Published by:

Summer 2013 issue 121 pp14-16
Publisher URL: http://www.pulseconnects.com/

Currency exchange: Glyn Perrin and Shobana Jeyasingh

Composer Glyn Perrin in conversation with choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh. Last of a 3-part series


Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company debuted in 1988 with Configurations. It was, essentially, a piece about the connections between dance and music. So? It’s common knowledge that dance and music are as closely connected as two sides of a coin – what was new? Well, Jeyasingh was choreographing in the classical Indian style bharatanatyam while her composer, Michael Nyman, was writing a suite for string quartet. Never mind the coin – they were working with different currencies, with different values, different stock. Which meant that Configurations landed Jeyasingh with some particular questions: could this dance share the stage with that music? How might she broker an exchange? Was there a trade-off?

In Configurations, she came up with a direct, singular answer. Using the counting systems she knew from classical bharatanatyam, she composed a complete rhythmic score for the dance and then gave it to Nyman, who used it as the basis for his string quartet (feeling, Jeyasingh recalls, as if here were composing ‘with one arm tied behind his back’). It was as if the mind of an Indian dancer were being rendered with the means of a western musician. In the event, the resulting correspondence of dance and music was direct and clear. They may have occupied different worlds, but they were conjoined by a clear, continuous border: rhythm.

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It was a neat response to those core questions of how to stage music and dance together, but it was the just first of Jeyasingh’s attempts at finding answers. For while her musical scores have ranged far and wide (she commissions new music whenever possible) and her dance style has travelled a long way from bharatanatyam, the question of how to broker a deal between sound and action has stayed with her ever since. To find out about some of her answers, I spoke with Jeyasingh and composer Glyn Perrin, who have worked together several times over the course of 20 years. Their first piece was Romance with Footnotes in 1993 – but in order to explain how that came about, they both begin the story a little further back. They need to explain what currency they were carrying when they arrived.

‘I was a classical trained western composer, who had also been working in rock and pop,’ says Perrin, who had also written some dance scores, notably for Rambert Dance Company and for bharatanatyam dancer Unnikrishnan. ‘When I first saw bharatanatyam,’ he remembers, ‘I just couldn’t figure out what the musicians were doing. It was riveting – but utterly mysterious! And I realised that what I did might be equally mysterious for them. Because counterpoint and harmony, which are so fundamental to the western tradition, are simply not part of the structural or expressive vocabulary of Carnatic music. It’s a huge difference in understanding how sound works.’

Jeyasingh’s came in from the opposite direction. ‘Until Configurations I had only danced to Indian music,’ she says, ‘and I couldn’t imagine dancing to western classical music. It can sound very simplistic if you’re listening with Indian ears, because it doesn’t have the arithmetical complexity and rhythmic sophistication – at least not until you get into the twentieth century. The rhythms sounded so predictable they used to annoy me! What I hadn’t appreciated at all was the harmonic aspect, which you don’t have in Indian music.’

‘It took me some time,’ says Perrin,  ‘to realise that the action in Carnatic music is happening in the rhythm. In the west, the development of rhythm had been quite relegated, because for a long time the main musical argument was happening elsewhere.’

Those are very different sound worlds, and of course dance relates to them differently. ‘In bharatanatyam, there’s not much room to negotiate between the music and the footwork,’ says Perrin. ‘Whereas with western music, a lot of which was never designed for dancing, the relationships are often looser, less determinate.’ Jeyasingh echoes his observation: ‘With bharatanatyam, if I heard the music I could do the footwork. It’s a very direct relationship. But after Configurations, I had to start navigating differently.’

The first few pieces after ConfigurationsCorrespondences, Late, Byzantium – explored similar musical-choreographic territory, but by the time Jeyasingh met Perrin she was ready to head elsewhere. If in Configurations she had been concerned with how to mediate different currencies of music and dance, in Romance with Footnotes she handed the same question to Perrin to deal with within the music – leaving herself freer to explore a less classical choreographic terrain. For the music score, she had already decided to use a fixed point – a set of jathis (rhythmically chanted syllables) composed by Carnatic musician Karaikudi Krishnamurthy. ‘The jathis were a given,’ she says. ‘But how Glyn incorporated them into the score was up to him.’ This complicated things. Now there were different currencies not only between music and dance, but within the music.

