I’m back to talking about rhythm. (Because I can’t not).

During the last couple of months, I had a couple performance experiences that let me revisit my ideas related to it. At the Richmond Dance Festival by Dogtown Dance Theater, my mother was the only choreographer whose dance medium was an Indian classical dance form. All the other choreographers whose work was featured (at least for the weekend that I was able to attend) were much more modern, Western (and no, that’s not code for ‘white’) and as a result, the application of rhythm was so different than the driving rhythmic footwork that typifies so many Indian dance traditions.

A couple of weeks later, I was watching S. L. Feemster’s ConFront(ed), a dance film based on some poems in his collection Upw(o/a)rds. I had the honor of collaborating with Lewis last winter, thanks to W&M’s The Untethered, and I too, had danced to a poem from that same collection. Yet again, I found myself ruminating on the very different ways rhythm are applied were central for me.

The movements in the dance film weren’t aligned necessarily with the beat of the very strongly rhythmic soundscapes of Lewis’s words. Instead, they moved fluidly in the spaces between, a hypnotic dance performed not only by the bodies of the dancers, but the shifting boxes within which each of the dancers resided. It spoke so much to the isolation, the dissonance, and the compartmentalization that has happened during these pandemic times, where on the one hand, business is as usual and on the other hand, we’re going through something traumatic. Alone. (Yet together. Maybe.)

When I had danced to Lewis’s work, I’d somehow found sankeernam (yes, sankeerna chapu, not Trisram) in his words - both the structure and cadence of his words, but also the imagery and meaning evoked by them.

I had fun writing the jathi to accompany his poem and then choreographing it because I found myself using very intentionally odd movements to match his words, and then, adding subrhythms in my movements and footwork that reside in the space between the syllables of the jathi.

I need to re-record my dance with Lewis’s voice reading the poem over top of the jathi, but I’ve put off publishing this piece for several weeks and still haven’t gotten to it, so I’ll just share the jathi instead.