Aparna Nagesh- Transcript

This transcript is from an interview that was first published on 8th of July 2019. This transcript has been edited slightly to help with clarity, the audio of this episode and more information can be found here.

In this interview was conducted by Piroska Voljay who was an Australian Youth Dance Festival, Youth Ambassadors.

Transcripts are a new initiative of Delving into Dance, seeking to make the rich audio archive more accessible to deaf audiences and for educators. These transcripts are paid for through the support of audiences and supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, and the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, as well as audience contributions. It would be wonderful to have your contribute to this initiative. You can contribute here.

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Piroska Voljay: I started by asking: ‘where did dance begin for you?’

Aparna Nagesh: OK, that’s interesting. By most standards, I started dancing late. It was only when I was 15 that I started dancing: learning and performing professionally. But I think what happened for me was… in India, at least in South India, in Chennai, there's a huge… I live in the city that’s the birthplace of Bharatanatyam, which is one of the classical Indian dance forms. And I come from a family that’s very musical. In most families, you do your classical Indian dance training, or you do an instrument like the violin or a percussion instrument, or you go for Bharatanatyam classes. So my family is quite musical. Everybody’s done their five, six years of Carnatic music. So I was doing that, my sister was doing the violin. And nobody in my family dances, actually. Everybody’s got a great sense of music into them.

I lost my father when I was very young. But my mum keeps saying how I’m very like him. And he was the one person who actually used to dance, and he enjoyed… I always say this is because he loved Abba. And my mum listened to a lot of Abba when she was pregnant with me, so I love Abba. I’m crazy about Abba! So I always say that it’s probably because of that that I’ve always been inclined towards the more Western forms of music and dance always, which is not to say I didn’t want to do Indian forms, but there was always something in me like… I was very enthusiastic about gymnastics as a child. But considering my mum was a single parent, there weren’t that many opportunities in the 90s here in Chennai, even for classes and things like that. I mean, I come from the generation that saw the transition from cassette tapes to CDs to MP3 players. In India, everything happens about a decade later. At least before it was like that. Even cable TV came in when I was in my teenage years, so I didn’t have a cell phone until I was in college.

So there was an instinct to dance, always. I was crazy about dancing, but never really… I tried asking my mum if I should join a classical dance class. But she was like ‘you know what, you’re doing one thing, you’re doing music, do it properly, and focus on that and academics’. And I was also a sports person: I was an athlete. So she said ‘you have too many things on your plate already. Just do these three things. You won’t have time for anything else.’ So I said ‘OK, fine’. But then I did go for one class secretly without her knowing. We had a sample class with this Bharatanatyam in school. And I went for the class after school hours. And then I came home and told her and I remember she was so mad at me, she was like ‘you should have asked my permission’. This was when I was eleven or twelve. So I kind of left it, but then… so we used to have these two hours of English music on FM over here on All India Radio at that time, before private radio channels came in, in the evening, from seven to nine. So I would run home, finish all my homework, finish my playing, make sure… and I shared a room with my sister, right. I would kick her out of the room for that two hours, lock the door, clear the bed, clear a space, and just be dancing. And I think that’s really where my inclination towards any Western form of dance happened. It was just me free-styling and listening to old-school music, even rock music. And I’m just dancing and having fun. We lived in an apartment building where there used to be these celebrations that used to happen for festivals and Christmas and New Year and all of that. So I ended up getting all the little people that I used to play with together, and I would pick my favourite songs and do choreography and things like that. I think it was kind of set then but I didn’t even realise it. (05:25)

And when I was about 16, I finished my 10th grade exams right before going into my 11th grade. In the summer holidays, I bugged my mum. There was this cropping up of western dance schools in Chennai at that time. And it was not too much of technique, it was more freestyle and the 90s hip hop movement. But nothing very technical at that point of time. Some amount of jazz was also there. So I started that way. I joined a professional dance company. I joined for classes and then the teacher was like ‘would you like to perform?’ And I was like ‘yas, put me on a stage! I’m ready for this!’ That’s one of the reasons why I dance also. I know that and I acknowledge that very openly: that I need the stage, I need to be able to perform. Because it gives me a high like nothing else does. Even now. And it’s 21 years of professional dance for me. May 22nd is my dance anniversary! And I celebrate it. For me, it’s very important. So 21 years of professional dance. So I started performing. And then there was no looking back. And then what happened was, as the school began to grow, I kind of laid the foundation with the school and helped build it. We had a lot of features coming in from around the world. So I’ve done bits of everything. So my training was quite piecemeal, from all over the place. There was no ‘fifteen years of ballet with this school and seventeen years of jazz with this…’ It’s not been like that. It’s been a very sporadic, very piecemeal kind of training. But I don’t have any regrets about that, because I feel like I look at dance a little less rigidly, maybe, and it’s a lot more vast for me, and I’m hungry to learn always. So that happened, and then I think, for me, one landmark thing that happened was after about five or six years into my professional career. Through college—I did my degree, but I was still dancing professionally and everything—I had the opportunity to meet Debbie Allen. She had come down as part of the US consulate, some cultural connect things. And I always had this dream of going to New York, and learning dance. So she kind of put that thing in my head, and she was such an amazing teacher. I started teaching also very early on, because it’s a very unstructured industry here. So there are people like us… we’re trying to set some kind of precedents and create a sustainable ecosystem for dance here.

After 12 years, I went to New York. It took me 12 years of dancing with the company to save up and get my shit together. I went to Broadway Dance Center. But that’s the origin story. I started only at 15, but I was dancing long before that in my bedroom listening to two hours of English music every evening. I mean, through my training, I’ve had the opportunity to learn—completely but at least learn the nuances—or be exposed to various Indian forms as well. Not just classical, but also folk forms and martial art forms and things like that. And I feel like it’s given me this worldview, which is why I call my vocabulary global dance fusion, because it’s really global. It’s kind of a mix of everything.

