Flash Eulogy and Review, 7-8: The Choreographer Suicides

"Have I missed the mark, or, like a true archer, do I strike my quarry? Or am I prophet of lies, a babbler from door to door?"

-- Cassandra, from "Agamemnon," by Aeshylus, 1194

Ranja Sircar and the Toll of Choreographic Excavations

By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2000 The Dance Insider

Every choreographer I have known is, to some degree or another, manic depressive. Clairvoyant in their highs, doomed in their lows. Sean Curran seems, on the surface anyway, more manic than depressive. Roger Sinha, both in the choreographic text of his "Burning Skin" and in his performance of it, is more obviously darkly manic. But I am thinking of this, to tell you the truth, not so much because of the performances of these two choreographers and their companies last night at Central Park SummerStage, but because of the news I heard, belatedly, just before the concert -- and which struck me like a blow to the solar plexus, taking the life out of me -- of the death by suicide, at age 36, of Ranjabati Sircar.

I met Ranja in 1995, when I had just started working at Dance Magazine and was something of a neophyte to dance in general, let alone dance from the sub-continent, let alone the distinctions between the various genres of that dance, let alone choreographer-teacher-dancers, like Ranja, who melded the classical forms to contemporary ideas, not always to a warm popular reception among audiences or choreographers of an older generation. On top of this burden, Ranja had familial expectations, her mother Manjushree Chaki Sircar being a well-known choreographer and teacher in Madras.

"Is it all right to smoke?" asked the tightly wound, striking young woman who entered my small office that fall day. "No," said I, and for the next hour, while Ranja was forthcoming in discussing her work and Indian dance and hybrid classical-modern dance, she remained tightly wound. Still, we hit it off, and, after some hesitation at its appropriateness, I called her a day later an asked her to a Maria Benitez concert that night. "I would love to go!" Ranja said.

It was a moving concert: Benitez's conception of the de Falla/Sierra 1915 flamenco ballet classic "El Amor Brujo," about an older woman driven mad by love and her own demons, followed by a tablao-style second half. We were transported, in fact, to a tablao, notwithstanding that the performance was actually happening in Chelsea at the Joyce Theater. Ranja was positively glowing afterwards; I could feel that she wanted to dance Flamenco right then and there, and indeed she explained to me some of the linkages between that form and some classical Indian dance forms.

To prolong our virtual visit to Andalucia, we decided to repair to "El Cid," for tapas and sangria. Something about the Flamenco left us both less tightly wound, we spoke not just as choreographer and journalist but as man and woman. The sangria loosened things further and by the time I walked Ranja to the 14th Street subway stop, we had that automatic, slightly giddy, elbow-knocking intimacy that, in the right circumstances, even strangers can sometimes find when the planets are aligned.

We met up again a couple of days later for San Francisco Ballet at City Center -- it was either Val Caniparoli's African-ballet hybrid, "Lambarena," or David Bintley's AIDS fantasia, "The Dance House" -- and I can still see Ranja, emerging from the crowd: intent look, oval face, olive complexion, intent eyes finding me right away across the crowded sidewalk.

This time we repaired to the Russian Samovar for horseradish-flavored vodka. More significantly, from a culinary perspective, Ranja imparted on me her curry recipe. She could never eat at Indian restaurants in this country, she said, so she carried with her a curry kit of the various spices that go into curry. Having previously only used a generic Spice Islands "curry powder," I asked her what the ingredients were: cumin, turmeric, coriander, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, mustard seed OR onion seed, cloves, and fenugreek. (The fenugreek is tricky; put it in last or it dominates the whole.) I still make Curry a la Ranja Sircar to this day.

Afterwards, sensing the imminent end of this visit and Ranja's return to India, I invited her over for tea. We spoke about everything -- life, relationships -- and oh, I am trying so hard right now to remember the specifics. About visualization, I think, and astrology. If I close my eyes I can see her face in front of me.... I think we spoke of gurus...and of something magic and inchoate...and she told me of Cassandra. There's a word in Urdu -- which I know is the Pakistani and not the Indian language, but still I think it applies here -- "Janoon," which, I'm told, means obsession. Ranja's Janoon was Cassandra, about whom she'd written and choreographed a piece, because of what Cassandra says about the position of women in society.

Given the gift of prophecy by Apollo, this daughter of the King of Troy was then deprived by Apollo of the power to make people believe her prophecies, after she refused to sleep with him. Thus, when she accurately warned the Trojans about the Trojan Horse, no one believed her that an armed force was hidden in the horse, and Troy was sacked, and Cassandra raped. When Troy was captured, Agamemnon took Cassandra as his prize; both were ultimately murdered by his wife, Clytaemnestra, and her lover Aegisthus. This too Cassandra predicted: "... for me waits destruction by the two-edged sword." [Cassandra. Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1149] (For more on Cassandra, go to http://www.hsa.brown.edu/~maicar//Cassandra.html, the web page which is my source today. ) In many realms, Cassandra was and is looked at as "mad," driven so by her visions.

Ranja invited me to see her "Cassandra" that week at Mary Anthony's studio. From what I can recall, it was a dance of vulnerability and pain, but seemed at its beginnings, Ranja not yet able to externalize a story that obviously resonated so deeply with her.

