Fluid movements

When he was eight, Mithun Shyam used to accompany his six-year-old sister Shraddha to her dance class in Bengaluru’s Cox Town. Watching the class in progress, Mithun began mimicking the mudras and moves being taught, even following the teacher’s corrections faithfully. This prompted the teacher, Irawati Naidu, to ask him to join the class. Mithun did, as did his elder brother Vipin. The three siblings studied under Naidu for two more years, until she moved to the US, but not before putting them under another teacher, Padmini Ramachandran.

Almost three decades later, Mithun credits the late Ramachandran, an exponent of the Vazhuvoor bani — a Bharatanatyam style marked by elaborate movements and nuanced abhinaya (facial expressions), among other features — with spurring him “to think and discover things for himself”. Choreography was an integral part of his training. While his sister and brother discontinued their training midway, 36-year-old Mithun has been performing regularly for more than two decades now, though he was barely 10 when he first performed on stage. He is known for his ‘high-voltage’ performances marked by physically demanding leaps, jumps and stances.

However, right from the beginning, the dancer remembers reworking even long-established dance items. He wanted to use this classical dance form to comment on contemporary situations. Beyond “just performing mythological and religious stories”, he began to take up themes revolving around issues of gender, sexuality and religious controversies. In this, too, he found a forerunner in his teacher. Ramachandran, her musician Jahnavi Jayakumar, and the students of her dance school, Natyapriya, were known for tackling unusual themes that showcased the diversity of India’s storytelling traditions.

On Christmas Day of 2015, at the ‘Rasa Sanje’ dance event in Bengaluru, Mithun performed ‘Yesu Padam’ — a full-length production recounting the life of Jesus, from his birth to his crucifixion. “My teacher suggested that I mark the occasion with an appropriate item. She recalled teaching a Christian student this item for her arangetram [debut] and we worked to make it a fuller piece,” he says. The controversy this stirred is reminiscent of the one roiling the Carnatic music scene currently.

“In the past month, Carnatic musicians have come under fire for singing about Jesus, which prompted vocalist TM Krishna to say he will release one Carnatic song on Jesus and Allah every month,” says Mithun. His own effort, he says, had been a “way to challenge myself to tell another kind of story through the language of this dance form”.

Mithun’s more recent works address, among other issues, the controversy over the entry of menstruating women into the Ayyappa temple at Sabarimala, and the criminalisation of same-sex love in India. His ‘18 Golden Steps’ retells the legends surrounding Ayyappa, and features him in the female role of the demoness Mahishi. The production was staged at the Dhanvantari temple in Cherthala, Kerala, in April 2018.

In March this year, at the Nruthyankura dance festival in Bengaluru, he premièred ‘Purushantaragatah’ (inherent qualities of man) — a production that navigates through the well-worn stories of Vishnu’s avatar as the seductress Mohini; Amba’s rebirth as Shikhandi to avenge past slights; Arjuna’s time in exile as the dance teacher Brihannala; and Thayumanavar (he who became mother) — Shiva taking the form of a midwife to help birth the child of his devotee. “I wanted to show that gender fluidity and alternative sexuality have always found place in our ancient legends, to give hope to those struggling with those questions in our times,” he says.

His latest is a work-in-progress focussing on fatherly love, a subject rarely touched upon by choreographers even while “ vatsalya (maternal love) has been explored endlessly in bharatanatyam”. Classical dancers who have previously attempted to colour outside the lines haven’t been received very well — they are denied performance slots at major festivals, don’t achieve critical acclaim and soon fade away. The trouble is that Bharatanatyam has come to be seen as an artefact of our cultural history, rather than a dance language that wrestles with its time to show us other possibilities. The margin for experimentation has opened up over the years, but there’s only so much that the gatekeepers of the classical arts will allow. The outliers find themselves forced to endlessly explain why their art too should be considered Bharatanatyam.

Mithun’s intentions, however well-meaning, do spark questions. Does his use of mythological and ancient texts lead him to the same trap that other conventional performances have fallen into? Does he read these texts as being prescriptive of their time? Or, do these texts allow viewers to see their ancestors’ attempts at grappling with the not-so-ordinary lives they encountered? The error would be to see these texts as historical evidence rather than an attempt at finding a place for the extraordinary in the mainstream.

“The story of Thayumanavar is even commemorated in a temple in Tamil Nadu,” Mithun says. He seems to wants his audiences to believe that people expressing their alternative selves in the past found more acceptance, or were received more kindly, which empirically wasn’t the case. He might be making the mistake of using these metaphors of inclusion as evidence of inclusivity. His cause will be better served by bringing more rigour to his research as well.

After today’s show in Mumbai, Mithun’s ‘Purushantaragatah’ will travel to Chennai (October 5) and Delhi (November 29)

Joshua Muyiwa is a Bengaluru-based poet and writer

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