Piroska Voljay: That’s very, very exciting. And you spoke about dance being very vast and this very expansive, interrelated entity. And it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and we don’t make art and we don’t relate to ourselves and other people in a vacuum. When you were training in a company, did you find that there was a push for a certain focus? And did you find that they were trying to make you quite a singular dancer? Or did they encourage that expansiveness that you talk about? (10:15)

Aparna Nagesh: Like I mentioned, it’s still quite unstructured and it’s still quite young here, at least modern dance and contemporary forms, which are not based in Indian origins. Like I said, the whole western dance school kind of thing. So it was also a question of the company finding its own footing. So I kind of grew along with the company. I was with the company for about 12 years. And towards the last two years, there was a sense of… I don’t know if I want to use the word disillusionment, but there was a sense of being jaded. My equation with dance has always been that of either a spouse or a partner. It’s the one great love of my life. As tried and as clichéd as that sounds, it really has. I’ve had my share of arguments with it. I’ve stepped away from it. I’ve hated it. I’ve loved it. It’s like this passionate love affair, right? It’s hard. I mean, being a dancer, you probably understand what I’m saying. But it’s only other dancers and maybe other people who’ve been so passionate about something in their life who understand this logic. Honestly, on a massive sidebar, I haven’t dated in like nine years. It’s a huge, off the cuff thing here that to be 36 and unmarried in India, it’s a huge thing. But luckily for me, my family, my mum is just like ‘whatever, you are an adult, I’m not gonna…’ But it’s not that way with most Indian families, right? So for me, this has occupied all my life, all my space, all my mindspace, my energy, my mental, physical, emotional energy, completely. So that expansiveness for me only grew after I was able to step away from working under somebody and discover for myself what I wanted to do with dance. Because being a commercial company, there’s always that restriction of ‘hh, we have this performance’. And it was too much performance and less training, one. Two, there was no balance between performance, teaching, creating, learning. Four very separate things. And you have to be different people when you’re doing each thing. And somebody who’s a great creator may not be a great teacher often. I don’t know, sometimes I feel like the two are interrelated. But sometimes I see people who are so eccentric and can create such amazing things, but they’re really the most uncomfortable people to work with, because they just don’t know how to get that vision across.

For me, one thing that was important was… my mother’s a retired schoolteacher. So I think teaching kind of runs in the family. So I realised that it’s something that I really enjoy. I enjoy seeing that bulb going on above somebody’s head. So I always connected a lot of how am I going to be able to use this? Why am I learning it? How can I bring myself into this? And it’s taken me this long to get to that place. But expansiveness is something you have to discover for yourself. And I also think that whole movement of discovering yourself through dance, at least here, it’s fairly new. It’s only happening now. It’s a very current movement. So yeah, there was a sense of restriction, there was a sense of… I love it, I love slapping on the paint and getting on stage. But I think after some time, it can’t be only about that. And I realised that balance was… I had to step away. And I do it regularly, even this month. Now, regularly, I say ‘OK, I’m not going to dance for a bit. I’m going to do other things for, say, a month. OK, this May is a holiday season. So the company dancers are all off. We don’t have classes. I just have one-off projects here and there. And this new project.’ So it’s not like I’m not dancing at all. But there’s a sense of distance. I’m able to give myself that breathing room, so I can come back to it fresh. It’s the same as with any relationship. I think you have to give it that space and breathing room and you don’t have to be like ‘Oh, I’m so passionate about this. I have to be in this 24/7.’ That balance, for me, came a little bit later. I mean, growth was always there. I’m always grateful to the fact that I got to meet people like Debbie Allen and the people who work with her. I got to travel to the States on a Culture Connect programme. I got to see the world. I got to perform with so many noted artists, commercial artists, singers and actors and actresses. And the kind of experience that performing professionally for over 12 years with the company has given me is… I can’t measure it. It’s definitely given me the kind of resources and strength that I need personally to be able to do my own thing. But like I said, the expansiveness, I think, is a process of self-discovery. (15:51)

Piroska Voljay: Yeah, absolutely. And as you just said, about having that space for things to kind of settle when… I think one thing, as a young dancer, and starting dance from a young age, and similarly to what you said about it, is coming from this need to move, and then going into something a bit more structured, and having all of this information given to you and it can be quite overwhelming. And so having, as you said, that space to digest it is really important. Having breaks and things, as you said, it’s really healthy. And I think sometimes, particularly the way I’ve grown up with dance as a relationship, we’re given that narrative, you have to do more to be better. And you constantly have to be doing it to be engaged. And so I find it really interesting to hear you talk about that space and that time to cultivate your own sense of how things should be rather than constantly…

Aparna Nagesh: I think that whole thing of repeatedly doing it and constant practice, that has to be at the start. And then as you grow with it, you need to discover… see, even with the young dancers who work with me, for the company, when I’m planning the year’s training schedule, I figure it out as I have these other master classes, or we do one class of just free movement, or … I have a lot of inner work that's integrated with my creation classes as well. So it’s not just always about technical training and practice. And I always tell the dancers, I say ‘look, we meet twice a week. Don’t depend on me to get your pirouettes better, or get you to do the splits. That’s something you have to work on yourself. I will teach you how to do it. We will practice it. But there’s only so much because as a company there’s so much more that we have to explore in terms of what we can create together.’ And it doesn’t work like there where the company is formed with dancers who are already pre-trained. Sometimes they come in with just the most basic like ‘yeah, I’ve danced in family functions and college culturals’ and things like that. Because I have a very specific vocabulary, or rather, I have a system, I try not to be too rigid with it, but I have a system or a path that I follow, I kind of have to bring them into that path to see the kind of work that we create. Sometimes we say ‘OK, you know what, today let’s just all go to the beach and practice. Let’s practice cartwheels on the beach.’ I’m trying to balance it out for them so that there is no thing of ‘oh my god, I have to…’ Maybe today, we decided that we’re going to do an inner work exercise and explore movement, and not really do something structured. Maybe today we’re going to do a group… I do identify a lot of movement activities and exercises so that they also have that little bit of space inside the head to approach it differently. I’ve realised that that’s one thing that for me is working. I get a lot of people who are still learning here, say ‘you know what, it’s very different from the experience I’ve had in any other studio or with any other class, because this is there's a sense of freedom of how I can allow my body to find what it can do.’ And that’s pretty much been my area of focus over the last couple of years, even in terms of creation, I think. (19:37)

