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A Novel Experience provided by the KaejasThe Canadian dancing couple Karen and Allen Kaeja, gave Chennai their first experience of contact dancing at The Other Festival, Chennai. Theirs is a very physical style filled with graceful, fluid movements, also marked by a sense of intimacy and tenderness brought on by the almost continuous body contact. The abstract style is strongly influenced by the light-footed ballet technique though the movements seem a lot more grounded and partner-oriented, aided by the presence of the distinctive American post-Modern dance lifts. The well-sculpted bodies of the dancers moved in tandem creating wave after wave of inspired patterns across the stage. Whether the movements were preplanned or not is a moot point, but there were times when they looked improvised or spontaneous. Going by the literature provided, there seemed to be a meaning behind the dances, but none of it was apparent during the performance. The music was a lot more suggestive though, with for example, the voice-overs suggesting family relationships in ‘Elements of Touch.’
The most exciting part for the local audience was ‘Earth Scent,’ a collaboration with local artists: Aarti Bodani, Madhuvanthi Arun, Mrinalini, Sangeetha Iswaran and Viji Rao, in a style based on that of the Kaejas,’ nevertheless including some of the traditional stances and steps of Bharatanatyam. The music was taken from an album ‘Music of the Asian Underground.’ The adaptability of these dancers to a changed milieu and to a different set of rules was remarkable. As Kaeja remarked later, “You would never know that they were performing this for the first time.”
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The Kaejas’ presentation entitled ‘lifeDUETS’ included another piece ‘Desperate Song’ inspired by Pablo Neruda’s works, with a composition of Edgardo Moreno. Choreographed as a solo, the representation was more literal in a sense that the agony and the despair of the soul were tangible. Karen’s pain seemed to bounce off the broad shoulders of her partner whose presence was merely in a supportive role.
This multi-faceted dancing couple have ventured into the production of short dance films. The
experiences of Kaeja’s Polish family in World War II led him to produce the films on this very painful
subject; the three of them shown that day ‘Sarah,’ ‘Zummel’ and ‘1939’ were very personal and deeply
disturbing even to a bystander. The last was probably the most disturbing, as a delineation of the
Jewish uprising in a Warsaw ghetto shot in a synagogue, with the almost violent movements of the so
called performers using the wooden benches variously as coffins, trees, ammunition, barriers, bunkers…
The sombre lighting with the flickering of maybe the reflection of fire from outside, and the plaintive
notes on the violin made for an intense experience. ‘Sarah’ was poignant in its simple picturisation of a
woman and an innocent child separated by the war, even without any explicit expression of the loss or of
the suffering of either, except for the repeated footages of a woman running alone in the woods perhaps
in search of her child. That people are prepared to share their innermost agonies is a humbling thought,
and the ability to never lose faith in mankind is what sustains the human spirit. 
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