I had an experience this weekend that showed me a value to arts funding I had never come across before. It isn’t going to convince foundations, arts councils and the federal government to necessarily pour more money into the arts and humanities, but it does go to show just how much good the money is doing.

This weekend we hosted a performance of Nrityagram Dance Ensemble, a traditional dance group from India. They are really a remarkable group based on their process alone. Every 6 years 6 women are chosen to enter the world’s only dance village. For these six women, every cost is taken care of. There are day students and week long seminars that are periodically conducted. Those people have to pay, but those chosen for the residential program have all their needs attended to..sort of.

The life they lead is somewhat akin to monstastic. There is no vow of silence and there are days off to go into town. However, the day runs something like: wake up, dance, help make breakfast, dance, help garden, study Sanskrit, have lunch, dance, etc.

The thing I found out this weekend though is that there is almost no written record of the classical dance forms. Everything was passed by word of mouth. One of the group’s projects is to assemble a library of material because right now they have to consult materials in the New York Public Library on their annual trips to the U.S. All the photos and other records of performance in India are held by families who are very resistance to sharing.

There is a classical text on Indian dance that is rather complete. An Indian woman has apparently made it her life’s work to translate and annotate it but almost no one uses it. One of the dancers commented on the irony of meeting a white, male Asian Studies student here that was more familiar with the book than most of the dancers in her country.

Another thing that surprised me was that there is apparently no tradition of dancing as a group in India. If there are 4 women dancing somewhere they are essentially each doing solo performances. The road manager told me that one of the biggest hurdles they have had to overcome is instilling a sense of performance discipline in the members of the group so they work in unison and ignore things like a flower falling from another dancer’s hair. Everything the Nrityagram Dance Ensemble has learned about spacing, coordinated complementary movement and interaction with other dancers they have learned from Western choreographers.

One of the group leaders was overjoyed to learn that a respected dance teacher from the local university was attending the show and had come backstage to visit. The professor in question had recorded Indian dance before in one of the dance notation forms and the dancer wanted to consult with her on how it was accomplished and the suitability of the notation style to traditional Indian dance.

Now one might argue, perhaps correctly, that if you are codifying a form that has not been and adding group choreography where none ever existed, you are no longer performing the dance traditionally. Honestly, I think that is a discussion for another entry and perhaps another blog.

It seems to me that if a group is trying to record and preserve cultural traditions which have nearly been lost a number of times due to sickness and disasters killing off gurus, that is a laudable goal. Indeed, some of their measures are actually doing more to preserve elements of performance. They periodically video tape themselves so that when they notice they have somehow started doing something differently, they can go back and see where the change started creeping in.

What seems incredible to me is that arts and humanities funding in the US is providing the references, resources and trained expertise to aid this group in the discovery and preservation their culture. It is common to hear about foreign entities consulting with our scientists, corporations and government in order to make their lives better and solve problems. It is easy to forget that our artists have some useful advice to provide too.