And there’s another thing: I also write a blog for a friend’s website. In fact, last week’s column was about practice and how you always grow up hearing this “practice makes perfect”, right? But what I have learned is that you could practice something 30 times and still not be great at it. But you can practice something 10 times but super efficiently, like asking yourself the questions of how, what, why when, where, with whom, right? The elements of movement, you ask yourself the questions, and then every time you do it, even if you’re just doing it five times, if you answered the questions, and you do it, you’re going to be that much better at it than just repeating it mindlessly for 20 times, right? It’s like process learning versus process learning. Just like ‘let’s memorise the multiplication tables’. But if you don’t understand why this much into this much equals this much, then like how? Seeing the pathway of how this number multiplied by this number leads to this number. Unless you see the path, you’re never gonna remember it. I think it’s just a question of how you learn. And I also do realise that a lot of teachers fail to do that, not just in dance, even in academics. There is a problem with first you teach your child how to learn, you teach the child or the person how to learn. Once you know that, then it becomes easy to learn. And each person has their own methods, speed, technique of learning, right? The education system doesn’t allow for that because systematised and standardised. Which is why we are also working with schools now. And we really like the schools that follow the IB curriculum, the International Baccalaureate. So they work on the process of unit of inquiry, as opposed to chapters. The unit of inquiry is about men and animals, then they do maths, chemistry, drama, movement, language, everything around that unit. I find that system really great. I’m also working on developing syllabus with the schools we work with, in that manner. But yeah, like I said, it’s not necessarily about how many times you do it, it’s about also how you do it that many times.  

Piroska Voljay: Yeah, absolutely. And I think you’ve touched on a really important point which I’m experiencing at the moment in my training, which is one thing that my teacher always says to me when we’re in class: it’s about engaging with the moment and allowing an experience to unfold rather than trying to conform your body to a particular memory of something, or trying to create this sense of perfection that obviously doesn’t exist. And we all know that, but we’re always trying to reach for it, even though we know it’s unobtainable. And so you saying the how and the journey and that experience of being curious rather than trying to master it, or trying to grip it, I think that’s really great.

Aparna Nagesh: It’s very hard to do it now because of the influx of media around us and seeing all these people who probably really, really, really work their arses off. And you can see it. Kids as little as eight or nine with legs that go up to here. It can be debilitating sometimes, even for somebody like me to see something like that and be like… it was literally just a lack of opportunity that, you know, I am not at the place… ‘maybe if I had had that when I was 10, I would be somewhere…’ And then I was like ‘no, don’t do that’. Everybody’s journey is so different and you sit and compare yourself. And it is hard for me also when I am trying to explain to young people that you have to find that balance, you have to let yourself go at your own pace. But everybody’s like ‘no, but you see the videos that are coming out, you see the people that are doing all these crazy things?’ And I’m like ‘yeah, but you also have to understand that sometimes that could be just the opportunities that they had… maybe even somebody who had zero opportunities, but clawed their way up there, that was written for them.’

I’m a strong motor of hard work. I always say that you have to work hard. And I think that really translates into what leaps in your life. But I also feel like you also need to know how to do smart work. You’re able to combine the two. I'm not saying sit on a chair somewhere and get 10 people to do it for you. That’s not necessarily always smart work. Sometimes, especially with things with dance, you have to do it, obviously. If people practise for you, your legs are not going to be able to do what they can do. As simplistic as that sounds, you have to get up and get there on the floor and do what you need to do. But at the same time, you also need to be smart about it. It’s very hard for me because this is a constant battle I’m facing, especially with young people, because they see people around them going viral with a really, really average performance. And it’s average for me, but maybe for somebody else it’s ‘oh my God’ and for somebody else it’s like ‘no, that was really shit’. You never know! But the point is that everybody’s constantly comparing themselves, right? And they’re all trying to find this one benchmark to get to, and I’m like ‘you can’t do that. Everybody is so different.’ Your background, your history, the steps you’ve taken to be where you are today, everything is so different, right? This is a constant battle because we are very clearly away from that spectrum of ‘yeah, we’re going to create content to generate likes’. That’s not where I’m coming from. That’s where a lot of people, a lot of young dancers today are coming from, and it’s also becoming very competitive and political and problematic. And I had a conversation with Alice about this when we discussed initially for the festival. She was talking about how that was one of the main reasons for doing the festival, to take it into a non-competitive, “let’s all grow together and learn together” space. I think that’s much more important today than winning prizes. (26:42)

Piroska Voljay: Absolutely. You have this poem behind you and you have your dancers from your ensemble behind you and it was very, very sweet. And as you’ve spoken just now about dance being this destiny and you choosing dance and, I suppose, choosing you. I’m curious, and we all experience it as dancers, what do the moments feel like when dance doesn’t choose you back? Or whether you kind of choose to not…? What are they? Because we all talk about the poignant moments, and, I suppose, the moments that are very quiet, but also very monumental in their own right. What are those moments like when you’re like ‘oh, dance really doesn’t like me right now’?

Aparna Nagesh: I mean, I have those very, very regularly. And especially as you get older, and your body refuses to cooperate, you do. It is a sense of like ‘what the hell! I’ve given so many years of my life to you and you’re supposed to like me back… you’re supposed to love me back.’ Like I said, I always treat it like I would a relationship and it’s the same logic. And this was a very hard thing for me to accept. And it happened around the time that I moved to New York to study here. And after many years of a lot of noise and chatter, both inside and outside constantly, I had the scope to be by myself, with myself, and really examine who I was. And it really only started between then and now, between the ages of 27 when I was in New York to now like 36, almost 10 years. It’s been such a period of self-actualisation and internal growth, right? And yeah, there are those moments where you just like ‘screw this. I don’t want to do this anymore.’ You really think about ‘do I really want to quit this?’ or ‘do I really want to’. But I think that it’s sort of like an amoeba. It’s like you’re inside this amoeba-like shape and you have to constantly keep moving to accommodate the new shapes that it takes. And so for me now, once I set up High Kicks in 2011 and then between then to now, I get my moments to perform, I get my moments on stage, but it has been a lot less performance, a lot more creating and teaching and syllabus setting. And last year, I actually decided ‘you know what, I’m going to get back…’ So I’ve always loved acting as well. But it’s something that I pretty much… I didn’t shelve it completely because, since we do dance theatre, it’s easy to incorporate that stuff. I’d done plays when I was in college, and last year I made a choice and got back on stage, just to act, no movement. In fact, one of the pieces, one of the plays, which is a monologue piece, the director was like ‘see, everybody’s always seeing you moving. I want you to be completely still sitting on the chair. You don’t move anything other than your hands.’ And it really helped me to re-evaluate. (30:21)

