Poverty, Dance, and Private/Public Space
Kolkata, West Bengal, India
I.
The first thing you see in Calcutta is all the extra people. The metropolitan area is saturated, and our neighborhood has the same population as my flat-mate’s native country.* Poverty in Calcutta is not relegated solely to some overflowing, putrid slum, where life is lived in super-saturated color and overwhelming stench and the chickens waddle in open sewers, past the pattering feet of kids (the goat variety as well as the human). Poverty is camped out on the sidewalk – street children, encased in a permanent grease-paint smear and oversized cotton shifts, sleep in front of the glass-case windows of the cafes, and whole semi-permanent colonies are erected, tents with wooden poles and sleeping mats and charcoal stoves boiling with sambar in the permanently thick, dusky evening light.
The first thing you learn to do in Calcutta is to render the extra people invisible. To see every detail – to acknowledge the sludge you are breathing and the sleeping family you’re stepping around on the way home from dinner, the young men gathered on corners in loose white tanks and acid-stained jeans chattering and staring, the old men in lungis lounging, the women sweeping the gutters as you step out of the auto on the way to work – is to live in a constant state of complete overwhelm. To see the details behind the sidewalk melee – the colonial buildings, the balustrades, the peeling walls in a million colors (some mold, some paint), the cross-legged vendor in his shop and the marble dais separating a department store from the street – you have to see past an initial, incredibly personal level, past private lives being lived in a public space; you have to see through people’s lives and out the other side, as if the people living them weren’t there.
This is an incredibly disturbing exercise. It is dehumanizing – an act of erasing – and in the process you often learn how to erase yourself, how to fade to the background as much as your own appearance will allow (and, admittedly, my appearance doesn’t allow much).
II.
Staring is accorded a different status in India. It may be a reflection of the high value placed on separation between public and private combined with the utter lack of just that, or it may come from a basic difference in the concept of an individual… but people stare, unabashedly and calmly, and often without comment, with a similar quizzical-less look at things both familiar and strange. As the world around me stares, I’ve started to stare back, mirroring the blankly curious looks in a profoundly unconscious and disturbing way.
III.
There’s a moment when the angle of your shoulder blades align, a moment when you’re lifted unexpectedly and smoothly, when the weight of your entire body is transferred in an instant – and you trade. There’s a moment when I can speak easily, despite a lack of common languages, when hands will follow mine on the floor, when we can color one another in. After all the erasing, the disappearing, the fading – the honest attempts to render myself invisible to escape the wondrous stares and to render the others invisible to escape the horror of comparing the resources used to create my comforts with their concrete mattresses – that moment of recognition, a moment on a roof-top dance studio under metal and thatch and hanging Rajasthani lanterns, under a moon and a breeze and beside tree-tops, re-creates the recently transparent surfaces, outlines bodies and then promptly colors outside the lines.
In a country where public touch is strictly of the same-sex variety, watching a pile of black spandex move feels radical in and of itself. To be part of the pile, exposed and entirely protected from the eyes that come later on the bus and in the flood-lit late-night streets, is sublimely liberating – liberating enough to create an internal peace which, mixed with equal parts exhaustion and hunger, floats me through those empty roads, rocking wildly against muted strangers in a steel auto-rickshaw, back-bone pattering against the wooden rails of an ancient bus bench, feet stumbling over the sleeping children on the corner outside my house. It is enough to float me home to the calm sea-green light of my porch, to the high ceilings and rocking fans of my own museum, where invisibility and want can be left at the doorstep, where outlines can be created and colored outside of and details can be put on display for discussion over dinner.
*The approximate population of both Ballygunge and Panama is 3 million.
Kolkata, West Bengal, India
I.
The first thing you see in Calcutta is all the extra people. The metropolitan area is saturated, and our neighborhood has the same population as my flat-mate’s native country.* Poverty in Calcutta is not relegated solely to some overflowing, putrid slum, where life is lived in super-saturated color and overwhelming stench and the chickens waddle in open sewers, past the pattering feet of kids (the goat variety as well as the human). Poverty is camped out on the sidewalk – street children, encased in a permanent grease-paint smear and oversized cotton shifts, sleep in front of the glass-case windows of the cafes, and whole semi-permanent colonies are erected, tents with wooden poles and sleeping mats and charcoal stoves boiling with sambar in the permanently thick, dusky evening light.
The first thing you learn to do in Calcutta is to render the extra people invisible. To see every detail – to acknowledge the sludge you are breathing and the sleeping family you’re stepping around on the way home from dinner, the young men gathered on corners in loose white tanks and acid-stained jeans chattering and staring, the old men in lungis lounging, the women sweeping the gutters as you step out of the auto on the way to work – is to live in a constant state of complete overwhelm. To see the details behind the sidewalk melee – the colonial buildings, the balustrades, the peeling walls in a million colors (some mold, some paint), the cross-legged vendor in his shop and the marble dais separating a department store from the street – you have to see past an initial, incredibly personal level, past private lives being lived in a public space; you have to see through people’s lives and out the other side, as if the people living them weren’t there.
This is an incredibly disturbing exercise. It is dehumanizing – an act of erasing – and in the process you often learn how to erase yourself, how to fade to the background as much as your own appearance will allow (and, admittedly, my appearance doesn’t allow much).
II.
Staring is accorded a different status in India. It may be a reflection of the high value placed on separation between public and private combined with the utter lack of just that, or it may come from a basic difference in the concept of an individual… but people stare, unabashedly and calmly, and often without comment, with a similar quizzical-less look at things both familiar and strange. As the world around me stares, I’ve started to stare back, mirroring the blankly curious looks in a profoundly unconscious and disturbing way.
III.
There’s a moment when the angle of your shoulder blades align, a moment when you’re lifted unexpectedly and smoothly, when the weight of your entire body is transferred in an instant – and you trade. There’s a moment when I can speak easily, despite a lack of common languages, when hands will follow mine on the floor, when we can color one another in. After all the erasing, the disappearing, the fading – the honest attempts to render myself invisible to escape the wondrous stares and to render the others invisible to escape the horror of comparing the resources used to create my comforts with their concrete mattresses – that moment of recognition, a moment on a roof-top dance studio under metal and thatch and hanging Rajasthani lanterns, under a moon and a breeze and beside tree-tops, re-creates the recently transparent surfaces, outlines bodies and then promptly colors outside the lines.
In a country where public touch is strictly of the same-sex variety, watching a pile of black spandex move feels radical in and of itself. To be part of the pile, exposed and entirely protected from the eyes that come later on the bus and in the flood-lit late-night streets, is sublimely liberating – liberating enough to create an internal peace which, mixed with equal parts exhaustion and hunger, floats me through those empty roads, rocking wildly against muted strangers in a steel auto-rickshaw, back-bone pattering against the wooden rails of an ancient bus bench, feet stumbling over the sleeping children on the corner outside my house. It is enough to float me home to the calm sea-green light of my porch, to the high ceilings and rocking fans of my own museum, where invisibility and want can be left at the doorstep, where outlines can be created and colored outside of and details can be put on display for discussion over dinner.
*The approximate population of both Ballygunge and Panama is 3 million.
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