Namchi Bazar brings back the Spirit of India

By Philip Szporer - Hour.ca - Canada

Thursday, October 12, 2006

You never know how an idea is going to strike. Faced with a Bollywood extravaganza - one of those all-singing, all-dancing, colourful feasts of love - Montreal-based dancer and choreographer Namchi Bazar sat up and took notice. In India, she says, "Bollywood is everywhere, blaring! Everyone knows the songs and dances."

People in our North American culture might mock and utter the word "cheesy," but Bollywood films are truly popular culture. The caste system still exists in modern India, and "people live in total chaos, poverty and misery," says Bazar, but she insists Bollywood's particular take on perfect love crosses the lines between the social strata. With her Western eyes, the dance artist was struck by how much "emotion the people would put into the dancing - children, especially, pop into dancing."

Bazar questions the portrayal of women in these films. "We see the more sensual side of life, whereas in their daily reality the vast majority of women are hiding that in public."
The backdrop to her research in India was Tapaz, in Rajasthan, where Bazar was artist-in-residence with a regional company of women dancers. Intrigued by the concept of universal love, and with a deep interest in Sufism, she found herself in a corner of the grand subcontinent where the crossing of traditions and cultures occasionally offers power. Her awareness grew as she learned the women's traditional folk dances, plus the kathak form. "I'd extract some of those vocabularies and then throw in some contemporary ideas," she says.

Bazar's previous work, often enriched by derivations of Indian classical bharatanatyam vocabulary, is noted for being "physically committed." That quality of connectedness is also reflected in Industry of Dreams, her pre-Festival du Monde Arabe offering, where body awareness and the use of isolation (using head and hands, in rhythmic sequences) are matched by a few video elements (including a nod to Bollywood) and live music (though not played by Indian instruments).

Women's "going down to the water" inspires Bazar. She's also related physical notions of temple sculptures - she and her two dancers, Angie Cheng and Sara Wiskar, ease into common postures of sitting. Bazar's hybrid dances are visions of possibility and potential, or as she puts it, "going into a dream state of what love can be," listening to the soul and letting the beauty of the path take you home.