By Roanna Gonsalves
Here in Sydney, it’s the time of the spring equinox. The city submits to the Southern Hemisphere’s annual movement towards heat, fire, flowers. A large audience has gathered in the courtyard at Old Government House to experience Bhoomi: Woman and Earth. It is the third in a series of annual recitals produced and directed by Arjunan Puveendran and Indu Balachandran as part of the Sydney Sacred Music Festival.
In Australia, it is rare to see traditional and new work composed, performed, and produced by contemporary artists outside of the Western tradition in spaces usually reserved for more mainstream work. We know from the research, such as that done by the BYP Group and by Kape Communications for the Australia Council, and from personal experience, that diverse audiences welcome the opportunity to see the strands of their particular histories and their contemporary experiences reflected in art. When these strands are woven together in an accomplished, aesthetically-pleasing way that also offers multiple perspectives on old stories, while highlighting the awareness of our positions as immigrants on Indigenous land, it is like finally entering a warm shelter on a wintry night.
Bhoomi: Woman and Earth is such a work. It is a much-needed attempt to open up the discussion around the gendered, class and caste-related gatekeeping of sacred music and performance. Ideas of purity, of submissiveness, and of the boundary between private and public labour are questioned, even if subtly, and this is always welcome.
Bhoomi begins with the opening ritual of namaskāram. The dancers Poorvaja Nirmaleswaran, Kersherka Sivakumaran and Seran Sribalan touch the earth to seek her blessings. In this courtyard that has seen servant and slave, master and supplicant, coloniser and colonised, the dancers move as if harnessing the dulcet light of the changing seasons. Working within classical Indian dance traditions where the irenic grace of the female dancers functions as a counterpoint to the more martialized grace of the male dancer, the dancers in Bhoomi sometimes delightfully subvert these gendered expectations. They work not only with torso, with limbs, but with their faces, their eyes, their gestures amplified to highlight a musical or narrative point in a highly symbolic, expressive and embodied form of storytelling.
The earth slowly gives over to winter’s long exhale. The mellifluous voice of Arjunan Puveendran is released into the atmosphere, asking for and receiving acceptance, offering an impressive range, suggesting potential before full-throated celebration. Then voice becomes music, music becomes worship, the secular and the sacred intertwine.
The mridangam, played by the accomplished percussionist Branavan Jeyarasa, provides the heartbeat to every work, setting expectations and then subverting them, playing with time, moving the audience to its irrepressible beat. Bhairavi Raman’s superb violin is sometimes soulful and sometimes energetic, revelling in its ability to flow between Carnatic and Western classical styles, aware of the delight it gives with every note.
Under it all, the mellow sounds of Indu Balachandran’s veena, an ancient stringed instrument associated with Goddess Saraswati, with knowledge, and with the passing down of tradition through women, courses through every work holding them all together like a bloodline.
The writer Shankari Chandran’s spoken word performances provide a beautifully nuanced understanding of place and obligation – from the intimate to the planetary – of the positions of the diaspora in relation to Indigenous dispossession, drawing attention to the blood of murdered children in the Sri Lankan civil war and in the colonisation of Indigenous peoples in Australia.
The piece ‘Dhūmavathi | Anguish’ is an interesting attempt to sympathise with the plight of Sita. As we are told in the program, “Sita, the heroine of the sacred literary epic ‘Ramayana’, embodies piety and beauty. However after her husband Rama is restored as king after years of exile he questions her chastity from having been kept captive in the demon-king Ravana’s harem. After a further period of exile and again being impugned by Rama, Sita is aghast. This work – composed by Arjunan assisted by lyrical development with Poorvaja and Sydney Hindu priest Nirmaleswara Kurukkal and choreographed by Kersherka – captures Sita’s anguish, a queen cast out by a patriarchal society before she seeks solace in the embrace of Mother Earth.”