Perrin’s solution was ‘like handing over the baton in a relay race. I would take the tail of a jathi and overlap it with a section of my music. And at the other end it would arrive at the beginning of the next jathi.’ The handovers were tricky because they had to carry the listener from the defined brilliance of the vocal jathis to the unfamiliar texture of Perrin’s ensemble – tape, bass clarinet and three cellos – and then back again. His answer was to use rhythm as the baton, and the tape as the instrument that passed it on. He spliced up sound samples of mridangam drums and prepared piano, and on the tape he played back knitted-together rhythmic fragments that merged with the jathi rhythms. Between these handovers, he could create a different sound world altogether: ‘Over the brittle, sparkling texture of the tape I had the bass clarinet, which is actually a very sexy instrument, and also the more romantic texture of the three cellos, which worked almost like a vocal trio.’

If musical continuity was one main concern, the other was how to link the music with the dance. For this, Perrin drew up a timeframe – ‘the map’, he called it – which plotted the course of the different sections and divided them up into broad counts. ‘Within that frame,’ he explains, ‘I could choose to stick to the cycle or be rhythmically loose. Or I could slow down and speed up through double or quadruple time, like dropping through gears.’

The map was vital for Jeyasingh, and for the work. ‘My ears were still functioning like a bharatanatyam dancer, and the dancers at that time were also primarily bharatanatyam trained, so it was important for us to be able to count to find a route through the map.’ A shared framework left both he and Jeyasingh free to compose separately. They didn’t need to work together all the time as long as they were working to the same plan. The result was a very coherent piece of work, but unlike the fix-framed Configurations, it was also a flexible one. It was, too, a very effective staging of the work’s underlying idea: the encounter of different realms, one (‘romance’) that gives free rein to fantasy, the other (‘footnotes’) a defined point of reference.

The encounter of different realms… that phrase could encapsulate not only Jeyasingh’s take on the relation between music and dance, but also, as becomes increasingly apparent during our conversation, her interest in it. The year after Romance with Footnotes, Jeyasingh and Perrin worked again on Raid; and again, the underlying metaphor was of contrasting zones, this time imagined as a game of kabbadi, in which two teams make raids into each other’s territory. As before, Jeyasingh asked Perrin to mediate between different musical worlds – his own, and a commissioned score by Tamil film composer Ilayaraja – while she worked in a parallel way in the choreography, mediating between dance movement and kabbadi movement. ‘Ilayaraja wrote a very unusual, inventive piece of music,’ remembers Jeyasingh, ‘which didn’t fit into any genre. He’s used to having these big ensembles, but this was all done through voice – a folk voice, not the more expected voice of light classical music – and drum.’

‘His score was pretty much already done,’ says Perrin, ‘so I inserted mine as kind of break in the proceedings – like half-time in a match. As I’d done in Romance, I used a synthesised tape recording to connect with the score, while on either side of the stage we had two violinists, duelling with each other.’ His music made for a high contrast to the voice and drum of Ilayaraja’s surrounding sound. Jeyasingh’s interval choreography was high-contrast too, the dancers switching from the sporty kabbadi style into a more formal, dancerly mode, driven by changes of speed. Once again Jeyasingh and Perrin worked to a measured plan, based on timing and underscored by a unifying metaphor – one that emphasised not co-operation (like the ‘relay’ of Romance), but competition.