I mean, I’m digressing. To come back to what you said, it happens. To come back to what you said, I think it’s just a question of learning to sit in that moment, kind of deal with it. It happened right before I went to New York, and applied for the course and everything. And then I took a step back from the company. And I had about two weeks of free time. And I was like ‘I’m so tired. I’m so tired all the time, because I had been performing non-stop.’ And I was like ‘do I really want to do this?’ And then I went to New York, and yeah, here I am: 27. I was not the oldest in my group of students. There were a couple of other older people, but they’d all been doing ballet since they were three. So the first two weeks, I felt like shit about myself. I was like ‘I’ve been dancing for 12 years, I feel like I don’t know anything. I feel like I can’t do anything.’ So that was a moment that was really a massive reality check. That was one of the points at which I had to tell myself ‘your journey has been different. The things that you know are different from what they know. Don’t think that just because they know something that you don’t doesn’t mean you don’t know anything.’ It was a really hard time for me. The third week of my course, I was almost ready to pack it in and I was like ‘well, you worked really hard, saved up a really long time. And lots of people, family have helped you get here and you need to just shut up and man up and do it.’ And I kind of powered through it. And then in the fifth week, one of the teachers whose class I was taking regularly, he noticed me in class and then he agreed to be my mentor. And it was very good. It was like ‘OK, you know what, you do have something. It’s not like you don’t.’ But I just had to very clearly not let myself get carried away with the whole ‘oh, yes, people are noticing you. And that means…’ I had to be like ‘you are here to learn’. And it helped that a lot of the teachers even at BDC are constantly about ‘look, we know a lot of people get discovered here, but it’s not about that. You don’t come into my class and try to show off, you come into my class to learn.’ And it is a very different environment there. You have 70 people in class and everyone’s pushing to show off. It was a very defining moment for me. And I had to really take a decision about what I wanted to do with my dance.

So yeah, those moments are there. Even now, in the last couple of years, there was a time when I was just like… last February, one of the productions that I was working on, our studio was barely a year old, and I was so stressed about the economics of it, money, and I just completely lost focus on the dance. It took me two months to sit and think about and be like ‘OK, what am I doing? This is not what I want to be doing. This is why you left the previous company. Wou want to be focusing on the kind of movement that you’re creating, and what you’re going to teach. And you don’t want to be sitting at the keyboard.’ I mean, while everybody does do that, ‘that’s not why you set out to do this’.  I feel like those moments are very integral, because they give you an access point to stop. They force you to stop and wait, and realign yourself. And those are all very important, even though those are all very clichéd words, these life coaches’ views. They’re very important. There’s a reason why people constantly talk about realigning and reevaluating and recalibrating. It’s absolutely important because you’re not the same person you were yesterday. You’re not the same person you were a month ago. And so that’s the same thing with dance. It’s not the same as it was yesterday. The universe is telling you something in relation to your body it is not the same as it was last month. So those moments, while I hate them, I’m never going to regret them. And I know as I get older there’s going to be more of them. I want to be at a point where I can say ‘OK, this means the universe is trying to tell me something, dance is trying to tell me something, my body is trying to tell me something: stop.’ It’s a very good checking point: it stops you right there. And then you’re like ‘OK, what do I need to do now differently?’ I hate them. And I’m not saying ‘oh, all artists are tortured souls’ or anything like that. But it can be very detrimental to your mental health. And you have to really, really be accepting of what it’s doing to you in your head and accepting of needing to ask for help, accepting of saying ‘OK, you know what, I need to heal myself at this point’. This is why I always tell my dancers this. ‘You can bullshit the world around you, but you can’t bullshit yourself’. At some point, the truth is going to come out. To put it in a better way, you can lie to the entire world, but you can’t lie to yourself. At some point the truth is definitely going to face you. But I don’t like those moments at all. I absolutely hate them. But like I said, integral part of life, in dance itself and for any kind of art form. (36:26)

Piroska Voljay: Absolutely. And in the moment, as you said, they’re really shit. They’re really blinding and can be really uncomfortable and overwhelming.

Aparna Nagesh: But like I said, for me, the dance-life analogy is a huge thing. Even in the column that I’m writing right now for a friend’s website, every article has been about the dance and life analogy and how the two interconnect for me. And it has to do… I mean, even if you take the word “dance” away from it it has to do with movement, right? Everything is constantly moving. Even in stillness, there’s movement, with stillness. And it’s like doing a piece on stage and you stopping at a moment, thinking, and then going into something else. It’s really as simplistic as that.

Piroska Voljay: Exactly. And particularly with my university that I attend is the discussion around gender equality and representation in dance. And it’s really come to the forefront about who’s getting seen on stage, the kind of bodies we’re seeing on stage, who’s getting funding, and who are the directors of the companies. And they’re often the same kinds of people that we’re seeing. They’re often male, they’re often white, they’re often coming from very, very privileged, moneyed backgrounds. And so it’s become really integral to the way I relate to dance and who I’m seeing in my personal sector of dance. And I’m looking around and going ‘it’s the same people making work and the same people getting funding’. And so I was just wondering what that’s like for you, personally? And how do you relate to that in a personal way but also in a global context? Sorry that was a very long-winded question!

