There’s a tradition in Hinduism that celebrates the concept of androgyny called Ardhanarishvara, which centres around a composite image of the gods Shiva and Shakti, where one half is male and the other half female. In the sense that it represents two genders in the one body, it recalls the Greek god Hermaphroditus; it’s also proof that gender bending (or gender rebellion) is as much an ancient rite as a modern phenomenon. Dancers Raina Peterson and Govind Pillai pull on this tradition in their show Third Nature, and then take it in interesting directions.
The piece opens with a wall of jasmine so beautifully lit that it seems to pulsate, sometimes a cool silver, sometimes a hot red. It looks like the most enticing of curtains, and when the dancers push on it from behind and make it undulate, it’s impossible not to think of a sexual come-on. This turns out to be quite appropriate in a show that swings wildly from the suggestive to the blatantly erotic. Eventually Pillai emerges, gorgeously angular and precise, before retreating back into the jasmine. Peterson then emerges, sensuous and self contained. For a while, it seems they won’t occupy the same space at all.
This is, of course, deliberate; a way of establishing two separate bodies – each a confrontation with the notion of ideal beauty – as perfect in isolation, before the playfulness and the merging begins. Once it does, the show becomes a kind of orgiastic celebration of non-binary sexuality, of that union suggested by the Ardhanarishvara, but sexualised. Because it is highly sexual, almost deliciously slutty. The dancers have an extended “roll in the jasmine” at one stage, pulling cords of it down on themselves, throwing themselves on each other, making out.
Peterson is an expert in mohiniyattam, which is a dance technique hailing from Kerala. It is freewheeling, loose and luxurious, and they bring a sureness and a power to the form. Pillai’s expertise is in bharatanatyam, a Tamil Nadu dance tradition that is, in contrast, highly structured, with an emphasis on strictness of lines and extenuated extremities. There’s a complex series of commentaries about gender expectation going on in the way these techniques are employed, but it’s also simply beautiful to watch.
Third Nature is, appropriately, divided into three parts, and it’s the third part that really drives home the work’s dramaturgical argument. After the orgiastic comes the incubatory, and from this emerges a third nature, a new way of being that completely trumps or circumvents the binary. The piece moves into a lofty or spiritual space, and ends with a kind of symbiosis of forms, joyful and utopian. There’s something a little naive about the work’s trajectory, and it’s all the more charming for it.
Peterson and Pillai work wonderfully together, contrasting and complimenting each other in myriad ways. There is a palpable sense of the lived experience about this show, a tangibility and honesty from the dancers that is rare. The piece suffers from a few longueurs – the dancers take far too long to emerge from that aforementioned curtain of jasmine – and a little self-indulgence, but it has a lot to say about gender assumptions and the future directions they might take. Most importantly, it reminds us that gender has been a contested space from the very beginning of our cultures, and that notions of old and new, of colonial and post-colonial, of man and woman, need to be rewritten if we are to progress as a species. Do we hear an Amen to that?