Interview #142—Nithya Nagarajan
by Sonia Nair
Nithya Nagarajan is an artist and curator whose practice adopts movement as a system of inquiry into the sacred, the sensual and the decolonial. Her performance work affects sensory perceptions of the witness through a collaborative process of devising, underpinned by a strong feminist sensibility.
I know you’ve worked in the creative sectors here in Australia and the UK, but also lived and worked in India. How has it differed working in the Western contexts of Australia and the UK compared to the country you grew up in?
Unlike in India, the arts sector in the West is structured, organised, funded and governed by top-heavy structures. These can be empowering in a variety of ways—ensuring economic means for artists, protecting (to a certain degree) rights of artists and arts workers, and fostering an ecology. But, it can also mean we lose sight of the intrinsic value of art as a life-force.
I don’t want to romanticise what is a very bleak situation for artists on the ground in India, particularly at this moment in time where freedom of expression is losing the battle to state surveillance. But I do want to point out that this lack of bureaucracy and regulation has also allowed for urgent and timely work coming out of the margins, an organic evolution of non-hierarchical working models, active participation in democracy and dissent, and an agility afforded by moving away from the reliance on governance and funding structures as we know them here. A lot of artists I admire deeply in India have also paused their practice during this period to steep themselves in relief work: mobilising to organise the delivery of food and hygiene products to ‘migrant’ labourers, minimising the effects of the digital divide on the education system, and finding means of income and wealth distribution to hereditary and folk practitioners whose work would officially be classified as ‘craft’, if at all.
I believe there is a lot for us to learn from looking at models in the Global South. Grassroots literacy movements like The Community Library Project, catering to over 4,000 children and adults, 7 days a week in 3 zones of the country’s capital in Delhi, comes to mind as a community-driven, volunteer-run example reshaping our collective understanding of reading as inquiry. Another example are night-long Kattaikkuttu performances in rural, agrarian Tamil Nadu where the village population gather once a month and donate a gold coin to commission the performer, thereby bypassing formalistic and time-tested organisational models.
Equally, we have a lot to share from here – particularly knowledge generated by our First Nations custodians of culture on protocols of working with communities, cultural restoration through ceremonial practice, and self-determined processes (with suitable permissions and preferably directly from the source). Similarly, our exemplary and under-funded TYA (Theatre for Young Audiences) sector contains showcases of global best practice. Polyglot, St Martins, Sensorium, Slingsby and Barking Gecko come to mind as just a fraction of the organisations putting their money where their mouth is in this space. I feel deeply excited by the generative possibilities of these meeting points.
When did you first become a creative producer in Australia?
My very first project in Australia a few months into living here in 2012 was a grassroots, self-produced evening of performance art with fellow artists (mostly mates) at Loop Bar. It was a fun, no-strings-attached-type evening and I genuinely miss the times I took it all less seriously!
In this ArtsHub piece, you skewer mainstream performing arts institutions in Australia, where the “dialogue around diversity automatically anchors whiteness at its epicentre”. What are the pernicious ways these institutions limit the imaginations and practices of artists of colour, and what exciting countercultural movements have you seen arise in response to this?
I do not believe that institutions can limit the imaginations and practices of artists of colour. This is all too powerful a thing and not even extractive capitalism, institutional whiteness and racist social structures have managed to undermine the creative and collective strength of artists at the margins. But, they can (and do) flex their muscle to limit entry, opportunity, access, learning and ascension in these spaces. They do this in not so subtle ways: programming white content again and again and again and again, saying there are ‘not enough’ First Nations and/or POC artists or their work ‘is not of a certain standard’ (whose standard anyway?), and excluding POC artists from delegations and/or marketplaces so they don’t access the opportunity to pitch their work for presentation and touring. Arts institutions also do this in more subtle ways: employing only one POC and often without adequate support structures in place so the power dynamic remains strong and centralised, engaging all-white decision-making panels in funding and selection processes, and only programming work that fulfils exoticising tropes of otherness.
The demystification of the arts ecology requires an intersection of privileges. In sum, you are either an insider or an outsider. And if you are an outsider, the structure wants you to ‘pay your dues’ to become an insider. But, this performative allyship has to die as nobody on the margins wants to be an insider anymore, and so the structures have to shift from within their core to remain viable and relevant. We see exciting countercultural movements in the ethos of collectives both established, like Unbound, proppaNOW, eleven as well as emerging collectives like this mob, New Wayfinders, and Hyphenated, some of whom traverse both the ARI and institutional space. There are alternative pedagogies, syncretic structures and long-distance solidarities nourished sustainably in the seeding of these models, and they are often artist-led, experimental and future-focused. The industry would do itself a great deal of good to pay close attention.
You write in the same piece—
‘There is no denying that curators automatically operate as cultural gatekeepers. And as a cultural gatekeeper, my only commitment has been to throw open the floodgates of elite institutions.’
How have you thrown open these floodgates, and have you faced any opposition in the process?