Aparna Nagesh: But it’s a very important one because we’re talking so much about gender as such. So even eight years ago, when I started High Kicks, there was a very clear reason, because in my twelve years with a commercial company, I had seen 12 different groups of girls come and go. Especially because in a city like Chennai, it’s still a conservative city, people are still very orthodox about their beliefs and what they think women can/cannot do. It’s changing for sure. I’m not saying no. It’s just that it’s really slow. It’s like this pushing through molasses kind of battle. So invariably they would come when they were studying for the first year of college as a part-time thing… ‘Oh, hey, I get to perform with this company and it’s freestyle, it’s commercial work, it’s easy, it’s bollywood dance and it’s…’ whatever. And then three years they do and then ‘OK, I’m getting into a job’ or ‘I’m getting married’ or whatever. And this was a huge thing then, right? Parents would be like ‘oh, beyond this age, if she keeps dancing, we’re not going to find a good alliance… marriage alliance’, because arranged marriages are still a thing. And it used to frustrate me. And I also knew that I was coming from a place of privilege because of the fact that I came from a fairly chill background, and my mom is ‘yeah, whatever you want. Do whatever makes you happy.’ And she’s never pushed us into anything. And we do come from a background where everybody is like PhDs in biochemistry and lawyers and bankers and engineers and doctors. My sister and I are one of the black sheep. But we kick-started it for our generation of people in our family. And now everybody below us, and my first cousins, and my second cousins who are all literally a decade younger than me, the generation younger… they’re able to follow and they’re able to put their foot down and say ‘hey, you know what, I don’t want to do this. I want to pursue music. I want to do archeology. I want to…’ In that respect, I think I can safely say I’m one of the first few women in my city to be a full-time, professional dancer or choreographer. (40:48)

There’s a lot more opportunity now because we’re also working on creating that ecosystem, on creating a fixed income and viable lifestyle students. But if you look there’s classical, and then there’s this commercial sector, and then there’s this weird, middle ground where we are. It’s very hard, because we are not, pardon my French, the pretentious… there are some people who are involved in that bracket of creating contemporary modern work that, for me, personally, I think is pretentious, simply because it’s very restrictive. It’s very elitist. You’re not meant to understand it unless you’re supremely intelligent kind of thing. Why should we spoon feed the audience? I'm like ‘hey, they’ve never seen this kind of work. You need to start from a perspective of “they will not understand anything”.’ And then build up to a point where we’ve come to a point where people who’ve been seeing our shows regularly over the last eight years say ‘hey, you know what, that was abstract, but I was able to get something from it simply because I’ve been coming to your shows and I’ve been seeing the difference’. And every time we give them a little less information. And it’s something that I learned about and I researched in terms of building an audience.

So one of the pieces that I had done last year here was called Her Story when I had a friend who runs an NGO and does this kind of work. In fact, we’re developing that into a fully-fledged production this year, where we featured women in history whose stories have been erased. Whether it’s Sadako Sasaki who made paper cranes during the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings and many young women and people who have been pioneers who… women’s stories are generally just erased from history, right?

I always say history is the perspective of a few men who actively choose what they want to tell the world. We really don’t know, actually, what went on in the minds of people during the Second World War. People know a large-scale perspective. We can know one side or the other side. And I always say there are three sides: my side, your side, and the truth.

It’s changed. And one of the things we did this year also… because earlier, it was a question of the gender binary, it was ‘oh, women are not getting that many opportunities, there is no platform for them, there’s no safe spaces for them’. There is a genuine worry because invariably the parents are worried that ‘they’re going to go into a mixed company, and then these boys are going to hit on the girls, and then there’s going to be all of this stuff that’s going to happen, and we don’t want that’. And this very traditional outlook, that those kinds of things, worries were there: ‘how are we going to find them a good alliance if they're going to be dancing in public in front of people, commercial work’ and all that? So as we started building our company, and the kind of work we were doing, it started getting easier. Definitely, it’s come to a point where we do have girls from really orthodox backgrounds, whose parents come and watch a show about sexuality, about gender, and are able to say ‘hey, that was good’. We had somebody whose parents watched… in fact, that’s the workshop that I’m bringing to the festival. We did this show called Skin which is about race, religion, gender, and sexuality on the playground, and how children perceive it and how they are force-fed the constructs and then the differentiation happens, right? And genocide begins with bullying. Bullying is like the micro of the macro, which is genocide. It starts with othering, other people saying you’re different from me. (45:00)

And this year when we realised there was… I mean, I’ve also been doing my research in terms of the whole trying to remove the whole binary construct of gender and the fact that people can be fluid or non-binary. And, for me, it struck such a personal chord because when I was growing up, I was labelled a “tomboy”. I hate that word. My mun was a single parent, I have really thick hair, and I was always rolling around in the mud. And I had like a close crop, chopped everything off. And she said ‘you grow your hair when you can maintain it on your own’. My grandmother was so pissed because she was like ‘no, how can you do this? She has to grow her hair’ and all of that. She was the judge. My mum said ‘you know what, I don’t have somebody to help me maintain her hair. She’s so active. She’s doing sports, she’s dancing.’ At least I was very active in school cultural activities and dramatics and dance and all of that. And I was always climbing trees. My knees are a mess of scars. I was always playing on the street. And I remember when I hit seventh grade, eighth grade, around puberty, I was always playing with the local boys downstairs. I was playing street football. And we have this game called Kabaddi that I used to play. I was climbing trees. I was always in these really toned raggedy shorts and t-shirts with short hair and I was happy being that. I was always having fun. And there was a lot of ‘oh, she’s such a tomboy’. And, of course, you know, I also had a separate section of being bullied in school for skin colour. You would be surprised at the amount of skin discrimination that happens in this country, even though we’re all brown. But there are varying shades, right? And I am definitely on the darker side. Then come hot season, which is like 90% of the year, I’m always out in the sun. I’m always running. I was always playing. And it was so confusing for me because I also love things like crafts. I loved makeup. Loved it. I liked dressing up, I liked what you would call traditional feminine things like sewing and doing things with my hands, making beads and crafts. It was really confusing. Somebody once walked in and saw me… we have this old sewing machine at home. And I used to alter all my pants and clothes myself. And I used to make little clothes for my… I never had Barbies. I never played with them. But I loved making little clothes for my friends’ Barbies. So I was sitting inside and then this family friend walks in, and he’s like ‘wow, you’re like this conflict thing of many things. You’re such a tomboy but you also like all this.’ And I was just like ‘why can’t I be both?’ So when this whole thing—this movement is so massive right now here—came up, and I was like ‘oh my god, this is great, because this is what kids need to be told that you can really be both if you want to. And you can do both if you want to.’ And people always, you know… somebody would come and tell me ‘oh, no, your masculine energies are too much’. Or I’ve had guys tell me ‘oh, you’re too intimidating. You’re such an ice princess.’ I’ve had an ex-boyfriend tell me ‘you don’t need anybody’.

