Tess for Our Times

She says the piece was personal in many ways. “As a woman, I had no mentor and struggled a lot. I was a single mother until a few months ago and it was not easy for me to pursue dance. I could relate to Tess,” adds Warrier, whose piece was also a tribute to the 125th year of the publication of Hardy’s classic.

When Warrier began working on the piece some months ago, the idea, she says, was to go beyond her comfort zone. “If you are interpreting Karna, Krishna and Arjuna, you have the gestures and the body language that have been taught in the repertoire, which is entirely Indian and inherent in the dance form. But, to understand and express something which is from a different tradition, which has a different cultural and political background, one needs to enrich one’s vocabulary, or work on it in a different way. I was interpreting the characters that were not typical to Indian literature,” says Warrier. Since Bharatanatyam is a broad-based dance form, Warrier could fill the gaps that arose because of the nature of writing which isn’t in poetry format. “It’s prose. It’s not like working on a Thyagaraja composition or Dikshitar composition, which are lyrical. To fill the gap, you need to find the emotional rhythm of the character,” says Warrier

Warrier is a popular name in Kerala because of her Doordarshan shows and her breakfast show on Asianet titled Suprabhatham, which she credits to her “brilliant command over Malayalam”. Born and raised in Thiruvananthapuram, Warrier first trained in Kerala Natanam because Bharatanatyam came to South Kerala much later. She had already trained in Carnatic classical, and later learnt Bharatanatyam from Guru V Mythili and Guru Jayanthi Subramaiam. Beginning with traditional Bharatanatyam, Warrier decided to go beyond the traditional compositions to expand the horizon. “It depends on how you define tradition. Traditional is the technique that you understand and learn. It becomes your language and idiom, a way of life and doesn’t leave you. With that in mind you want to explore a series of characters who do not belong to the idiom,” says Warrier.

Her work is sometimes called “a dance form full of postures”, which she finds disturbing. “It is not full of postures, I tell people, though it has become like that. If a dance reminds you of the technique, it’s not art. Real art transcends the technique and connects with the audience as an experience. That is what we need to strive for,” says Warrier.