I make intercultural interdisciplinary dance theater pieces when I have something I need to say to the world.
For instance, when it came time for me to articulate my personal protest against the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Gujarat Riots, and all the senseless violence in the world, I heard an inner minister that said, “Speak now, or forever know no peace!” I chose to create an evening length piece, Lamps on Lilypads, that questions our definitions of success, explores various aspects of freedom and peace, and finally revels in the myriad forms of love.
I also make work that elucidates classical kathak dance while cross-pollinating with contemporary movement. The Hindustani classical forms are often inaccessible to anyone not trained in their complexities and subtleties. The challenge of displaying the magnificence of the art, revealing its intricacies, while actively engaging the audience has been one of my inspirations. Lamps on Lilypads used text and songs in different languages. The interdisciplinary and intercultural aspect made the work highly accessible to people previously unfamiliar with kathak and the Hindustani classical arts.
Audiences were moved and inspired by this piece and I am encouraged to experiment further with my new piece by incorporating more vocabulary from outside the Hindustani classical tradition. I’d like to show the commonalities and contrasts with other forms with which local people may be more familiar, such as tango, flamenco, and contact improvisation.
Traditionally Hindustani classical music communicates a mood and kathak re-tells the mythological stories of India. Within the schools of these forms it is deeply ingrained that the purity of the form must be maintained. Innovation is strongly discouraged. There is a fear that “fusion causes confusion.” I have been inspired to use these forms to express deeply personal, contemporary, and radically political issues in a manner that stays true to the tradition yet avails of the improvisational aspect to create work that not only is accessible to, but also touches, moves, and inspires multi-cultural and international audiences. I want to use the articulate potential in these forms to instigate introspection in the audience members that inspires them to radically change the way we we think and live.
In a world that extols the virtues of the specialist I have found myself to be the rare interdisciplinary physician artist who believes in excellence through integrated versatility. I thrive on the layering of forms, approaches, and methodologies and believe the process is enriching.
For me, the first layer of my artistic process is the statement I want to make to the world. I often find my voice revealed in my writing, and also reflected back to me in the things I read and hear. In the rhythm of these words I often hear the layering of the rhythms of tabla and kathak and am sometimes thrilled by how well they fit together. I start layering the words over the rhythm and then I interchangeably work with the movement and the melodic components. I often focus on different points along the arc of the idea and then work to connect those dots coherently. The polishing of the layers upon layers as a performance piece requires intense concentration and dedicated practice over months and years.
My hope is that the piece I’m currently working on, Aawara, La Vagabonda, will inspire women to value their creativity and inherent worth regardless of age or relationship or marital status. The protagonist is an amalgamation of my revolutionary heroines, such as Colette, Amelia Earhart, Umrao Jaan, and Arundhati Roy. Though their life histories include romance, it seems to me their fulfillment lay in the cultivation of their talents. Women often abdicate this freedom at great expense to their human potential. Aawara explores how we negotiate the spectrum between freedom and security and exalts another option. Through this piece I wish to encourage women from diverse backgrounds and cultures to consider and nurture their intellectual and creative pursuits.
To state my mission feels limiting. Although my Artist’s Statement purports an intention and purpose, suggesting a mission, those seem to be necessary when applying for opportunities to create and share my work. I actually feel art arises without mission, like emotions, deep meditation, or love. They all have no real purpose other than their own existence.
Art, to me, is simply self-expression of thoughts and emotions, which does make me healthier and happier, but that is not the mission, rather a side effect. My creativity doesn’t ensure a fulfilling life. That’s just another unintended consequences, but not the purpose by any means.
The words art, creativity, self-expression often evoke something special, magical, mysterious, yet there is nothing mystical about thinking, feeling and expressing those thoughts and emotions through any modality.
Art is like breathing, there is no purpose. We don’t breathe to live, nor do we live to breathe. The only purpose of breath is to be breathed. Breath simply exists and you are either with it, or without it. The paradoxical beauty of breath is that each inhalation gives life and each exhalation takes us towards our last breath. Each breath paddles our boat on a glorious journey for no reason at all.
Similarly, there is no purpose to feelings other than to be felt; they exist and you either feel them or you don’t. Like all things, they arise and pass.
Like love, making art can have no purpose. I don’t make my works in order to feel good, to please another, to create peace or goodwill, to become known, to solve problems, and definitely not to garner financial security. A mission in art is impossible for then it turns into strategy and destroys the very art itself. Self-expression happens and one is either in it, or out of it.
So why do it? For the same reason we love and live: for no reason at all. Like life and love, it is the most worthwhile thing to practice.
Jaysi was born in Chandigarh, India and raised in Plover, Wisconsin, the town with love in its heart, the home of Plover Potatoes. She took her first ballet class at the age of two and has been dancing ever since. Besides the usual childhood ballet, tap, jazz, and gymnastics, she has had extensive training in classical Indian dance and contemporary dance. She studied bharatnatyam with Shrimati Hema Rajgopalan for ten years and kathak with Pandit Chitresh Das for ten years. She also has been training in contemporary dance for over two decades and contact improvisation for several years. Recently she added tap, tango, and flamenco to her regimen. Lately she has been recognized as an emerging choreographer in the Bay Area. Internationally, she had the honor of performing at the Nehru Centre in London in 2010 and opening the Festival of the Arts for Non-violence and Tolerance 2011 at the prestigious Darpana Theater in Ahmedabad.
She’s also musically inclined and loves literature. She studied western classical violin through the Suzuki method for ten years of her childhood and has been studying the tabla with Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri for nearly 20 years. Thanks to the tutelage of the late Ustad Ali Akbar Khan she’s incorporating singing into her dance practice and is extending the tradition of kathak by including the kanjira which she has studied from Pandit TH Subhash Chandran. A chapbook of my poetry “Missus Rhesus and other poems” was published by the Writer’s Workshop in Calcutta.
In spite of her artistic tendencies, she is a practicing physician trained in family and community medicine, as well as occupational and environmental medicine from the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). She graduated with a doctoral degree in medicine from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and earned a master’s degree in public health with an emphasis in environmental health from the University of California-Berkeley. She loved caring for patients at the Tom Waddell Clinic for the Homeless. She also creates a podcast about prioritizing well-being, Nei Jing Now! and is the founder of a nonprofit, Beyond Holistic, which promotes primary prevention and teaches healers how to stay healthy through arts, action, skills, community, and humor.
A doctor by profession, a dreamer, dancer, and drummer by obsession, she is sometimes known as an AABBCCDDDD (Asian-American-bred and buttered, cross-cultural and creative, dancing, drumming, desi doctor).