The Powerful Art of ‘Insurgent Solidarity’

There’s a lot going on at the annual Indian Summer Festival in Vancouver, which opens today. Dance? Check. Music? Yes! There’s also comedy, food, panel discussions, storytelling and, of course, more than a few parties.

The festival’s guest curator Am Johal hit the ground running this year. He has taken a strong, expansive approach that covers a multiplicity of disciplines. It’s encompassing, inclusive and just plain fun.

Johal’s curatorial theme, “borderless solidarities,” couldn’t be more apropos. As he explains over coffee in a downtown Vancouver café, the festival reacts to the social and cultural climate, and offers a path to new ways of understanding the time and place we find ourselves in.

“With the closures of thought all around us in an era of hardened borders, resurgent strains of authoritarianism and violent expulsions, the urgency to think and live otherwise intensifies,” the festival organizers wrote in a statement.

“In an unravelling world, we invoke an audacious and unfashionable idea — an insurgent solidarity that refuses the inertias of this troubled time.”

In a dance work, lightning strikes

“Insurgent solidarity”: we could all use a lot of it as human society seems to wobble wildly on its axis. The meaning of the phrase comes into sharp focus in a new dance work commissioned by the festival called Today is the evening to strike lightning / Aaj To Bijiliyan Girane Ki Shaam Hai.

The work brings together choreographers Justine A. Chambers and Simran Sachar, who also performs as the principal dancer. It marks a union of different creative disciplines (dance and film) as well as other elements like family, culture and social traditions.

Chambers is a veteran of the cultural sector. In her career as a dance artist and educator, she has collaborated with a broad array of artists and worked in a multitude of creative disciplines. Sachar also has a diverse background in dance and film.

It was a conversation about both artists’ respective mothers that sparked the idea for Lighting. Sachar’s mother was the choreographer for the 1990 Bollywood film Thodasa Roomani Ho Jayen.

The film was partly inspired by N. Richard Nash’s play The Rainmaker, which was also adapted to a 1956 film of the same title starring Katharine Hepburn and Burt Lancaster.

The plot centres around a loveless woman who falls under the spell of a charlatan and, in the process, comes to understand herself in a new light. The trailer for the 1956 film is a bit of a retrograde howler. But the Bollywood version of the story is more radical because it spotlights romantic love over arranged marriage, hence its attraction to Sachar and Chambers.

With only a few days before the premiere, the women are fine-tuning everything from lighting to sound in a rehearsal studio at Simon Fraser University’s Vancouver campus.

Solo performance, by its very nature, is inherently challenging. With only one body onstage, performers are forced to contend in an immediate, often intensely direct, relationship with audiences.

But as Chambers explains, she doesn’t like it when dancers give it all away in catharsis. She prefers the idea of making an audience come to you. That’s exactly what happens in Today is the evening to strike lightning. The more precise translation, according to Sachar’s mother, is, “We know we’re hot, so let’s get all the boys.”

It’s always an interesting moment in the immediate leadup to a performance. As Chambers admits, she is infamous for changing things up until the final moment — she even made adjustments in the final dress rehearsal of a work at the National Arts Centre.

With a few days before the opening here at SFU, the elements are all combined, although in a few instances the small lineup of folks who are present to watch the run-through must use their imaginations to picture what the performance will look like in situ.

As Sachar explains, she starts the show high up on the catwalk at the Orpheum Annex. The majority of the performance takes place atop a small square plinth, with just room enough underneath for a set of flashing lights that recall Studio 54 at its disco height. Add in shiny silver mylar covering, a pulsing techno score, a white tuxedo and you have all the raw elements of pure spectacle.

But seduction and beauty are not the most overt or obvious aspects of the work — the opposite, in fact. In certain points in the performance, I find myself thinking about the contrapposto posture of Joseph Merrick. In other places, the lurch between beauty and a certain kind of grotesquerie is so destabilizing that it’s hard to know how to feel.

Emotional reactions tumble out as quickly as Sachar’s changing expressions.

The constraints of working in a relatively small area give rise to a kind of enforced creative exploration. Another narrative stream takes place entirely on Sachar’s face as it morphs from sly smiles to impassivity and then into other expressions that are harder to qualify. A lurch of the mouth almost leads the body in one direction.

In a larger venue this part of the show might go little noticed, but in a smaller, more intimate space like the Annex, audiences will be close enough to witness this intimate form of choreography.

Another element in the work is the dance form called waacking that evolved out gay nightclubs in Los Angeles. On the surface, it resembles voguing, another dance form that includes hand and arm movements. The choreographic vocabulary also recalls Indian dance traditions like Kathak but there is a contemporary edge that mixes and mingles the present with the traditional to create a fission of different elements and style.

What is most interesting in Lighting is what is seen and what isn’t. In this aspect, it’s the solidarity of the dancer with themselves that becomes most apparent. A good section of the work features Sachar working with her back to the audience or silently mouthing a stream of dialogue. Rather than alienate, these moments are more curiosity inducing.

It’s the push and pull between attraction and repulsion that fuels the engine, animating up and out from the insularity of a single body in an enclosed space into a greater and more expansive experience.

After a while, I forget that it’s only one person onstage, such is Sachar’s ability to evoke a parade of different manifestations.

If ever art was necessary, it’s right now

So, too is a festival like Indian Summer that collects a diverse, eclectic body of artists, thinkers and performers to embody and interpret the discursive cultural currents of the moment.

If ever art was necessary to help parse and express human experience, it is right now, when empathy appears to be dwindling and intolerance is once again flexing its ugly muscles.

In such a time of monsters, artists are critical.

The animating spirit of Indian Summer is summed up in its curatorial statement: “We ask, how can we be together today? What is the time of dreaming? How to amplify the whispered gestures of the periphery?

“To listen well. To move beyond estrangement. To laugh, to gather, to persist in the face of impunity. To court the ecstatic trance. To disappear and reappear. To reinhabit the capacity to touch and feel. To assemble a brief refuge for the imperishable, a defense of the sensual.

“A bumpy carriage ride where both tradition and change have room for maneuver. An open door to the stranger, the neighbour and the passerby. Always an insistence on promiscuous alliances and borderless solidarities.

“To leave open the possibility of the possibility of something new.”

Maybe that’s exactly what is needed.

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‘Today is the evening to strike lightning / Aaj To Bijiliyan Girane Ki Shaam Hai’ takes place on July 5 at the Orpheum Annex in Vancouver. The Indian Summer Festival runs until July 13 at multiple venues across the city. Find tickets online.