With a great deal of strategy (and energy), a little bit of straight-talking, and a willingness to be wrong rather than do nothing at all. The opposition you face is never overt in these spaces, but always covert. In some ways, this is the nuance that is hardest to navigate within our sector. I prefer my racists, well, racist. As an industry, we largely lean to the left and engage with the big political conversations of our time. There is critical rigour and discourse in our everyday sphere. We create, collaborate, exhibit and tour. We spend a lot of time talking about our practices and processes. We mobilise to advocate for our (rightful) place in civic society. We are genuinely excited by ideas, new and old. These are all things I can get behind. Yet, the powers to be in these spaces remain White and I have a much harder time getting behind that. Asking me where to buy desi sweets on harmony day does not constitute inclusion. As a dear friend once put it, sometimes it feels like ‘gulab jamun gate’.
I believe there is a lot for us to learn from looking at models in the Global South.
You’re passionate about building non-traditional arts spaces and audiences for dialogue, discourse and democracy—whether it’s through your curatorial work or through your personal work. What are spaces you’ve created and/or events you’ve curated that you’re most proud of?
When I worked for NIDA, we partnered with Asian-Australian lit magazine Peril to present a night of spoken word poetry, beginning at the NIDA studios in Melbourne that then traced its way through the Waiting for Godot cafe, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Malthouse Theatre and multiple spaces at Testing Grounds in Southbank. The brilliant lineup of poets Ellen Van Neerven, Bella Li, Raina Peterson, Manisha Anjali, Evelyn Araluen and Abdulrahman Hammoud performed site-specific verses in a collective placemaking experience that the audiences traversed through, before sharing time-space around a bonfire. Designing this event with Peril Editor Mindy Gill was a real treat, and we had a fabulous turnout despite torrential rain!
This event sat within a broader suite of programs called NIDAnights, each presented in partnership with a local organisation/collective and which looked at alternate forms of gathering and community, featuring predominantly First Nations and/or CALD artists. I was really proud of this annual series as it was an important personal lesson in effective intervention from within the institution. Admittedly, I have grown much more suspect of institutions and their conceptual frameworks since.
You seamlessly juggle being a dancer, performance maker, cultural researcher, curator and arts activist. Is there a common underlying thread informing your approach to each practice, and how do these practices feed off and into each other?
I personally feel these arbitrary classifications are just an outcome of the limitations of language, not a truism.
I wanted to switch tact and talk about your dancing practice. You mention that movement is a system of inquiry, and that you first learned about movement on a political level as a migrant, but also in a personal way through your training as a Bharatanatyam dancer. How has your understanding of Bharatanatyam and your dance practice changed over the decades?
This is a real big question and any answer I provide to this will be rushed and superficial at best given the space we have in this interview. But, in sum, Bharatanatyam is an appropriated art form. The form was appropriated by the Brahmins or the forward caste community in India during colonial rule from the hands of the dancing courtesan communities, who occupied oppressed caste-class hierarchies in the social fabric of the subcontinent. The ‘Sanskritisation’ or ‘sanitisation’ of the appropriated form played out in a number of ways: violent exclusion of hereditary practitioners from their own tradition(s), removal of eros from the repertoire, a pedagogical blueprint modelled on ballet, framing of the form as a ‘rite of passage’ for young women, and conflation of Vedic notions of purity and devotion with Indian nationalism, to name just a handful. Artists and vocal advocates with hereditary lineages like Nrithya Pillai (Isai Vellalar community) and Yashoda Thakore (Kalavantalu community) speak articulately on the multiplicity of hereditary perspectives tied to Indian classical dance forms, and I believe it is important for young practitioners to listen and learn from their labour.
This is further problematised in the diaspora where the practice of the form (India’s biggest cultural export after Bollywood) retains structures of caste-class dominance that have romanticised intersections with immigrant nostalgia. There is a cognitive dissonance and we must move past our own complacency in understanding how we are implicated in this violence. In the West, we often think in binaries but if the dancing diaspora move beyond the victim-oppressor bind, we can begin to unpack how we are implicated in this violence and then what we might do from our positionality toward reparation, solidarity-building and contemporary practice. I don’t have any answers as yet, neither do I think they should be self-derived but I’m sitting with some of these questions at the moment.
We in the diaspora cannot stand in solidarity with Bla(c)k lives here and in the US, and claim our marginalisation as POC on this land, but simultaneously refuse to examine our own implications when the pyramid is inverted and we find ourselves at its crown.
As a practitioner, I have a love-hate relationship with Bharatanatyam. Being in the studio with my Guru Krishnakumari Narendran in Chennai is my happy place. I make sense of the world through multisensorial impulses and I’m interested in movement – in the broadest sense of the term – as a way of seeing.
What have you been working on recently?
I had the privilege of sharing a work in progress called Sacred Grooves for Secular Spaces with artists and faith leaders at MPavilion one sunset just before Australia went into its first lockdown. When I meditated upon the work as a ‘radical congregation of hope’, little did I know what power and potency such spaces would hold for us on the other side of this new normal. Sacred Grooves for Secular Spaces began as an intimate prayer and culminated in a collective ritual. In an age when religion is both ammunition and shield, it dared to ask whether a temporary structure can offer refuge.