Ranja and I lost touch until 1998, when I asked her to write a preview about the pioneering Indian choreographer Chandrelekha. Ranja made clear that there was a fission between her and the older choreographer, but that she recognized her importance on the Indian scene. When the article came in, I perpetrated what I now see as an irrevocable minor cruelty; there was no interview with the story, so I declined to use it, or to pay Ranja. This upset her, and we lost touch again. Today I grieve not only Ranja, but that I will never be able to make this right, to compensate for a minor cruelty with a later kindness. And I wonder if this was just one of a series of "small" cruelties that added up, in Ranja's mind, to only one solution and antidote.

It's hard to fathom suicide, and I almost don't want to go to the dark and hopeless place Ranja found herself in on October 23, when, as police believe, she hanged herself from the ceiling fan in the flat of a family friend in Borivili. According to a report in India Today (see http://www.india-today.com/itoday/19991115/mfeature.html), just two days before her death, Ranja e-mailed a friend: "I am battling the dark spaces within myself."

The same report in India Today makes all sorts of conjectures about what drove Ranja as an artist, and what in society and in her own family life -- particularly her complicated relationship with her mother -- might have driven her to kill herself. Rather than elongate this already long article, I'll simply urge you to go to the url cited above for more details.

Here, I can only offer the observation of someone who once observed Ranja close-up, in what seems now like a lifetime, indeed a different life ago: Alternately driven and insecure, confident and unsteady. Beautiful and yet perhaps burdened by that beauty. An heir to a pedagogic legacy, and yet burdened by that as well.

In what now seem our all-too-brief but nonetheless intense conversations of five years ago, it seems Ranja and I only started to ask the important questions....okay, now it comes back, one thing we talked about, both of us, was how we were trying to live healthier lifestyles; she in particular to give up smoking.... It seems Ranja hit a black impenetrable wall in her own searching and maybe...maybe, for as I write this I am still too stunned, numbed really, from the news of her suicide to barely begin processing what it means...but it seems that even if Ranja was not able to find the insight that would save her from her own hands, she offers one insight, I think, to choreographers -- not just artists, but choreographers specifically.

Roger Sinha's piece, "Burned Skin," had to do with insecurity about identity -- no, with self-hate of one's racial identity, based on an apocryphal tale of an Indian boy who jumps into a vat of boiling water because he's heard it will turn his skin white. Interpolated with Pascale Leonard's serenely making chai, the dance that ensues is nonetheless manic, as Sinha tries on all sorts of racial archetypes, from a swaggering, chick-chasing Dean Martin in shirt and tie to a kilted Irishman. It's a comic romp, but performed with a mania that suggests the character is not so much whimsically playing with other identities, trying on other masks, as running from his own.

Sean Curran presents a similar contradiction. His Chaplinesque stage persona never really completely hides -- and perhaps this is why it resonates! -- some sort of tragic, invisible burden. He's ultimately a sad clown. In "Folk Dance for the Future," when he gives up and then hangs his head after suggesting he might follow Amy Brous's pivot-less somersault, it's funny, but it's painful too. Curran's kinetic skill and particularly his gift for inventing new dance geometries is apparent in "Abstract Concrete," premiered last night, and it's an enjoyable diversion, expertly danced by a group of performers who are clearly getting inside Curran's choreographic vision...but it has nowhere near the emotional resonance of his recent "Six Laments." (See Flash Review 2, 5-5: Blending, and Flash Review, 5-15: Transformation.) This dance -- and particularly Curran's own performance, as he gets up, stumbles, and gets up again, repeatedly, always looking over his shoulder, it's surmised at a departed friend, as if he is being reminded every time he stumbles that the friend is no longer there -- is anything but a facile tragedy with cheap plays to the emotion; it's obviously based on real experience.

I'm thinking also of Mark Dendy. As hysterically funny as "Dream Analysis" was -- this 1998 hit conjures Nijinsky, Martha Graham, and Judy Garland among others -- it is ultimately a psycho-familial journey that also drove Dendy nearly to hysteria. During the creation, he told me, he was haunted in his nightmares by an aunt who he also conjured in this dance, the sense being that she couldn't believe he was going to bare her story in his dance.

Since "Dream Analysis," interestingly, Dendy has gone an easier route, a pure dancey route. In one sense I want to scold him for this -- Why is he relying on his natural musicality for easy successes, when he can go so much deeper? -- but after the death of Ranja, I can see the danger inherent in those deep waters.

Here's what all this is leading up to, at least as close to coherence as I am able to express it this morning. Recently I have been discussing with another choreographer-dancer-teacher from the sub-continent how dance is not looked at seriously by society in general as a career. You've probably all heard this after you tell someone you're a dancer: "Okay, but what's your real job?"

The suicide of Ranja Sircar -- and to a less obvious extent, the work of the artists I saw last night -- gives me this epiphany: Dancing, and particularly choreographing, is not only not "not a real job." It is an expedition no less fraught with peril than the most snake-ridden excavations of Indian Jones. Not all of these prophetic men and women, thank God, find their visions so ultimately and unremittingly black and hopeless that they are moved to take their own lives. But I have no doubt that the small deaths are real, and the stakes high.

Note: As may be obvious from the above, I am not an expert on the work of Ranja or her place in the annals of choreography from the sub-continent. The url I've listed above provides some of this context; I also suggest just doing a web search for "Ranjabati & Sircar." Ranja's mother passed away this spring. Thanks to Anita Ratnam for her insight.

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