Padmini Chettur

This grant enables a contemporary dancer-choreographer Padmini Chettur to produce a new choreographic piece titled Beautiful Thing 1. Padmini’s work since the beginning has been an attempt in responding to beauty that exists in pure and ‘honest’ form. For her, this has been a source for her movements that allows her to create ‘eternal known’ in beauty that is in ‘space around me’. She plans to explore ‘finding expected’ beauty in her proposed production of Beautiful Thing 1.

Padmini and her group had already started exploring the concept through movements. Rehearsals for realization of the idea have started by breaking away from the classical repertoire of gestures, posturing and mythical tales, to shape an alternative vocabulary of movements and choreography that will be “independent of meaning and not seductive”. The dancers would begin by creating movements in random sequences, which would direct them to move a body part in isolation. To exemplify, Padmini started rehearsing with her dancer by picking chits of paper in random sequences that would direct them to move a body parts in isolation. The movement is then perceived as a living force within the body. This shift creates a necessity for dancers to concentrate on movement within the body devoid of intentional expression.

Beautiful Thing 1 will be a new experiment for Padmini in one more sense as she is introducing a text in her work for the first time by collaborating with Vivek Narayanan, to investigate the interplay of sound, word, and meaning. The premier in India is scheduled to be staged towards the end June 2009. It will follow their tour in Europe with support from Szene Salzburg.