Award-winning choreographer, dancer, actress, social activist, and Co-Director of Darpana Academy of Performing Arts – Mallika Sarabhai believes in finding your heart and following it through thick and thin. By Nichola Marie
An award-winning choreographer and dancer in the Indian classical styles of Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi, Mallika Sarabhai has led Darpana for over four decades. Known the world over for playing Draupadi in Peter Brook’s ‘The Mahabharata’, she has created over 20 hardhitting performances that have gone to audiences from Supreme Court judges, to beedi workers in Kheda, to sugarcane workers in Suriname and sophisticated London audiences at Sadler’s Wells.
She is an activist for education, human rights, and women’s empowerment, and uses the performing arts to raise awareness and advocate change nationally and globally. Some of her critically acclaimed productions include ‘Shakti: The Power Of Women’, ’Sita’s Daughters’, ’Colours Of Her Heart’, ‘V for… Violence’ and ’In Search Of The Goddess’.
It has been 75 years since Darpana was established in 1949 by your parents — legendary dancer Mrinalini Sarabhai and renowned scientist Vikram Sarabhai — to teach, perform, create and propagate Southern classical dance forms and music in North and West India. What are your feelings about this milestone and your journey thus far?
Darpana stopped being only a classical dance institution within 10 years of its birth. Gujarati theatre needed a home in 1959, so the IPTA actor Kailash Pandya persuaded Amma to start a theatre department, that went on to encourage new writing in Gujarati, and the revival of Bhavai as a significant folk form that could be put to use with contemporary themes. In 1963, Meher Contractor, the famous puppeteer who was the President of UNIMA, India, thought that a puppet department that could research old forms and save them, and also create new forms, especially for social issues, was needed in the country, so puppetry began.
I joined Darpana as a professional dancer and Joint Director in late 1976. My interest, after the first few years in establishing myself as a Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi dancer, was in continuing Darpana’s work in using the arts for change and empowerment, so I formed a special department called Darpana for Development. Any artiste within the institution or from outside, with this focal interest, was encouraged and supported. We also started a department to archive and learn folk dance and music, and folk cultures, after a visit to an allegedly remote Dang village, where traditional dances were being danced to Bollywood numbers.
In 2001, when the now Creative Director Yadavan Chandran joined us fresh out of film school, we launched Darpana Communications. It was Papa whose dream it was to use TV for education and empowerment and I had always wanted to pursue this. Over the next few years, D for C created 3,000 hours of television material for Doordarshan, Gujarati, on women’s empowerment, communal harmony, violence and more using all the most popular genres.
Over the last two decades, more and more of our work tends to cut barriers of genre. The focus remains on societal change and on excellence in form and communication. We continue training dance students, not to make dancers out of them, but to understand culture and contemporary society while going through the rigours of classical dance.
So what started out as a dance academy has grown into a crucible for the arts.
Darpana is also intensely personal for you, as you keep your parents’ legacy alive. Leading Darpana over more than four decades, how would you describe its impact on your own life?
I am consumed by it. Everything I do, including my five years touring with Peter Brook, is spent thinking of how Darpana could benefit from my experiences and encounters, how that could be used to benefit thousands and lakhs of people.
Darpana has done incredible work in nurturing talent across dance forms, theatre, music and puppetry, as well as reviving dying art forms. What has been the driving force behind these achievements?
The diversity of our culture is like a magic box, the more you dip your hand into it, the more you find. But many of these have disappeared and continue to disappear because of the ‘Macdonaldisation’ of India. And humanity loses value and beauty. We try to capture the essence, repackage for today, so that forms live and get a new lease. This is as true for crafts as for performing forms.
What role has Yadavan Chandran, Creative Director at Darpana Academy of Performing Arts and the conceiver and director of much-acclaimed performances, played in Darpana’s continued relevance and growth?
