Queer Arts Festival 2023: Bharatanatyam dance artist Sujit Vaidya celebrates brown queerness
Breathe In the Fragrance is the performer-choreographer’s erotic new gender-ambiguous fantasy
Breathe In the Fragrance, Sujit Vaidya. Photo by Joshua Romine
Queer Arts Festival 2023 presents Breathe In the Fragrance on June 23 at 7 pm at the Roundhouse Performance Centre
HAVING GROWN UP IN Mumbai (when it was stil called Bombay), Vancouver-based dance artist Sujit Vaidya identifies as a cis gay man. This wasn’t the easiest thing to do in India a few decades ago; it was only in 2018 that a historic judgment decriminalized same-sex relations. The art of Bharatanatyam and choreographic movement in general helped Vaidya get to that place of being comfortable in his own skin.
“Dance was never something I actively considered in my growing years, but as I reflect back, it was always present in my life and was part of me,” Vaidya shares in an interview with Stir. “My earliest childhood sensations around dance are of pure joy and abandon. In the moments that I danced, I could access a part of me that allowed for complete self-acceptance. I have always struggled with the performance of perceived masculinity, especially as a gay person growing up in India in the early ’80s. Dance allowed me to let go of all of that baggage and find abandon in my gender expression.
“Some of my earliest memories that clearly stay with me to this day are around visuals and sounds of the dance we now call Bharatanatyam,” he adds. “There was a sensory overload in its experience. The mridangam [an ancient two-headed drum used in Karnatak music] made my heart dance. I was instantly attracted to the vibrant red on palms and feet painted in alta [dye] and the heady fragrance of mogra gajras (Indian jasmine strings). All of these sensations inform my personal and dance aesthetic even today and creep up in my creative processes.”
These influences are all infused in Breathe In The Fragrance, Vaidya’s new full-length dance performance that will premiere at the 2023 Queer Arts Festival: Queers in Space.
The work is very much Vaidya’s way of honouring his identity in a joyful way while holding onto his roots. Throughout the course of his career, he has typically performed classic repertoire, mainly solos, but he has also done duet and group work, whether self-produced or with companies across North America and India. More recently, he has been creating dances within the context of his traditional training while exploring queer narratives. His work also questions the very concept of “tradition” itself and the need to label dances.
The work is what is known in Bharatanatyam as a Śṛṅgāra varnam. Breathe In The Fragrance, Vaidya says, is a ritualistic dismantling of stigma around the expression of Śṛṅgāra— erotic longing—while “holding sacred knowledge from structured spaces”.
Varnams are poems performed in traditional Bharatanatyam repertoire that have a very defined structure with abstract dance and expressive phrases woven into a narrative, Vaidya explains. In a Śṛṅgāra varnam, the poem contains explicit erotic lyrics that build to a crescendo. Traditional Bharatanatyam repertoire contains many Śṛṅgāra varnas with different degrees and shades of erotic expression.
The Śṛṅgāra varnam that Vaidya is performing at QAF expresses a sense of urgency to be with his lover. Usually the poems are explored using metaphors, but Vaidya has chosen to incorporate a six-foot frame and fresh jasmine flowers into the work.
“The poem roughly translates as ‘I’m burning with desire for you and need you in this moment,’” he says. “In many ways, it is a celebration, a celebration of brown queerness through my experience; a celebration of my favorite Bharatanatyam composition; a celebration of the mogra flower [Indian jasmine], a flower that holds deep resonance and fuels my creativity. Breathe In The Fragrance holds space for sensuality, for eroticism, for stillness, for vulnerability, for ambiguity and for in betweenness. I'm amplifying the eroticism of the varnam and creating space for a gender-ambiguous narrative.
“I'm not changing its essence,” he notes, “just imagining it through an aesthetic that brings some of my queerness to it. I look at it as a full throttled celebration of the form, of the varnam, of mogra, and of embedded memories.”
Vaidya moved to Vancouver in 1997 to be with his partner; the two had met in graduate school in India. Once he became immersed in Bharatanatyam, he has went from a student to a performer, interpreter, and choreographer.
“As a gay person growing up in a time and place when there was such ambiguous information—if any—around sexual identity, I internalized my desire to train formally in dance,” Vaidya says. “Formal dance training came very late in my life. What started off as a desire became a mad passion for a dance form that I had carried in my body. I was merely the vessel through which these energies were begging to manifest.
“Many questions, curiosities, disconnections, and negotiations later, I find myself today standing in its essence as a loud and proud queer person, slowly finding my voice in its gift,” he adds. “I continue to learn and unlearn, as I make peace with its complexity and find new ways to be present with it. Today I find immense joy in my dance expression, in giving voice to that little boy who grew up with internalized trauma around his sexual orientation and living all of his fantasies through this dance that he held so close.”
Vaidya is keeping the traditional form’s integrity intact in many ways, while putting his own fresh spin on it. He will be joined on-stage by accomplished dancers Kiruthika Rathanaswami and Malavika Santhosh. A trio of musicians will accompany the artists live on traditional instruments. Curtis Andrews, a frequent collaborator, will play the mridangam. A percussionist, composer, and teacher, Andrews has helped Vaidya develop some of Breathe In the Fragrance’s rhythmic phrases. Arno Kamolika will play the nattuvangam (cymbals), a skill she developed during the pandemic, Vocalist Ramya Sundaresan also appears, with a wealth of experience accompanying dancers in the U.S. and India
“Breathe In the Fragrance holds space for sensuality, for eroticism, for stillness, for vulnerability, for ambiguity and for in betweenness,” Vaidya says. “I'm amplifying the eroticism of the varnam and creating space for a gender-ambiguous narrative. I'm not changing its essence, just imagining it through an aesthetic that brings some of my queerness to it. I look at it as a full-throttled celebration of the form, of the varnam, of mogra and of embedded memories.
For Vaidya, participating in Queer Arts Festival is a point of pride.
“This year's theme, Queers in Space, seems like the most appropriate space to manifest a full-blown queer fantasy,” Vaidya says. “I've cheered on many friends that were programmed through the years, and I'm thrilled to be part of the amazing line up this year. I hope that in a small way, this makes space for other queer artists training in non-European dance forms, especially "traditional" Indian dance to manifest their own fantasies. I would love audiences to journey along with us on this fantasy."
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