Bijayini Satpathy, a widely admired exponent of the classical Indian dance form Odissi, has played gods, milkmaids, animals, even natural phenomena. But, she said, she had never portrayed a character that transcended the binary of male and female. She was not even sure she would know how.
“In Odissi,” Satpathy said, “gender is taken for granted.” After years of what she described as “dancing within the codes,” she started questioning whether it was possible to look beyond them. She was eager to find ways, she said, “to embody different identities.”
Those explorations led to her new solo, “Trikaya,” or “Three Bodies.” It comes to the Asia Society for a performance on Nov. 5. (She will also perform it in Salt Lake City and at Yale.) In it, Satpathy depicts three characters from the “Mahabharata,” the great Sanskrit epic.
First she is Arjuna, a warrior famed for his prowess with a bow and arrow. Then, Urvashi, a celestial nymph, or apsara, who tries to seduce him. And finally, Brihannala, a character of neither sex into whom Arjuna is temporarily transformed.
The word used to describe Brihannala in the epic is “kliba,” which can be translated as eunuch, or neuter, and is often interpreted as representing a third sex. Importantly, Brihannala is also a dancer.
In the Natya Shastra, the ancient Sanskrit text on which the classical Indian performing arts are based, “three genders are specified,” Satpathy said. And there are several third sex characters in Hindu mythology. “But in the training for Odissi,” she said, “we are told that for third gender characters, we should adopt feminine positions.” This approach, she said, no longer made sense to her.
The movements associated with gender have as much to do with the dance masters — mostly men — who, in the years after Indian independence, adapted ancient dance practices for public performance, as with any intrinsic qualities in the characters. The reshaping of Odissi and other dance forms in the 1950s was part of an effort to standardize, some would say sanitize, the arts for national and international consumption.
Odissi, a form that developed in eastern India, is performed to vocal music, often songs that draw on Hindu mythology and devotional poetry. The accompanying choreography directly reflects the words as the dancer enacts characters, often passing through several in a single dance.
Mostly, each gender has a distinct language. For male characters, the stance tends to be wide and square, the arms strong, the back straight, the expression of the eyes and face direct. Female characters are danced with a pronounced S-shaped curve in the body, known as tribhanga, or “three bends,” and moves with a lilting fluidity and smaller steps. “Even animals have genders,” Satpathy said, “depending on the energy.”
In “Trikaya,” Satpathy found herself questioning not only how to perform the third sex character, but also how to approach the male and female characters. Encouraged by her dramaturg, the writer and choreographer Poorna Swami, Satpathy read essays by the philosopher Judith Butler, incorporating ideas about how the characters perform gender for others.
To create a blank slate, she pared down some of Odissi’s decorative aspects. Her sari is a neutral color; she wears little jewelry and simple makeup; her hair, now gray, is pulled back in an unadorned bun. The music, by Bindhumalini Narayanaswamy, incorporates moments of silence and stillness.
“We kept stripping things down,” said Narayanaswamy, who will sing live. “I was very glad we could pull in a lot of silence, because if you just watch Bijayini, there is still so much music in the way she moves.”
This stripping down gave Satpathy a new freedom.
As Arjuna, the warrior, Satpathy, in a lunge, raises a taut arm over her shoulder and grabs an invisible arrow, shooting again and again, a portrait of prowess in battle. Then she pauses, as if following the flight of an invisible butterfly, placing it tenderly on one hand. Until, almost sadly, she picks up Arjuna’s bow, and starts shooting again.
What began as a study of hypermasculinity, Satpathy said, became a portrait of a man who asks himself, “Does he really want to kill?”
The dance’s climax is her depiction of the nonbinary Brihannala. In the “Mahabharata,” Arjuna becomes Brihannala for a year, spent living among women and teaching dance before departing again for battle.
She decided to depict Brihannala’s final dance before transitioning back to male form. In her hands, the dance becomes a moment suspended in time, filled with enjoyment “about living the body’s beauty as it is,” she said.
Here, Satpathy moves with commanding self-assurance, combining wide stances with exaggerated tribhanga curves, arms sweeping through the air, shoulders swaying, eyes shining. “At that point, there is a great upsurge in energy,” Narayanaswamy said.
As the intensity rises in the music and the dance, Satpathy seems to break through the story’s frame into a state of ecstatic enjoyment.
“Perhaps the whole idea of gender and identity is a space of ambiguity, constantly fluid,” she said. “We are what we feel — that is my answer to myself.”
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