Free Flow

Fifty years ago, Astad Deboo pioneered contemporary dance in India. Today, as in 1969, he remains a study in how to be a modern man who moves with the times

- Nidhi Gupta

No 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.”