Today’s audience has the attention span of a sparrow and the challenge is to keep them hooked: Mallika Sarabhai

Multi-tasking is a way of life for

Mallika Sarabhai

. Besides being a celebrated exponent of

Kuchipudi

and Bharatanatyam, the Padma Bhushan awardee is also an accomplished writer, actor, social activist, ex-politician, feminist and more. The way she sees it, all art is just a matter of initiating a dialogue. “I am a communicator and for me, all the art forms — be it cinema, theatre, writing or dance — are just different ways of communicating with the audience,” remarks Mallika, who performed at the historic Sri Seetha Rama Chandra Swamy Temple in Ammapalli on Saturday, for the annual temple dance festival, Gudi Sambaralu. In a tete-e-tete with Hyderabad Times, the veteran opened up about the Hyderabadi audience, her love for all things art, the therapeutic power of dance and more. Excerpts:
This is the first time you’ve performed your acclaimed dance ballet, India: Now, Then & Forever in Hyderabad which chronicles the history of dance in India. You couldn’t have found a better venue than the 800-year-old Sri Seetha Rama Chandra Swamy Temple...

(Smiles). Absolutely. The objective of the show is to chronicle 1000 years of Indian dance forms that evolved in India over the last millenia defying the linear approach that historians usually adopt while tracking the history of Indian classical dance forms. For instance, rarely do we speak about the linkage between Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s vaishnava Movement and Kuchipudi. While Bollywood dance continues to dominate popular culture in India, at the same time, a little known 1000-year-old tribal dance form is also sustaining itself in an obscure

hamlet

somewhere. The truth is India like is a salad bowl where multiple dance forms have simultaneously existed and that is what we strived to show through the show.

You’ve performed at many ancient Indian temples, is it any different from performing at other venues? There is a perception that temple settings add a spiritual dimension to the performance, do you agree?

I’m not really a temple person but I feel it’s a lovely idea. Personally, I’ve never felt any less spiritual when performing at other venues. However, I must say, performing a piece called Sampradayam at the Brihadeeswara Temple, Thanjavur during the shrine’s 1000th anniversary celebration, without lights or a fancy stage in front of 5000 devotees, was a different experience altogether.

There is no denying that dance can be both uplift the soul and healing the body as well. You’ve been using dance as a therapy to help children with autism and Down syndrome long before the therapeutic values of dance became a vogue...
Yes. I am glad that people are finally waking up to the therapeutic power of dance. A few decades ago, while working with my friend and acclaimed actor Mohan Agashe on a project, I realised that performance art can bring remarkable change in autistic children and those suffering with Down syndrome. In dance, all the sad experiences are displayed with inward movements of the body and the happy ones are portrayed through outward movements. We taught the autistic children some of the happy movements and observed remarkable change in their conduct. In my academy in Ahmedabad, I continue to use this method and it has achieved great results.

You seem to have inherited the love for dance from your mother, Mrinalini Sarabhai. What sort of an influence did your father, Vikram Sarabhai, have on you. His passion for science seemed to have been lost on you...

(Smiles) The reason for that was fairly simple! I was asked to cut frogs during science classes and I refused to do that. Today, students have the option of doing that virtually, but back in my days, that wasn’t the case. Being a vegetarian and a believer of non-violence, such assignments were a strict no no for me. Coming to my father, I don’t think of him as a mere scientist but as someone who stood for nation building. Science was just a medium he preferred to empower Indians and my dancer mother, environmentalist brother and me have also sought to do the same. We may be using different mediums but actually we’re trying to work for the nation’s development.

Be it dancing, acting or writing, you’ve donned many creative hats in your career. How do you manage to do all that?

For me, every art form is a medium to communicate with the audience. But every art form is different from the other. Cinema is completely different from doing live performances but both have elements that are not in your control. For instance, acting in front of the camera gives you numerous chances to get things right, but the output isn’t in your control as there is a director in charge of the film. Similarly, while performing live you have a lot of things in control, but everything falls apart if there is a technical glitch in the light or sound department. So, there is plenty of frustration to deal with whether dancing or acting and it fuels my writing. I write whenever I am frustrated about something. For instance, When I had tried to bring out my activism through other playwrights in the early 1980s, it didn’t work out the way I wanted. So, out of frustration I picked up the pen I and came up with Shakti: The Power of Women..

You have aged gracefully and today at 64, you’re as fit as a fiddle. However, receding physical prowess must take a toll on your dancing. How do you deal with it?
I think dancers must learn what their bodies are capable of at a certain age. Ideally they shouldn’t try to do something that their bodies don’t allow. For instance, somebody who’s 80 shouldn’t play the role of a teenager in a dance drama. People will laugh at that. But then again, it’s up to the dancer to choose if he/she wants to be affected by the social comment. A dancer should know how to package their performances. Today’s audience has the attention span of a sparrow and the challenge is to hold their attention. How you draw a spectator into the essence of a dance is the key but then again, I don’t know how many dancers who actually try to do that today.