Flying in the face of all precedent

Dancer-choreographer Joshinder Chaggar takes up a tour of 100 solo shows titled ‘She Flies with the Swallows’.

KARACHI:

There is no gainsaying that choreographer Joshinder Chaggar is one of the most distinct and unique artistes to hail from Pakistan. Chaggar has proven her mettle with her stints across the world. Since August 14 last year, she has embarked upon a tour of 100 solo shows titled ‘She Flies with the Swallows’, which comprises 20-minute performances and is followed by a question-and-answer session with the audiences.

She says that these shows are an important part of her personal journey and will pave the way for her growth as a dancer. “With this solo show, I spend countless hours rehearsing and changing the choreography over and over again,” she tells The Express Tribune. “My stamina, flexibility, balance and sharpness were quite out of sync before, but now I feel they are coming together,” she adds.



Chaggar shares that before she began the performances, she feared she had reached a point of stagnation in terms of her dance technique. She laments that this has been due to the lack of full-fledged dance teachers who would ‘push’ and ‘test’ her.

“And when I work with a group of dancers, all my time is devoted to teaching them and then there is no time or strength left to work on myself.”

Chaggar says, her latest series of dance performances is, by far, the “most experimental show” she has ever done. An interesting aspect of the shows is that Chaggar will perform without the aid of music. Commenting on where she derived this unorthodox idea from, she says, “I’m not sure where this idea came from. But it has been in my heart for a few years.”

“Now that I have been living with it since August and have performed it numerous times, I feel like it’s the most natural and obvious choice.”

The dancer-choreographer elaborates that she had always been fascinated by pure movement but it was only after reading Isadora Duncan’s autobiography, in which she stated, “I don’t need music to dance. The music is inside me,” that she decided to follow her heart and perform without music.

She clarifies that she has not been performing the series in an attempt to encourage other people to pursue dance as a form of art or to spread awareness about interpretive dance. “Frankly, I’m not trying to encourage anyone to pursue my type of art. But I do like to encourage people to follow whatever it is that is their calling,” she holds. “There is limited exposure of experimental work in Pakistan and least of all, in dance. So, doing something that breaks your limitations of the possibilities of performance at schools is great exposure for these young minds, says Chaggar, who is credited with choreographing the Pakistani film Good Morning Karachi.



Chaggar is hopeful that the emergence of the local film industry may lead to the development of a unique Pakistani style of dance. But for that, she feels, the industry would have to diverge from following Bollywood’s suit. “I have absolutely nothing against Bollywood. I used to teach Bollywood dance.

Bollywood knows what it is and produces interesting dance pieces. Look at the choreography in the film Yuva,” she says. “But Pakistani films are fixated on trying to copy the ‘Bollywood’ dance formula instead of exploring original free ways of expressing themselves. Pakistan has 44 local folk styles and there is so much that could be explored,” adds Chaggar.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 2^nd,  2015.

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