‘Dhūmavathi | Anguish’ is a commendable piece that attempts to interrogate popular representations of Sita as the submissive, feminine ideal. This new work honours the tradition of Sita being represented as a woman of strength and self-assurance. The dancer Kersherka performs Sita as a complex persona, sometimes joyful, then hurt by misunderstanding, anguished by the intransigent position of her husband. As we watch Sita hover at the point of despair, an Indian mynah flies across the space, bringing with it the suggestion of portents, or heralds.
A highlight of Bhoomi is the processual, multimedia piece entitled ‘Kamala | Beauty’. Uma Sekhar and Abi Sivaraman enter the performance space to create intricate kolams using rice flour in a dexterous demonstration of the highly skilled labour of women that lies beneath many sacred rituals, and that is part of everyday life in much of South Asia. Shankari Chandran weaves this process of creating a kolam into her story of a Sri Lankan woman who has migrated to Australia. This practice traditionally also has a nurturing aspect to it, as the ants eat the flour, take it to their “underground universe”, as we are told, and the wind takes it elsewhere. ‘Kamala | Beauty’ is a ritualised work, both a reminder and a celebration of the ephemeral nature of this practice. It is infused with Indu Balachandran’s improvisations on the veena. Her notes anchor the piece to this specific place and time, while also lifting the often-invisible labour of women into the public eye.
In ‘Māthangi | Sound’, Indu Balachandran’s mastery of the veena is given its time to shine. Her rendition of a 19th century piece by the famous composer Subbaraya Sastri is jubilant and surprising. She takes us to the edges of the composition, slowing down as if to a false ending, before pulling us back again into the charm of the work. The joy of the musicians, smiling at each other as they perform, held by the spine of the mridangam’s rhythmic phrases, binds this courtyard to multiple performative and cultural histories as it elevates it towards further radical potential. It is a delight to behold.
After the energetic ‘Kāli | Time’ which rises to a crescendo of voice and body and music, we are brought to the short, final work ‘Bāgalamukhi | Stillness’. Arjunan Puveendran’s chanting of Om is resonant and holy. Transcending its associations with repressiveness, with attempts to homogenise the diversity of Hinduism, the Om reaches for that which is inexplicable within us and outside of us. It stretches out to connect our breath to the breath of the universe, taking the profane and making it into something sacred, something that is truly beyond human religion, binding both the artists and the audience with countries and continents, with the earth, with the seasons, in a process of transformation. We are all stilled.
Such a collaborative, buoyant work offers critical perspectives on our contemporary positions as immigrants on Indigenous land while celebrating our inextricable links to our homelands. It also offers new ways of broadening our thinking about artistic merit and excellence in the arts. Over three years, Arjunan Puveendran, Indu Balachandran and their collaborators have crafted unique performative experiences, and the audiences continue to come in droves. We look forward to more radical interrogations in the next set of their innovative and exciting series.
The names of the ten traditional and new works performed as part of Bhoomi: Woman and Earth:
- Tripurasundari | Consciousness
- Bhuvanēshwari | Creation
- Tāra | Protection
- Dhūmavathi | Anguish
- Kamala | Beauty
- Bhairavi | Fear
- Chinnamastā | Self-destruction
- Māthangi | Sound
- Kāli | Time
- Bāgalamukhi | Stillness
Bhoomi: Woman and Earth is the third in a series of annual recitals produced and directed by Arjunan Puveendran and Indu Balachandran as part of the Sydney Sacred Music Festival. It was performed on Sunday, September 22, 2019, at Old Government House, Parramatta.
Images courtesy 8Letters
Roanna Gonsalves’ book The Permanent Resident won the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Multicultural Prize 2018. It is published in India as Sunita De Souza Goes To Sydney. Her ABC RN radio series, On the tip of a billion tongues is a portrayal of contemporary India through its multilingual writers. Roanna is a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Endeavour Award. She is the co-founder co-editor of Southern Crossings. See more at roannagonsalves.