JULY 2019 — 73“So I left on a cargo boat loaded up with cattle and
labourers bound for the Gulf,” he grins. “I got off at
Khorramshahr in Iran, and from there, with my magic
thumb, I hitched for two-and-a-half months, all the
way up to England.”
He gazed upon the Colosseum, he sunned in Capri,
he crossed Checkpoint Charlie in 1969. He also met an
Iranian pop singer, who got him a paid gig to perform
Kathak for a Tehran-based TV channel. He met a pair
of Australian girls with whom he travelled to Greece,
who’d call him in the early 1970s to present his work
at a fundraiser for leprosy patients, in collaboration
with Pink Floyd, who’d just then released Meddle.
Eventually, hitch-hiking gave way to travelling for
craft, or an early-days version of voluntourism. “My
modus operandi,” Deboo explains, “was to land up in
a city, contact the Indian student union at the local
university and say, ‘Look, I’m a classically trained
dancer, perhaps I can teach you?’”
This is how Deboo built his “movement bank”. When
it became clear he wasn’t going to make it to the US, he
joined The Place in London, a school of contemporary
dance, to learn the Martha Graham technique. “This
was all about contract and release, even when you’re on
the floor,” Deboo explains, “For me, dance was always a
more fluid thing, and this felt very rigid.”
In Indonesia, he studied the traditional Javanese
dance; In Japan, he learned kabuki and butoh while
he “taught English, became a fashion model and a
host in a women’s underground bar”; then returned to
India to learn “two Kathakali pieces” under Guru EK
Panikar. “My body kept moving, either on the road or
in dance.” Everywhere he went, he made friends and
expanded his network.
It was in Mexico that Deboo realised his signature
move. “I was a regular at discotheques and one
night, Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” was on, and
I just began to spin.” At another point in his life,
after spending a year with the Pina Bausch Dance
Repertoire – “when the high priestess of modern
dance calls you herself, it’s a huge honour” – he was
convinced he didn’t want to be boxed in as “just a
Kathakali dancer”.
In 1988, a decade after he’d had his debut India
show at Prithvi Theatre in Mumbai, Deboo began
to work with the disadvantaged: With a theatreNo one’s actually said it’s an intermission. But the
dark and quiet inside the matchbox-sized auditorium
has stretched long enough for someone to ask: “Can we
have the lights on?” Astad Deboo, who at this moment is
barely a silhouette slow-marching across the blue-tinted
space, shoots back: “No. No music, no lights.” And then,
magnanimously: “You have to get used to the darkness.”
Forty-five minutes earlier, at the beginning of
“A Dream Of Sunrise”, the septuagenarian
contemporary dancer descended, at glacial pace,
from a corner staircase at G5A, Mumbai. Dressed in
a floor-length butterscotch anarkali, he paused after
each step, stretching a leg high above his head, or an
arm over the balustrade, bending front and back at
the torso, his posture enviably correct at all times.
He’d dance with his shadow, hands curling into all
sorts of mudras, eyebrows bouncing like a Kathakali
dancer’s. When the music sped up, Deboo began to
twirl – not a pirouette, not quite a pivot, but he went
five, ten, 25 times at once. The teenage girl fidgeting
next to me paused, mesmerised.
“Not everyone likes my work,” shrugs Deboo, when
we meet weeks later, “but most seem amazed by the
twirling.” We’re in the airy living room of his south
Mumbai home, also a sparse work space where the
only ornamentation is a wall of bric-a-brac, photo
frames and a Nataraj statue. “That’s a signature
move,” he continues, “from the Kathak tradition.
People have said it looked a bit Sufi, but I haven’t
been inspired by Sufism.”
A dancer, as a man, at his age: These are also the
things that amaze people about Astad Deboo, even if
they do overestimate his age all the time. Deboo’s life
has revolved around dance and the stage, ever since
he began to train in Kathak at age six in Jamshedpur.
It might’ve started as a casual interest, but two events
in 1968 set him permanently on this course.
First, he watched the famous Murray Louis Dance
Company on tour in India. “I was fascinated. That
very different sort of lighting, these dancers in unison,
the way they used space. It was all very unlike what
I’d seen in Indian classical dance.”
Second, he listened, fascinated, to the stories of a
friend who’d hitch-hiked across Europe. So, once he’d
graduated from RA Podar College in Mumbai, he
announced to his family that he’d been given a spot at
the reputed Martha Graham Dance Company in the US;
and that, before he went there, he’d like to commence his
own spell of hitch-hiking. What convinced them was the
IMAGE: RITAM BANERJEEfib he told about a non-existent scholarship.
N
LET’S DO THINGS RIGHT"There is an Indian
f l av o u r t o m y
movements, and
while it is always
individualistic, it has
t o a lway s b e p r e s e n t "