It was ten years until their next company collaboration, Transtep in 2004. Here, the encounter of different realms was multiplied again. The piece threaded together four scenes, each by a different choreographer – Rashpal Singh Bansal, Filip van Huffel, Lisa Torun and Jeyasingh herself – and each with a different musical score, as sourced by Perrin (the composers were, respectively, Ryoji Ikeda, Mozart, Terry Riley and Monteverdi). With that format in place, Perrin and Jeyasingh then took on a very singular job: to create the transitions. They were acting as mediators, sliding doors between one world and the next. ‘I sampled the scores and transformed them in the mixing studio,’ says Perrin. ‘Working with music that’s already made is more like design than composing. But I absolutely love that process of finding how to move from one sound world to another, even if one is electronic blips and the next is Mozart.’

In his last two collaborations with Jeyasingh, Perrin’s role shifted further from composer towards director and designer. Bruise Blood (2009) was planned with two different sound worlds, neither of them his: the first was Steve Reich’s seminal tape loop Come Out (1996), the second a live performance by beatbox artist Shlomo. Perrin’s initial role was as guide and facilitator, but Jeyasingh soon felt she needed an additional musical counterbalance to Reich’s short (13-minute) piece. So she asked Perrin to create the interpolations – after all, he’d done this before with her, several times. But this time, remembers Jeyasingh, ‘it turned into a rougher ride.’

Perrin agrees. ‘There were so many moving elements. I originally thought that I would just set up Shlomo to pick up the baton from Reich and transition into his own beatboxing. But he took it in a different direction that was not conventional beatbox territory at all. It was intense, neurotic, sometimes obsessive.’ In the meantime, Perrin had already sampled Shlomo’s more conventional beatboxing, and remixed it in a drum machine.

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It didn’t work: the balance was off. The scores added up to too much voice and loops and rhythms. ‘It was hard to acknowledge that,’ says Perrin. ‘You can get very invested in what you’ve made and it can be hard to see that the piece is telling you something different.’ He ended up rewriting his contribution entirely. ‘Shobana was right: it was not what the piece needed. In the end, I made something much more dubby and chilled out, less rhythmic and more atmospheric. Between Reich and Shlomo, we needed a way of clearing the space, not adding to it.’ If it is any consolation, Jeyasingh reminds him that almost nothing worked first time round: ‘We recast the dancers, redid the costumes, rewrote music, rechoreographed. The only thing we didn’t change was the lighting. It was a painful piece to make, and I’m glad it was with Glyn, because if it was another composer we might not be talking now!’

A painful piece, perhaps, but Jeyasingh now regards it as one of her favourites. ‘I’m very proud of it too,’ says Perrin, somewhat relieved. ‘I think it was risk-taking, and achieved a lot.’

Their last collaboration Dev Kahan Hai? (2012) went a lot more smoothly between them. Perrin wrote no music himself, but acted as director and facilitator for electronic composer Niraj Chag. ‘As it happened, he produced so much material, so fast, that all I really had to do was to say: keep going, don’t hold back. And because he works in short sections, I was able to bring in my background of working with continuity. Apart from that, my role was really just keeping the door open and letting him go through. The score certainly has that wonderful freshness of a person discovering something.’

It was a very different working relationship from when they created Romance with Footnotes. Yet you can still see the core concerns: how to balance different currencies, how to stage the encounter of different worlds, whether of style or history, of personality or technique. And have they learned how to do to mediate the different stocks and systems of music and dance?

‘The single biggest lesson I’ve learned,’ says Perrin, ‘is not to overload the space with sound. It’s easy to do because in dance, unlike in television or text-based theatre, the acoustic space is all yours. If the sound is very busy with lots of events – which is not the same as dense, or loud – then it becomes almost impossible for the audience to process the sound and visual channels at the same time. And they’ll tune out. Because the sound then becomes a wall through which you have to fight to experience the choreography. But get the balance of weight right, and the sound can become a cradle for the dance to work in. That’s far more powerful than coming out with all guns blazing.’

Jeyasingh likens the music-dance relationship to an arranged marriage: you hope it’s going to work out, but you don’t know what it will become. ‘They’re like two totally different beings that you hope will talk with each other. You can’t go in with huge expectations. Instead, you have the best will in the world that the music and dance are going to work something out, together.’

Third of a 3-part series. Part 1. Part 2.