It happens, especially… I don’t know how it is in Australia. But I do know that men can be very sensitive about being needed, being the strong man, needs to do things for women. And it’s still a very dicey battle here, because 90% of the people you speak to, except 1% of really privileged, urban, who have the opportunity to read up about these things and know these things… I mean, I do have transgender friends. In fact, this year, for the first time—we were called High Kicks All Girls Dance Ensemble—we removed the “All Girls” from our logo. We’ve opened it to non-binary, gender fluid, trans community as well. And we had a transgender woman audition for us this year, to do the first year course and join the company. And she’s, in fact, doing her transition only later this year. So she said ‘I want to be physically fit’.  So we’ve offered her a sport, which she is taking up next year. And, for me, that was a very clear thing of ‘I want to remove that saying’, because if somebody feels like a girl, or even if it is a boy who doesn’t feel safe in a regular, male-dominated environment, feel free to come work with us. Even the school as such, the institute as such, which is the performing arts institute that I run, we have one male student who comes for the contemporary classes. One male student. He feels comfortable enough to be with us. He was the one male performer in about 40 female performers when we did a school showcase in April, and he was perfectly comfortable with it. And that’s my point. If you don't feel safe in a male… and they are very male-dominated there. We share space with another dance company. And there are young boys there whom I constantly try to talk about in terms of how they are using language, how they’re using… Like the guy who’s partnering with me, we were trying to launch a set of martial arts and fitness classes, and ‘can I say “fat to fit”?’ and I’m like ‘no, you can’t use the word “fat” because fat is not necessarily unhealthy’. I’ve been struggling after having been a normal-sized person for most of my life, I developed a thyroid issue, like about five, six years ago, and I’ve been struggling with weight issues. Everybody comes up to me and asks me things like ‘you’re on your feet six hours a day. How come you still have so much weight?’ And people here have no filters, especially when it comes to things like… they have zero filters here, zero filters. So somebody who has no idea who I am who’s seen me ten years ago comes up to me, and his wife’s standing right next to him, looks up and says ‘oh, you’ve put on a lot of weight’ and I’m like ‘it’s none of your business! Your wife is standing right next to you. Don’t look up and down at another woman’s body.’ It’s offensive, but they don’t realise that they’re doing something wrong. (51:52)

And even here, especially with how boys and girls are raised, the kind of things that they’re allowed to do and not allowed to do. Like I have an uncle, who when we were in eighth grade, told my sister not to sit with legs on both sides of a scooter. She was asking and he said ‘no, women have to sit with their legs together’. And, of course, my sister and I laughed in his face like that. My mum also laughed in his face. But it is that bad sometimes. And even in 2019 it can be that bad. So even in terms of representation, you see women. It’s just, how are they being represented? Which is one of the reasons why I’ve had questions. Guys have been like ‘oh, you’re discriminating against men who want to learn from you’. I’m like ‘no, my school is open. And now my company is also open to anybody who doesn’t feel safe in a space that’s male-dominated.’ One of the main reasons why I didn’t want to have the typical cishet male in my company was because a lot of the young boys here look at it as an opportunity to hit on girls, or to find girlfriends. And I’m like ‘that’s not what we’re doing here’. It’s a very dicey battle. It’s a very complicated battle. First, we have to get them to understand what it is that they are doing wrong in terms of oppression. Then we have to get them to understand that there is no binary, let’s not look at the binary. And that was one of the poems that we had in SKIN. It’s a part of the workshop that I’m bringing, which is about what they tell a boy to do and what they tell a good girl to do. And taking the opposite of that and saying that it’s not necessarily that just because I’m a boy, I have to… starting with the whole colour coding thing, right? Blue and pink. And we do have a lot of female identifying classical dancers here. But I don’t know too much about the classical dance circuit and industry. But from what I’ve heard, there is a lot. And when the whole Me Too movement hit, there was a lot of stuff that came out. I think there was somebody who set up an internal thing for theatre and classical dance and performing arts here, and some 128 complaint cases came out. And these are all like older men, supposed to be mentors. And I’m—I wish I wasn’t, but unfortunately—I’m as hetero as you can get. And I’m at this point where I’m just really starting to hate men! ‘Shut up! Don’t talk! Don’t open your… !’ I’m a raging fourth-wave feminist. (55:07)

I think I’m at this point where… I really think it’s collective rage also. It’s yours and it’s also intergenerational trauma that all of us are gathering, and the whole, collective rage is kind of coming out now. So that’s one aspect of it, and then seeing the fact that there shouldn’t be any gender binary is the other aspect of it. Marrying the two together and then removing the concept of gender, or removing the concept of stereotyping what gender is. It’s a completely maddening construct, right? The science has proved it. It’s very dicey. It’s a hard battle and it’s very dicey. And I’ve had people, educated, urban young men who claim to be all for equality who stand next to me and go ‘bah, you’re such a feminist. Stop with the ranting and raging.’ And I’m like ‘well, you can’t help it. It’s rage. You’ve just got to shut up and listen.’ Even with the whole sizing, and all of that, we’ve always prided ourselves on being inclusive, and whoever is large size, I always ask them ‘it’s up to you. You tell me what you’re comfortable wearing, what you want to wear,’ and we always formulate our costumes around that. And that’s something I just don’t see, because they’ve never had any issues with it. I have really tiny people who also go through their share of, you know, and I’m seeing the horrible, negative impact it can have on young women. I have a 30 year old who has severe body dysmorphia and bulimia, because, you know, it’s family: one inch of fat and they’re like ‘oh my god, you’ve become so fat’. And all of the logic comes back to the same thing: how are you going to find a boy who likes you? How are you going to get married? Let’s stop with those questions and… so she’s severely body dysmorphic, because she looks at herself in the mirror and she says ‘oh, my thighs are so fat. Oh, my arms have gotten so fat. I need to stop eating.’ And so it’s something that we are collectively as a group trying to help her through, trying to get her to see somebody to help her with it. And food guilt is a big problem. Yeah, massive problem. I love when I can see more diversity on stage, in terms of creating work, in terms of who’s being given a platform to say what they need to say, without their narratives being snatched from them. Which is why I’m also very careful because, even though maybe I’m traditionally a woman, I also do come from a slightly more entitled or privileged background, and I’m very careful about whose story I’m narrating. I don’t want to steal the narrative from somebody who deserves to have that platform.

