Pushing societal boundaries

Dancer, performer and UCLA student Sheetal Gandhi once went a year without shampoo. Standing in a supermarket aisle, she found herself despairingly confounded by a bottomless variety of choices in the product.

“It’s almost like we have too many choices. We have all this freedom that can trap us,” Gandhi, a graduate student in the department of World Arts and Cultures, explained.

This Friday and Saturday, Gandhi joins fellow WAC student Krenly Guzman in exploring the themes of confinement and release through the lenses of each dancer’s culture.

Gandhi and Guzman conceived the prototypes for the evening’s dances while participating in “Microscopic Histories,” WAC’s showcase last spring of graduate dance students. Each artist intended to expand upon his or her dance in a solo performance but decided on a dual performance when they realized that the dances complemented each other in subject matter.

“Sheetal Gandhi and Krenly Guzman in Concert” combines Bahu-Beti-Biwi (which translates to “Daughter-in-law-Daughter-Wife”), Gandhi’s North Indian-influenced work, and Guzman’s “Reclaiming the Sacred,” a representation of his past experience with Santeria.

Improved from the year before, the dances feature a variety of changes. The focus of Guzman’s dance has shifted from the effect of technology to a phenomenon he terms “gender fluidity.” Guzman deconstructs gender through a series of body codes, specific movements that would be identifiable by members of a culture in order to explore the position of women and homosexuals in Santeria.

Guzman says that an American audience would recognize crossing of the legs as a feminine body code. The challenge has been translating messages based on gender codes that would be recognized in Cuba to an American audience that does not share the same frame of reference.

“I’m looking at how these codes can create resistance, in both breaking free or using them to gain power within the space. What’s been very difficult for me is establishing the codes for my audience,” he said.

“How do I decode this for my audience and still keep the integrity of my art?”

Guzman attempts to bridge the gap by first showing the audience an action and then attaching a gender to it.

He and the seven other dancers in the piece create resistance between female and homosexual practitioners of Santeria and the religion itself by breaking limitations against the minorities within the practice. Guzman, a practitioner of Santeria until the age of 16, says that Santeria has become much less tolerant of females and homosexuals over time, especially following incorporation of Christian traditions into the Afro-Carribbean religion.

“We are constantly fighting against each other instead of embracing each other’s beliefs and saying, “˜I can learn to respect yours if you can learn to respect mine.’ I think that’s what this piece does. We work within the environment and show how one can succeed within the environment,” said Guzman.

Guzman hopes to assuage gender stereotypes by using possession in Santeria rituals as a metaphor.

“How do I surrender my body without any limitations? As a male, how can I surrender my body to a female without having these limitations of, “˜I am the man! I am the conquering hierarchy here!’ But we can come to terms here with this agreement: that it is a give-or-take here. It is not a passive surrendering.”

Guzman explains that Gandhi takes a more theatrical approach to exposing limitations and breaking free from them. “I’m more about the different ways of exploring the body without creating characters. It’s about the individual experiencing something within the space,” he said.

“She creates characters that the audience can see.”

The characters of Gandhi’s narrative collectively shape a commentary on the restrictions placed upon Indian women. The choreographer combines her study of Indian folklore and personal experiences with the traditional dance form Kathak to create a series of characters: mothers, daughters, aunts and herself.

“In a class on improvisation that I was taking, they said (to) think of a person in your life and imagine them larger than life, really embody them as if they were a character in a mythological story. So I started to think of this auntie of mine. Her head never stops moving, and it’s like a bird, almost,” she said.

“The element that I began to explore was not just “˜What is the character?’ but “˜What is the transition from one character to the next and why does one character slip into the next character?'”

The seamless stream of characters represent a struggle of desires and unfulfilled, longing notions that Gandhi says are inherited by each generation of women.

“I’ve had so many of these women, my cousins or aunties that have been married, pull me behind closed doors and express to me what they feel like they’re lost or what they’re struggling with or this feeling of being trapped, yet knowing full well that their own mothers said, “˜Be prepared to suffer for five years and then you’ll accept.'”

Elizabeth Terschuur, production assistant to the show and graduate choreography student, believes that culture is the key to engaging the audience.

“You don’t even realize time has passed and you’ve been learning about a different culture, learning about it through your senses, through stories and visuals, and you come away with a new understanding,” she said.

Gandhi hopes that through her culture and that of Guzman, audience members will learn to question the restrictions in their own lives.

“It doesn’t matter so much to me what they take from it but that they’re moved and they sort of feel like they’ve entered a space and a moment where they felt part of something larger, … something that makes them remember their own grandmother or makes them think about people in that part of the world that are experiencing a state of confinement and empathizing,” she said.

“(The goal is) building compassion and empathy and resonance and making people think, not giving people all the answers but raising questions that people will want to answer for themselves.”