Creative Direction: Vijay Ravikumar
Dancer: Joshua Sailo
What is the shape of the space we move through?
Some movement seems to contain a seed of stillness. And stillness sometimes contains a germ of movement. Through this ebb and flow of stillness and motion, can we understand the shape of the space our body negotiates?
Join us this Sunday at 7:00pm (IST) for a live online presentation of the discoveries we made in the studio and experience new ways of imagining our spatial orientation.
Clink on the link below
Public Sharing on Aug 30, 2020 07:00 PM India
Vijay Ravikumar is a mathematician, illustrator, and puppeteer based in Chennai, who has finally lost his American accent [or so he thinks].
While I was living the quintessential freelance artist lifestyle last year, I was crashing at a friend's place in Bangalore during a dance project. That's where I first met Vijay when he also spent a few nights during the tour of a play he was a part of. Though we were both supposedly "working", we spent every evening talking late into the night as though everynight was a Friday night. This was when I learnt of Vijay's playful yet inquisitve mind and I was really inspired by his journey into theatre and his knowledge in Mathematics and puppetry. Over the months, we kept bouncing ideas back and forth, and thanks to the lockdown brought on by Covid-19, we were finally able to carve out some time to create together over zoom.
People often create a clear divide between the arts and sciences, where one is "emotional" and the other "rational". Speaking with Vijay, you will soon realise how passionate you can be in Mathetmatics, and how you can speak about ideas, patterns and behaviours in an emotional way. This experience has shown me how similar dance and mathematics actually are - they are both studies, observations, and a creative play of watching something unfold. This collaboration was a great way of pairing theoretical knowledge about spatial orientations on movements on a plane (or several planes and axes) with an embodied experience on how the body can traverse through space.
Given the structure and practical limitations of Virtual Act, we were only able to explore perhaps 40% of the imagination that our eight hours' Zoom calls sparked. But I have learnt a great deal on learning to observe and not always direct and predetermine outcomes, and how I might build upon ideas. Of course, the mantra these days is that dance is political, and any stance/dismissal is inherently political. But, I find that sometimes, dance and art can be removed from the cultural socio-political environment and just be enjoyed simply for the sake of movement possibilities. And within that, just as I realised thorugh the many mathematical concepts Vijay threw my way, we can extrapolate lessons and ideas to our life. Sometimes, simplicity is far more complex.