BOX choreography by Hari Krishnan, with Krishnan, Nalin Bisnath, Hiroshi Miyamoto, Masumi Sato and others. Presented by inDANCE at Fleck Dance Theatre (207 Queens Quay West). Runs today (Thursday, March 18) to Saturday (March 20), 8 pm. $18-$31. 416-973-4000. indance.ca.
“At first it was nerve-racking. I was absolutely nervous,” recalls artistic director, choreographer and dancer Hari Krishnan. He’s referring to last April, when his Toronto-based company, inDANCE, premiered its postmodern, experimental show BOX at the prestigious Joyce SoHo in New York City.
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“At first we worried that nobody was going to come because we were a completely unknown company. I was expecting us to perform very well, but I wasn’t too sure what to expect from the audiences, because they have seen everything.”
As it turned out, everybody loved it. BOX enjoyed a sold-out run in the Big Apple, and scored enthusiastic reviews in the New York Times, among many others.
BOX melds contemporary Western choreography with Eastern influences in unexpected and provocative ways, always aiming to entertain while playfully disrupting traditional categories and assumptions.
“I’m interested in exploring the whole notion of hybridity and the multiple realities we face every day,” he says. “We hope to challenge the audience to rethink how they see dance.”
A veteran dancer/choreographer (inDANCE is celebrating its 10th anniversary), Krishnan also works as a scholar and mixes his ethno-historical work on South Indian courtesans into the show. Many scenes draw on these creative cultural mixtures transcending nations, disciplines, communities, identities, sexualities and time.
In the course of the show’s seven pieces, Krishnan and 13 other dancers from diverse backgrounds tackle a host of themes and styles. In one, they explore questions of gender in the history of dance in colonial India, incorporating British marches and bagpipes. In others, they seek to undercut the cultural hegemony of Bollywood and poke fun at modern dance legend Ted Shawn.
The action in the latter piece, Mea Culpa, gets amusingly meta.
“We make fun of and subvert the idea of cultural appropriation by showing how Shawn appropriated a particular Hindu god from a 1936 poster. We make fun of me making fun of Shawn making fun of the Hindu god,” he laughs.
“But most of all I want people to have a really good time,” he says of the show’s upcoming Toronto debut.
“BOX is a celebration meant to expand the possibilities of dance by renegotiating the notion of compartmentalization of communities and art in a rigid framework. We want to make those frameworks blur and disappear.”
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