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The First Erasing Borders Dance Festival is HERE!
Posted on August 19th, 2008 by E. Nina Rothe
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 If you have been seduced by the scent of jasmine flowers braided into your neighbor’s hair on the subway or have started noticing a particularly elegant gait in your fellow New Yorkers’ walk when crossing the street, it’s all thanks to the First Annual Erasing Borders Festival of Indian Dance, organized by the Indo-American Arts Council. This cultural event is bringing together some of the finest dancers of the various Indian classical dance disciplines, as well as modern and fusion dance companies from all over the world. But while you are trying to absorb and digest all of this information, don’t delay in buying your tickets, as the festival lasts only through Thursday, August 21st. After that, NYC will go back to its usual chaotic pace and mostly unpleasant smells.
Included in the festival are outdoor performances by a few of the artists, as well as symposiums and lectures on such subjects as preventing injuries in dancers. There are also film screenings and a Master Class at the Alvin Ailey Studios. Then, plan on your evenings being filled with fantastic concerts featuring some of the finest dance companies this side of the Indian Ocean, followed by hip after-parties and a glamorous gala that will have the NYC dance world buzzing about it for months. Like the Indo-American Arts Council itself, many of the dancers and choreographers who will perform here have hyphenated identities. They are flying in from Chicago, Minneapolis and Washington D.C.; from Montreal and London. Some of them were born in India, while others are second-generation immigrants. For "Erasing Borders," 15 ensembles will perform out of doors at two free events sponsored by the Downtown Dance Festival and will give a pair of formal concerts in the Ailey Citigroup Theater.
Organized to coincide with the Battery Dance Company free annual Downtown Dance Festival, Erasing Borders  is the brainchild of IAAC’s Founder and Executive Director Aroon Shivdasani and Jonathan Hollander, who is the President of Battery Dance Company in NYC, as well as being the Vice President of the IAAC. India is the only country in the world with various separate and all formally taught dance traditions, as Mr. Hollander pointed out during a Press Conference hosted by the Consul General of India in New York, Mrs. Neelam Deo, on Monday. But as ancient and culturally diverse as the various disciplines are, they are also often misunderstood or ignored in the Western world. “Western audiences need a forum to learn how to watch Indian dance and that’s what we aim to provide through this festival”, revealed Mr. Hollander during the opening reception.
 Too many to all list here, the companies featured in the festival include Canada-based Manu Kala Mandir (see top photo) with a piece about the interaction between male and female, as the meeting of two rivers; NYC’s own Maria Colaco Dance, with a piece about Kashmiri carpet weavers which includes some amazing images projected on the screen behind the dancers; Sinha Danse from Canada, a contemporary dance company headed by Roger Sinha - whose background includes Indian roots but who grew up in the UK and wittily describes his own upbringing as “totally Fish & Chips, NOT Masala Dosa and Samosas”; and Boston-based Sudarshan Belsare, a transgender performer who has created an edgy, bold performance style which allows him to take risks, yet remain committed to the traditional Bharatanatyam dance discipline.
I suggest checking out the website for NYC-based Thresh for their interactive dance instruction and education tool “Dancing for the Gods”, as well as that of Afghan-born, Canada-based Manijeh Ali, who has created and performed pieces about Sufi poetry and Genghis Khan and incorporates her knowledge of North Indian Kathak discipline with West African dance, sprinkled with a good dose of Persian culture. Then there are the moderns - choreographers with political agendas, like Ananya Chatterjea, of Minneapolis, who makes dances like "Daak, Call to Action," concerned with environmental justice and land rights; or Anurekha Ghosh, from Birmingham, UK, whose piece "Noor/LIGHT," combines Kathak with acrobatics and multi-media.
"It's not just about ethnicity, but it's also about where you would like to take the dance," Dalal says. "A lot of older Indian dance teachers may not necessarily approve of that, and that's another boundary that dancers are struggling to break down.
 I’ll leave you with one last thought, something I wasn’t aware of before this festival started: the likes of great ballerinas such as Anna Pavlova and Alicia Markova are known to have performed Indian dances! These beautiful dancers saw in the grace, dramatic expressions and fluid bodywork of Kathak and Bharatanatyam, a discipline different from theirs but equally valid and absolutely breathtaking. That’s why they strayed off their beaten path of point shoes and tutus and got bejeweled and sari-clad, to foray into this world so foreign to them but yet so irresistible.
Erasing Borders will forever change the way you view dance. Like the ballerinas of the past and the lucky audiences who have already experienced the first free performance at One Chase Manhattan Plaza on Monday afternoon, you will find yourself awed by the beauty of this cultural exchange and what a skip across several colorful borders can provide. But don’t take my word for it, try it out for yourself!
Images courtesy of Manu Kala Mandir, Manijeh Ali, Sinha Danse, Dr. Janaki Rangarajan and Peepul PR
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http://daily.chictoday.com/2008/08/19/the-first-erasing-borders-dance-festival-is-here/
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