I’m also currently co-devising a new intercultural work Of Stubborn Songs and Unequal Wars with theatre-maker Liv Satchell, sound artist Marco Cher-Gibard and lens-based artist Hilo Mur, produced by absolute legend Zainab Syed for Adhocracy. The one woman-show and living repository of research explores domestic violence, the micro-personal and macro-political landscapes of female bodies, and women’s cultural resistance practices.
Finally, I’m working with First Nations performance/ceremonial artist Jacob Boehme and Asian-Australian video/sculpture artist Kalanjay Dhir on a body of work that grapples with the complexity of archiving the embodied wisdom and psychosomatic practices of Elders in martial, meditative and movement traditions across Australia, South Asia and the South Asian diaspora.
I’m also in creative producing conversations with some shapeshifting festivals on work I cannot disclose much about just yet, and constitute the fifth of a newly formed collective of South Asian artists pan-Australia where we focus our efforts on creating safe spaces for peer exchange, knowledge sharing and coalition building.
In my day job, I work in international engagement across South and Southeast Asia to build reciprocal and multilateral programs and exchanges anchored in an artist-centric strategy. In a COVID-world, my remit can sometimes feel like speculative fiction.
‘We in the diaspora cannot stand in solidarity with Bla(c)k lives here and in the US, and claim our marginalisation as POC on this land, but simultaneously refuse to examine our own implications when the pyramid is inverted and we find ourselves at its crown.’
Do you have any advice for emerging dancers, curators or performance-makers?
Let your anger not become your practice. Rage is a powerful tool to subvert dominant systems and can be an excellent instrument in the process of making, so allow it to inform your practice in myriad ways. But if your anger becomes the entirety of your practice, your practice will only exist in relation to that injustice - in which case, they’ve already won.
Who are you listening to?
I’m a sucker for Pakistani sufi music. Abida Parveen, Sain Zahoor, Rahat Fateh Ali Khan are always on loop at home, particularly when I’m cooking. I find so much comfort in their music and I genuinely consider us lucky to be alive at the same time as some of these phenomenal spiritual seekers and Thumri, Khyal, Qawwali and Ghazal musicians. I am still gutted to have missed Abida Ji in the flesh when she performed at Arts Centre Melbourne for Asia TOPA this year. As many of these forms use broadly recognisable raags (melodic frameworks) and taals (rhythmic systems) to most classically trained musicians and dancers, the transcendental quality of their riyaaz (practice) enjoys broad appeal in the subcontinent. It blows my mind that Sain Zahoor produced his first record in 2006, well into his 60s, even though he was actively singing in Sufi shrines across Pakistan from the age of five. It’s a real reminder of how little global recognition or mainstream validation has to do with actual genius, and how exclusive the structures we’ve built for ourselves in the arts truly are.
I have also been listening to the FB and insta lives of Equality Labs (an Ambedkarite progressive South-Asian power building organisation that works in a variety of ground-up ways), the digital releases of Serendipity Arts Festival in India (through their how-to series, which I think has been curated brilliantly!) and the Tender podcast by Madison Griffiths – a podcast about what happens when women leave abusive relationships.
What are you reading?
I am reading Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed, Low by Jeet Thayil, and familiarising myself with the life work of Judge Victoria Pratt and her contributions on alternative sentencing for juveniles and adults, as well as restorative justice. She treats every defendant with respect and care, and hands out introspective essays as alternatives to jail time!
How do you practise self-care?
I practise self-care, particularly during these very strange times, through some weekly rituals. As much as possible, I attend these virtual group writing sessions called The Writer’s Army, hosted in Australia by artists Liv Satchell and Emma Valente, where artists from different walks of life write together in what they call ‘a silent demi-communal activity’. It is excellent for accountability to the self. I also attend group therapy sessions with artists and arts workers from India through these circles of resilience birthed by Indian dancer, choreographer, comrade and COVID-19 survivor (!) Diya Naidu and facilitated by a qualified therapist.
I think one of the best ways I have always practised self-care is through maintaining close friendships outside of the arts. I genuinely cannot recommend this enough.
What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?
Being Asian-Australian to me is an assumption often made of me in artistic spaces. I have been in Australia since 2012 when I arrived on the lands of the Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations to pursue a PhD in performance studies. I was born in Kuwait and hold Indian citizenship. I have been going through the unforgiving skills-based migration system for years now, almost four. It’s hard not to throw your hands up in the air and give up hope. The iterative and bureaucratic procedure for migration to Australia is complex and is designed to make it difficult every step of the way. Of course, this depends on who you are and where you come from. But, even as someone best positioned to navigate its complexities – being a fluent English speaker, holding a doctoral degree, working for a federal government agency, paying in toil and taxes to this economy – it is still a harrowing process to put oneself through. So, being Asian-Australian remains an aspiration at best, but the dash is also a daily reminder of what it means to be a settler-coloniser on this country and the responsibility contained within this hyphen to build lateral solidarities with First Nations peoples on their unceded sovereign lands.
If your anger becomes the entirety of your practice, your practice will only exist in relation to that injustice—in which case, they’ve already won.
Find out more
Interview by Sonia Nair
Illustrations by Viet-My Bui