Yadavan is brilliant. He is the most creative person I have ever met. And he is meticulous. He will constantly learn and try new things in totally different ways from what the conceiver might have thought of. His ideology is the same as mine. Most of my work and Darpana’s, over the last 20 years, has his imprint. And for the last couple of shows, they are his babies, created in his mind’s eye and made possible because of his doggedness in making things happen.
What are some of the main challenges that Darpana had faced and overcome – and some that continue to pose difficulties?
The biggest challenge has been financial. Darpana is one of the few institutions that has its own repertory company, conservatory and venue that is curated. That makes it a large elephant. The other challenge is that many of the young people I work with like to take shortcuts – our standards of performance are arduous and they don’t want to stay tuned. They quit for lower-hanging fruits like an ad or a music video. No arts institution in the world runs without committed, long-term financial security. And it hasn’t yet become available to us, although we do such cutting-edge work, such socially relevant work, such good work.
Darpana’s latest production to mark its 75th anniversary, ’Meanwhile Elsewhere’, is inspired by Italo Calvino’s literary masterpiece ‘Invisible Cities’. What made this particular piece the choice for Darpana?
I have loved this book for decades. Yadavan discovered it recently. The conversations between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo inspired him to think about cities as metaphors, as memories, as destroyers of relationships and nature, as possible poems of love. His interpretation makes it relevant to many of the questions facing us as a race today. Its layering makes it accessible to many people at many levels. And it brings together artistry and meaning, something we have stood for, for 75 years.
As an award-winning choreographer and dancer, what are the themes that inspire and drive you? How would you describe your own growth as a creative artiste and a human being?
As I was growing up, the sole certainty was that I didn’t want to become a dancer. Too much hard work. And then at 22, I had a Eureka moment. Even when I started dancing professionally, I felt I was the perfect mitti for a creator, not a creator myself. Amma and I worked like a dream together. She would start a movement and I would complete it. Then I spent five years playing Draupadi. I saw the huge impact of my interpretation of the woman on audiences all over the world. I came out having the desperate need to talk, through my art, of things that I really wanted to speak about. Not the deities, but about how we treat human beings, nature, other species. How wrong so many things were in our world. How unjust and cruel were our ways and systems. I tried getting writers to write and failed. So a close colleague forced me to become a writer, a creator. I have been doing that over the years. 10 years ago, I started writing contemporary compositions for Bharatanatyam, talking about violence, the destruction of the environment, what a young person today might pray to Krishna with, and more. There are fecund periods and fallow periods. I find I can create when I feel strongly about an injustice or a rape plus murder or a mob lynching, or a piece of music!
As an activist for education, human rights, and women’s empowerment, how do you use the performing arts to raise awareness and advocate change nationally and globally?
The arts were traditionally used to educate people, give them values, teach them right from wrong. Dance, music, theatre; long before they became entertainment. They are an incredibly persuasive language that break through the walls of prejudice we build around ourselves, walls of self-protection and fear. If I were to go to a men’s college and give them a lecture about rape and ‘eve teasing’, they would yawn and chatter. If I have a compelling performance, they will watch, and inadvertently something will percolate into their consciousness. Unfortunately, many NGOs use the arts in an awful way to promote their message – besur music, bad theatre. We always say that the performance needs to be good enough to keep b*ms on seats!
How involved are your children in Darpana?
Revanta and Anahita both trained as Bharatanatyam and Contemporary dancers and actors. Revanta became a dancer and now does films, dancing occasionally. Anahita had the makings of an extraordinary dancer but injured her back – that brought that to a stop. She is a gay rights activist. I don’t think either is interested in running or being involved with Darpana. And I happened to come in and make it my life’s work. It is not a family institution – or at least it doesn’t have to be. Yes, having a mother and daughter run it for 75 years can be daunting and make it seem like that. In a fast-disintegrating world, I am sure someone will appear to run it if it needs to be run.
What would be your advice to youngsters today?
Find your heart. Follow it, through thick and thin, hardship and fear. And smell the flowers every day. The real joys of life are in giving and loving, not in collecting and amassing.