Piroska Voljay: We then spoke about the importance of deconstructing and challenging the gender binary, and the significance of having gender-inclusive bathrooms. We also spoke of the process of decolonisation.

Aparna Nagesh: Massive decolonisation is happening. There’s all this rage, and there’s all these unchecked feelings that people are really trying to deal with. With the whole gender-inclusive bathrooms, we have a different other kind of problem here with that because there is a sense of… the men here can be very lecherous, and there is a sense of discomfort when you have typically cishet males also using the same bathroom because the women will immediately go up in arms about how, ‘oh my god, we have no privacy’ because men will just stand there and stare at you. Because here, especially in India, we still have… they need to be taught how to look at women. And I hardly think it’s a sexual thing. It’s a power oppression thing. It’s taught from childhood that women are beneath them, or anybody who’s not cis-hetero is, you know, beneath them. And it has nothing to do with somebody telling them ‘you can be emotional, you’re allowed to cry’. Yes, all of those things are important, but they also need to be taught that they are no better than anybody else, that they’re on the same plane, to not look beneath or look down at anybody else. For us, it’s very intersectional because of the caste politics involved. There’s economic politics involved. There’s classism, casteism, ableism. So it's really hard. It’s got to start from a complete micro level. (01:00:21)

Piroska Voljay: People have these huge amounts of internal biases that take… it’s a process. And it can be a really tricky process, as you said about these people who do identify as cisgender, and then there are people who are… finding that way to marry it, as you said, and trying to manage it. It’s tricky. And it’s a very unknown process, but I think we all have to commit to that process of making everyone, as you said, feel comfortable and to be able to coexist with one another, rather than this kind of “us” versus “them”. It’s tricky.

Aparna Nagesh: I think, for me, that’s one of the places where dance really comes in, especially in the last two years. How can you make your art… what you’re creating more meaningful? How can you say something? How can you build a dialogue? How can you initiate a conversation? How can you even effect…? And I’ve seen it. I’ve physically seen it happen with people who come… one of the dancer’s families who came for SKIN, she told me later, when we were doing a feedback session after the show, she said that ‘we went for dinner after the show and I actually had to explain to my parents what the entire LGBTQI spectrum was’. They wanted to know what each and every individual letter stood for. And she said while they’re not some orthodox conservative parents, they would have never been able to sit at a dinner table and have a conversation about the spectrum if it hadn’t been for the show. And she said, for her, that was such a massive growth point. She said ‘I never thought I could sit there with my parents and talk about being a lesbian or being gay or being gender fluid’ or ‘what is a trans woman, what is a trans man?’ They actually educated their parents completely on that. And that’s something I’ve done with my mum as well in the last two years. And that’s where it starts, right? That’s literally where it starts. So I think that, for me, that’s where I marry it. It’s very important that we use the art form, whatever it is that you do, to create this space where everybody can talk about it, everybody can have healthy debates and discussions about it. The whole show is about differences. And I’m actually really excited to bring that basic workshop, bringing one small portion of the repertoire that can be created by the participants themselves. But I’m doing one of the make workshops. So I’m actually quite excited to see how it translates. I feel like maybe I’ll bring the gender one specifically. It depends on how the class is divided.

Piroska Voljay: We then spoke about the importance of initiating dialogue around gender and representation, and the way that dance can initiate change, and the power of being with other people and moving with other bodies.

Aparna Nagesh: I think that sometimes when you’re doing art form, especially something which is as tactile as dance, there’s a sense of grounding, there’s a sense of constantly being aware of all your senses, right? You’re seeing things, you’re listening, you’re breathing, you’re constantly in touch with your breath, and you’re feeling the ground beneath you, you’re feeling other people. I think that it really has the potential to build so much of the sensitivity, it has the potential to really build that ‘I’m different, you’re different, but in that difference, we can come together and build something’, or we can choose to stay on our paths, but be peaceful with one another, and not necessarily have to go into conflict. Or if we have a conflict, we can really choose to dance around it and move around it and figure out a way to resolve that conflict without having to escalate it into something that’s violent. I think that’s ideally how we can use those analogies and dance. For me, it’s a very powerful visual medium. For me, one of the standpoints was when we… the show previous to SKIN was, which was called [? 01:05:02], the piece from that, which was what we were supposed to perform as the company was coming, but unfortunately, they are not because of lack of funding, was called Displacement which is about being displaced as a refugee or as an immigrant. The second piece was called White Noise which is about mental illness caused by social media. Mine was [? Monkey Mind], which I told you about. So it was a triple-bill performance, and when we took it to another city recently—last August, I think—we had somebody in the audience who had almost no vision, he had 5% vision, he could only see blurs and colours moving around. And he had somebody next to him translating. We had a lot of voiceovers recorded, and the music was playing, of course, but he also had somebody explaining what was happening on stage. And the best feedback I could get from him after the show was he said ‘Madam, I can’t see. I have 5% vision’, but we always do a Q&A after the performance. And he said ‘I felt like I didn’t need this person to explain anything to me. I understood everything that was going on on stage. And I could imagine it in my head. And I really enjoyed the show.’ Imagine somebody with 5% vision looking at a visual medium and telling you that they enjoyed your show, because they understood everything. For me, that was such a huge benchmark of whatever it is that I’m trying to do. This means that this has the power to really affect change. You have to do more with it, use it. See how you can really… one of the ideas we explored was creating a show based only on sound for people like him, specifically for people who are visually impaired but want to watch a dance performance. And how do they watch? They watch with their ears. So it was such a beautiful moment of culmination of everything that I was trying to do. I think it has so much power. And I think that people who have it should really be responsible with it… be really careful what they do with it. (01:07:20)

Piroska Voljay: Yeah, absolutely. It’s super fast, I suppose, in the way it acts in both its form on stage. It’s this constant presentation. You’re performing and you’re constantly having to have this sense of a particular self, and it can be a very work-fast, whirlwind environment. How do you reconnect with yourself and stay grounded and find your sense of yourself within what we do? As it can be a lot to deal with.

