Crossing cultures

For an Indian woman to make a dancework about La Bayadère is a promising prospect. This classical ballet of 1877 by Russia’s French-born genius Marius Petipa tells the simple story of an Indian temple dancer — essentially a religious sex slave — whose potential salvation by an amorous young soldier is dashed when he expediently marries the rajah’s daughter. Death and transfiguration ensue in some addictively gorgeous balletic poetry, along with all sorts of improbable exotica to please the tsar’s eye.

Londoner Shobana Jeyasingh, born in India, trained as a traditional Bharatanatyam dancer, and is a contemporary dance choreographer of keen intelligence, if sometimes letting her brain get the better of her choreographic imagination. And Bayadère — The Ninth Life is full of fascinating content.

It pivots on Théophile Gautier’s fascinated diary of the first European sight of Indian temple-dancers, in Paris in 1838, and is studded with some delicious choreography. Two weeks after seeing it, I still find certain of her lovely Indian-meets-Russian arm gestures coming back to me, homages to Petipa’s orientalist ports de bras but cleverly remade as motifs that cross from his 19th-century European eyes to her 21st-century Asian view. But what also remains is frustration that this terrific material meets a sludgy end.

The hour-long work is classically planned: tripartite, it begins by introducing us to Jas Gupta, today’s British Indian, who is recording his impressions of seeing La Bayadère for the first time. Shown simultaneously on a giant laptop screen, he blogs and tweets about its racial archetypes and Bollywood plot, noting its numerous risibilities. As he does so, through the screen, we see La Bayadère’s characters, one by one, in a speedy plot summary, Jeyasingh selecting for each of them a key motif.