When I arrive at the CFA Theater, Patricia Beaman, my normally chipper and laid-back ballet teacher, is wielding a dagger and wearing a black wig, white mask and black leather skin-tight halter dress (I later found out her costumes are from a sex shop).
All I can say is she does not dress like this for class.
Next weekend, April 17 and 18, at 8 p.m. in the CFA, Patricia Beaman and Hari Krishnan are performing in their Spring Faculty Dance Concert “Goddess, Siren, Monster, and Liquid Shakti.” Though the concert is six solos about female deities from the Greco-Roman and Hindu tradition, Beaman and Krishnan’s work is anything but pedantic. Both dancers sat down to talk to me about inspiration, “queer-androgynous,” Indian dance, and why the term “po-mo” can be appropriated for describing a ballet.
Argus: For people who haven’t read the performance description, can you tell me a little bit about your show?
Patricia Beaman: Well, this came about because Hari and I have always been fascinated at what each of us do respectively, and how similar it is. Both Bharata-natyam and Baroque dance get their material from antique texts—his thousands of years old, mine three-hundred. They’re very married to the music, both forms. There’s an intricacy in the hands, the structures are very formulaic.
Hari Krishnan: There’s a very specific framework, a specific point of cultural reference.
PB: Definitely.
HK: So we use that, and we are both very accomplished in those two forms. We use those two forms as our starting point.
PB: The other very important thing that both of the forms share is mythological subjects, mine Greco-roman mythology and his Hindu mythology. So…I’m doing three Greco-roman femme-fatales; I’m doing Venus, Armide, and Scilla.
HK: Mine is called “Liquid Shakti,” and it’s basically an exploration of the liquid goddess Ganga, who is very much a part of Hindu mythology and very much a part of Hinduism in India in terms of worshiping water. So it’s three representations of her in various facets, and I tied this in with my relation to the environment and this particular goddess’ relationships to the problems in India. It’s very personal.
Argus: For you both, what is your interest in working with female deities in particular?
Patricia: Well first off, I’m a woman [laughs]. No, but I don’t mean that in a funny way. In the Baroque canon of notated dances, we resurrected these from actual notation systems – I have learned three of the hardest dances in the repertoire, the paseta[sic], which is a musical form and a dance form, of “Venus, the paseta Armide,” and “The Paseta of Scilla.” I learned all those and did all those in a strict manner, and because the choreography is so wonderfully intricate, and because the stories of each of those goddesses… I mean Venus, goddess of love, everyone wants a piece of her. I brought her into the 21st century by making it about celebrity, about what happens when that turns. You have to only look at Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton to look at how when they get put on a pedestal, people can’t wait to knock them down. And Armide is really about being left, being abandoned. And Scilla gets cursed and she gets transformed into a monster—all of these are about transformation. So it wasn’t so much for the female part. I spent a lot of time researching and learning, and I wanted to do something more with that; I’m really pleased with how it’s turned out.
HK: This is purely coincidence that we picked the goddesses as our theme. It just lent itself very well to good programming [both laugh].
PB: So I go, he goes, I go, back and forth, and we’re tying it together with video.
HK: As a segue.
Argus: What are the videos?
PB: One of the things about Hari’s form is the hands, so we shot his hands. And with me I have a lonely beach coast from when I was in Paris.
HK: So I think the video it provides the subtext of some of the feelings one is going to be experiencing in the six solos: sensuality, loneliness, hope. It’s much more of a nuanced presentation.
Argus: Did you help each other choreograph each others’ pieces?
Hari: We worked independently but because we are such good friends and because we have such immense respect for each other’s work, I think the programming flowed very organically. Of course we talked about what pieces follow in terms of strategizing so it makes for a good dance presentation…because we come from two very different traditions, yet we infuse those traditions with a very contemporary current and sensibility, which is us [laughs]; that’s what’s interesting for the production. It’s seemingly two different worlds, but you have so many similar strands of aesthetics.
Argus: Hari, I know in class you called one of your dances very “po-mo.” Would you say this is?
HK: [lots of laughter]. Some of the pieces are very “po-mo.” The prototype for the professional Bharata Natyam dance is the devadasi woman (temple dancers), and that’s become my inspiration because I’ve trained with the devadasi community extensively. She [the devadasi] represents the cosmic consciousness behind the power of the dance forms, so that was an inspiration. The dance form itself is extremely female-centric, and as a male practitioner, I think it’s very important not to see the male-female shift. There’s a very wonderful queer, androgynous sexuality, fluid sexuality that is already inherent in the form and its presentation. Although Patricia is dancing female deities, she’s extremely masculine at times, extremely forceful, so I think these six solos transcend the discourse of gender and history.
PK: It’s interesting that you said the “po-mo” word…I started to study a lot of dances from the 1960s from the Judson era, and in my ideas of deconstructing them I used several of the techniques I studied, “accumulation” being one of them…postmodernism was a lot of the springboard for my being able to have the freedom to deconstruct these sacrosanct pieces from the 18th century, and I have lost friends over it, frankly.
HK: But that’s what makes it exciting, accessible and personal, and totally refreshing, I feel.
Argus: That’s what I see with both of your stuff—you’re very exited about playing.
HK: But the reason why we could play is we’ve done all the legwork—we have a solid foundation and then we can play with it. You have to have something to play with, something solid to play with, and then you push the envelope and take risks.
Argus: What do you want your audience to get from this?
HK: Just to come in with an open mind, without any preconceived expectations about what each form should represent. Because Patricia and I, as you know, don’t do the stereotype, we go beyond that. What we can get from this is a sense of freshness, contemporariness, modernity, married very well with classicism and history.
PB: And humanity! Everyone’s been left, everyone’s transformed, aged.
HK: I get into concepts of barren earth, dryness, hopelessness—and then a sense of hope and fertility, prosperity, celebration. Very similar themes [as Patricia’s], but very different execution.
PB: There’s a lot of humanity in the show that I think people, even if they don’t know anything about the forms, can grasp.
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