Aparna Nagesh: It can be, especially when you’re going towards a production and if you’re somebody like me who’s like ‘all in all. I gotta do everything,’ and we don’t really have separate technical managers and stage managers. It doesn’t work. I gotta do everything. You’re right, it can get really overwhelming. And to be very honest, it’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve really taught myself how to… one is grounding exercises, of course. Two is that I journal a lot. I write a lot. I tune out sometimes. Sometimes I’ll just be like ‘you know what, I’m going to forget everything about this, and just watch some mindless television’. I just really tune out, or I try to spend time with myself. Meditating is something ‘'ve been doing very recently because what happened was, for me, I find it very difficult to sit still in one place. My mind doesn’t stop. It’s constantly churning. And one of the things… I don’t do, I follow homeopathy and ayurveda and my sister is a yoga therapist as well. So she puts together a programme for me that I follow. And my doctor kept saying ‘you know what, you don’t have to focus on sitting down and meditating like other people. You have to find where your meditation is.’ And I realised that, for me, when I go into a trance-like state when I’m just dancing, like I’m not creating, I’m not focusing on choreography, I’m not teaching, just put on some music and just move, for me, I kind of forget about who’s around. That is one form of meditation. For me, that really helps me both connect and disconnect at the same time. (01:09:41)

I also cook a lot. It let’s me just completely tune out. My brains are blank. I read. These are all the things that I do. I make sure that I have one of the things. And it may feel a little weird since you’re young and you’ve been dancing and this is what you’re getting into, is that sometimes you can’t let it be such a large part of who you are. I made that mistake for many years. I said ‘I am nobody if I don’t have dance’. And it still holds true. It is a very large chunk of who I am or what my identity is, but I can’t let it become my identity. I can’t let it be me. I don’t know if you understand? It took me a while to understand this. And I was like ‘what do you mean? This is me!’ It took me a long time to say ‘you know what…’ And this is something I talk about. You have a passion and you have a purpose, and you just have to find a way to marry the two. And I realised that my purpose is not dance. My passion is dance. That’s my method. That’s what I use to fulfil my purpose, which is to effect a particular change, or to cause people to think differently, or to bring about a change in people’s lives. Whether it’s just through a simple ‘yeah, let’s have fun’ dance class, or let’s really think about this issue and come up with something. And this is something I talked about in another talk that I did, which was not a Ted Talk, which was something called a Josh Talk, a recorded thing that’s there, which is about really finding a way to marry the two. And when that clicked in my head, and I was like ‘OK, now you know that this is just your passion, this is your purpose, and you’re using your passion to fulfil your purpose, and these are not who you are, these are just part of the many things that make who you are. It’s just semantics, but you have to keep telling yourself that enough. So that if you are at a point where, one day, you don’t have the passion for this, but the passion shifts to something else. It’s a very hard place of acceptance, but you have to be ready to accept it. I have to always be aware of the fact that it’s like a relationship. Maybe I’ll fall out of love with it one day. Maybe I’ll fall in love with something else. Maybe then I will use that to fulfil my purpose. My purpose doesn’t change. My purpose doesn’t change, but passion can. And it can be a very hard pill to swallow. But as long as I have it for this, as long as I’m able to marry all the different things, as long as I’m able to find my balance with this, I’m going to keep doing this. I’m not going to stop. And as long as I have that faith, I have the belief that I won’t lose my passion for this. It’s like cute little circle. Then it becomes easy to ground yourself. You have to have separation. If you’re not able to separate yourself and find that boundary it becomes very difficult. And it was very hard for me to follow like this, you know, swallow this pill and be like ‘yeah, it is a part of who I am. But it is not me.’ You can’t be that selfish, because sometimes letting it be that selfish can make you very jaded, it can make you cynical, it can make you hate it. And right before I went to New York, I was hating dance. I was like ‘I don’t want to do this anymore’. I actually went through that patch. And then it took me that separation, that identifying of ‘it’s not who you are, it’s just a part of you with one aspect’. Of course, there’s all the various practical other grounding things so you don’t get completely overwhelmed.

Piroska Voljay: Yes, I agree. And right now, what is something that you’re excited for about dance? What’s something you’re excited about in dance right now?

Aparna Nagesh: I would have to say actually the festival. Yeah, I’m excited because at least I’m getting to travel. I’m so excited about coming there to like teach and… New dancers! I’m going to see a whole bunch of new dancers, right? And actually that’s one of the big things that I’m really excited for: I would have to say two things. That’s one. The second thing, maybe not so much to do with dance, but like I told you, one of the things for me has been constantly about effecting change in the world using dance. So to that extent, I’m applying for this course at Coventry called “Global Diversity”. And it’s not something where you have to go there. You only go there for like fifteen days, and then you come back and you implement the project here. And you can be in any stream: you can be a scientist, you can be a business person, you can be an artist. But effectively I want to use the arts for global change. That’s where I’m heading towards. So I’m sending in my application and, hopefully, will get selected. And that comes with the Commonwealth Scholarship, so it’s all fully paid for. Runs for two years, except that you keep going back and forth. But you can really effect some meaningful change with that. So these are the two things. And we’re working on the Herstory  production, but with women from Chennai who’ve been erased from the history of the city. So there's this one woman who has been curating and collecting and researching all of the stories. She’s agreed to meet me next week. So yeah, I’m trying to create a dance-on-film documentary about this.

Piroska Voljay: Thank you so very much. It’s brilliant. Thank you so much for bringing this generosity. One thing I was thinking about when I was talking about these questions is the relevance of the teachers that I’ve had were hugely monumental in my life. And they expand beyond, as we’ve said, just the dance and the physical practice. And so it’s been such a pleasure to hear the way you talk and care about dance and yourself and your students and the way you’re making these huge, amazing changes. And it’s really been such a pleasure. So thank you so very much. I really appreciate it.

Aparna Nagesh: Thank you for all your nice words.