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KV oil lamps and lighting technologies on global dance stages by Dr Avanthi Meduri
Kim’s provocation is inspiring. It enabled me to think about my own personal crisis generated around the KV oil light and stage light, which I perceived within a binary framework of Indian tradition versus Western modernity in the early 1980s.
If the KV oil light represented the god-time of Indian modernity for me, the proscenium stage light, emanating from Edison’s discovery of the incandescent light bulb, belonged to the time of Western modernity. Both lights co-existed, paradoxically, on the Indian proscenium since the time of the Indian national dance revival in the 1930s, the history of which I provide in my historical exposition following this introduction. It is the juxtapositioning of both lights that created a theatrical crisis for me in the 1980s and resulted in a breakdown of sorts that changed my life irrevocably.
Although I did not see my theatrical crisis as a nervous breakdown, I knew it was something that I could neither deny nor ignore. I thus decided to take a break from dancing–something I had been doing since the age of three and with view to think about god and stage lights, historically, philosophically and aesthetically. While the soft, natural god-light emanating from the oil lamp created hallows around me and imbued me with depth, the stage light objectified, flattened and hollowed my identity both as a woman and dancer. I wanted to choose the ‘light’ that would work best for me as a woman dancer. But to do this I had to pause, to cease dancing on the dance proscenium and rethink my life from outside this institution. I was not to know then that my theatrical crisis would remain as a trace and haunt my life as a dancer-scholar for decades and long after the passing of the immediate crisis.
To embark on this conversation with light, I ended my arranged marriage, packed my KV lamp, dancing bells and icon of Siva in my travelling suitcase and left for the US. I enrolled in a Masters programme in Austin Texas in 1984, where I created my first contemporary dance theatre choreography entitled Matsya (Fish). The work theatricalized my impossible and hallucinatory desire for a god who promised to come but never did: so many times we called to you, Matysa, Oh Matsya!
In 1988, I enrolled in the PhD programme in the Tisch School of Arts at NYU and embarked on my doctoral research, which was focussed on devadasis (temple dancers), god, the icon of Siva/Nataraja, colonial and Indian modernity, and how these master-narratives enabled the historic transformation and modernization of Sadir into Bharatanatyam through the long period of colonial rule ending with decolonization in the1950s (Meduri 1996).
In my first ever academic publication entitled ‘Bharatanatyam: What are You?’ which has seen several reprints, I wrote a script for my inaugural theatrical crisis, spoke about god and the question of choice in a woman’s life, but I could not speak about the trauma caused by the doubled lights because the essay was not about myself, but the postcolonial field of performance that I wished to interrogate (Meduri 1988).
In my doctoral thesis (1996), I alluded to the trauma of the doubled lights, but could not provide detail because ‘I’ was not the subject of my dissertation. I had, besides, been transformed myself, into a hyphenated subject, namely, a dancer-scholar immediately after the completion of my dissertation in 1996.
My split identity was consolidated, legally, when I received my Green Card under the American O-1a Visa category reserved for Aliens of Extraordinary Achievements and Abilities in 1996. Although the O-1a visa enabled me to live and work in the US, albeit under the new splitting category of the dancer-scholar, it also disempowered me as I could not speak about my original trauma with the doubled lights. Not only was I estranged from the life of a professional dancer, but my peers perceived me as being more of a scholar than a dancer. This was unfortunate as I myself lived and worked in the liminal place of the hyphen.
In 1996, I adapted my doctoral thesis into a bilingual play, entitled, GoD has Changed His Name, translating my role as dancer-scholar into performance.The image below captures my hyphenated subjectivity, theatrically.