Performing Arts and Social Change
Music is probably the most pervasive form of performing art and a powerful conduit for expressing emotion and ideas. Music – classical, folk or popular– has held us under its sway since time immemorial.
A bhajan (devotional song) written by the 15th century saint-poet from Western India, Narsee Mehta: ‘Vaishnav Jana To Tene Kahiye Je Peed Parai Jaane Re (True human beings are those who understand the pain of others)’ is imbued with a message of boundless compassion. A bhajan is meant to be sung collectively. During the Indian freedom movement, Mahatma Gandhi reinvented this traditional bhajan. He got it set to music by a classical singer, and it became a part of the evening prayers at Sabarmati Ashram. It became extremely popular among freedom fighters and for almost a century, the song has continued to inspire people, not just in India, but across the world. In 2019, it was recited in 150 different countries on the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth sesquicentennial. It is amazing that a song can have such a massive global appeal as a channel through which messages of humaneness can be spread.
English songwriter, peace activist, and a former member of the Beatles, John Lennon’s “Imagine” was a similar appeal to the world to adopt unity and peace. “You may say I'm a dreamer. But I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us. And the world will be as one”. These words echo the very famous declaration “I have a dream”, by Martin Luther King Jr. Black lives matter, and the most powerful medium to convey that message has been Jazz. When Louis Armstrong sang “What A Wonderful World”, his listeners knew that these were words coming from the grandson of a former slave and the son of a black sex-worker. The words represent the incredible resilience, patience, and the will to live, in the face of ruthless oppression, that the Black people have fought.
This connection between life and art means that many artists come to find an interface between their practice as artists and a larger social cause. A fascinating example of this is the work of the French pianist Hélène Grimaud. She has devoted her life to protecting wolves and has founded the Wolf Conservation Centre in New York. Her work as an environmentalist, who has made her home in the forest among the wolves, and her work as a globetrotting pianist go hand-in-hand.
The performing arts give artists tremendous flexibility: if they want to make a point, “all the world’s a stage”. Streets, cafes and parks can serve the purpose as well as any elite venue such as a concert hall or an opera house. Yoann Bourgeois, a French dancer, gracefully performed “The One Who Falls” in the centre of a park. The mime performance, accompanied by quiet piano music, gives shape to the thought that the one who falls is bound to bounce back, and eventually succeed, but regardless of success or defeat, the fate of each being is the same: to go back into dust, exactly where they originated from. The performance could not have had a more appropriate setting.
The world of the performing arts is full of endless such possibilities. Different art forms can be combined to give newer aesthetic shapes. A sport such ice skating can merge with music and dance and you have a wonderful new medium of expression: ice ballet. Ranging from acrobatics, puppetry and ventriloquism, to the hybrid medium such as film, that combines drama, storytelling, music to mediate the audience’s experience with camera, the performing arts are an ever-expanding world of creative possibilities, inviting us to introspect, to question, to rethink, and to change.