Lessons from the intersection of Odissi and… life

I’ve been persevering with Odissi dance lessons at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. It’s definitely the toughest dance form that I’ve attempted yet, but also the most interesting in many ways. In the last class, I learnt how to stand in tribhangi position. This rather cute pose is what distinguishes Odissi from all other forms of Indian classical dance, and is based on three bends. Check out this youtube clip for a demo.

Try standing in this position for a while – looks very graceful but gets uncomfortable quite quickly if you’re not used to it.

One thing that is fascinating about Indian classical dance lessons is that the student-teacher relationship is very different to that in ‘western’ dance lessons. Students treat their teacher with an enormous amount of deference, and never, ever answer back. If you want to learn Odissi you have to be prepared to deal with a lot of poking, prodding and telling-off if your tribhangi is wonky or you are not stamping vigourously enough, and you have to just suck it up. Which brings me to the title of the post. There are a number of lessons from learning Odissi dance that are applicable to life generally (or at least my life, as it is at the moment). The most important one is that learning Odissi teaches you take criticism well. If it’s done in the right spirit, criticism can only be a good thing. When someone is teaching you something and they really, really care about it – and want you to get it right – it can be a very good thing.  If it doesn’t sound too pretentious, my Odissi lessons so far have been the cause of a bit of a paradigm shift for me in terms of how I take criticism, not just in terms of dance but in other areas of life too. There will always be moments when one needs to need to submit to a lot of prodding, coaxing and refining to get something just right. And that’s ok.

 

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