what we know, to instrumentalise it, and to narrate it into some meaning. In other words, to bring order to Yearning.

Doesn’t Yearning always escape this meaning-making project? Doesn’t it swell and surge long after we have found “reasons” for our Yearning and sought to end it? Does it not continue to lap deep within us, like the waves at night, spraying our intimate moments with its salt taste?

The gift of dance as ritual was to express the ancient Yearning of the body and to meet the great boundless waters. The ritual was not a cathartic expression, but a danced painting that sought colour its manifestation with the shades of Yearning within all of us with unconditional beauty. Pain, memory, desire, joy and passion were offered into the dance canvas unconditionally.

The Apsara or dancer is not a curator who sorts out order and chaos, or seeks to create a canvas that affirms our vision of order and beauty. On the contrary, the ability to express the infinity of Yearning is only possible when Apsaras flow with unbounded reality, when the choiceless Kshetra or body reveals the intelligence of the ritual invocation beyond duality.

Yearning in this dance does not separate chaos and order, nor does it uphold one above the other. It reveals that the duality is an illusion, as ephemeral as the seawalls that appear to hold the great waters at bay.