In 1992, American choreographer Jonathan Hollander was in India on a Fulbright Award and working with students of the National Institute of Design (NID) to showcase their fashion design collections. A 19-year-old boy handed him a cassette. “That’s where I first heard raag Durga rendered by Rajan-Sajan Mishra,” says Hollander. The Delhi-based classical vocalists’ work exhilarated, uplifted and spoke to Hollander deeply and, like words one never forgets, it fuelled a dance piece, titled Shakti: A Return to the Source, more than 20 years later. To his group of dancers, from classical ballet and modern dance backgrounds, Hollander added a Bharatanatyam exponent, Unnath Hassan Rathnaraju, and let their combined experiences render the music of the Mishra brothers. The piece was brought to Delhi, Mumbai and a few other Indian cities by US Department of State and ICCR recently. Shakti isn’t about a deity, insists Hollander, but his ode to the raga, whose sequence of notes had woven into his soul. The centrepiece of the performance became three duets in which it is the woman dancer who initiates the movements and controls what happens. This could be reflective of the Women’s March in the US — except that Shakti was created in 2016 when #TimesUp and #MeToo were still in the future. One of the duets is between Rathnaraju and an American dancer, giving the image of an Indian man being led by an American woman a whole new subtext. “My mother was a concert pianist, so music is a constant connector for me,” says Hollander. His older sister played the clarinet and his younger sister the flute. His brother played the cello, so Hollander’s house was full of music. “I would do well but I never studied. I liked it when I mastered something big but the work to get there, I just didn’t have the patience for. I was a young person in a hurry,” he says. It was when he formally trained in dance that Hollander discovered that he “loved the hard work and this differentiated from anything I had ever done in my life”. Hollander is among the leading choreographers in the world and his Battery Dance Company, named after the neighbourhood of the World Trade Centre in Lower Manhattan, where it was set up more than 40 years ago, is well-known for artistic excellence. Hollander has a repertoire of 75 works and his present preoccupations include “Combating Islamophobia Through Dance and Spoken Word”. But, it is his works on Indian themes that represent Hollander’s abiding interest in the country he visited on scholarship as a teenager. Among these is Songs of Tagore in 1995, marking the first time that a Western choreographer had created dances to Rabindra Sangeet. Layapriya (1998), Sanskrit for “one who loves rhythm”, was moulded from Indian movement patterns. “If we could touch audiences the way I was touched by music, it would be incredible.”
