Ep 21 Padmini Chettur - The outsider

Stage Matters: Beyond the Classical - A Conversation with Padmini

Join us on Stage Matters for a fascinating chat with Padmini Chettur, a leading contemporary dancer and choreographer. In a genre-bending episode, Padmini takes us from her early training in Bharatanatyam and her eye-opening time at BITS Pilani to becoming a dedicated full-time artist.

She details the decade she spent under the mentorship of the legendary Chandralekha, a period that fundamentally shaped her belief that dance must be political and capable of changing society.

Listen as Padmini breaks down the difference between entertaining an audience and disturbing them, explaining why her work strives for "hyper presence" over the sublime. She also shares the surprising realities of contemporary dance today—from managing a company scattered across cities to her practical advice for aspiring artists on financial sustainability.

Discover what an ideal organizer looks like, the role of failure in a live performance, and why she views the audience as having a responsibility to engage with the art.

Don't miss this deep dive into the philosophy, preparation, and enduring conviction of a major voice in Indian contemporary dance.

Transcript

Hi Padmini, welcome to Stage Matters. Thank you. So this is very exciting for me because you're the first performer from a non-musical background. 

Thank you. So it'll be a different kind of a show today. Yes. 

So how did you first get into this? What drew you first into performing, the performing arts? So, of course, as a child, I grew up learning dance Bharatanatyam. So I had a solid foundation of 10 years. But I never at that moment considered becoming a professional classical dancer. 

So I went on to pursue my studies, etc. At the age of 20, I had come back. You've entered some famous college, no? The same one as you, Arvind. 

Yes, BITS Pilani. So after BITS, I had come to Chennai to do my PS, to the thesis, final thesis. And I met this incredible choreographer and artist, Chandralekha, who was, yeah, really in her prime making like huge sort of artistic and political wave within the local scene, but also internationally. 

And when I met her, it was almost like for me, several doors opened in terms of it wasn't just about performing, dancing on stage. It was also through her own discourse, trying to understand who we were as Indians as women, how to counter certain kind of inane sort of capitalist consumerist tendencies that she was already responding to in her time that was in the late 80s, early 90s. And so for me, my entry or my decision to become a full time maker was a lot more than just the practise being, yes, that was a part of it. 

But it was like a time when we were spending five, six hours today, a community of dancers, musicians, actors, and there was some kind of real belief that this could somehow impact and change society. And something which I think today is very rare. I think today, we're all very preoccupied with ourself and a small little world. 

There's no, there are very few grand visions in the way that Chandralekha had. So I was very grateful I could be a part of that for 10 years. And after those 10 years, it was too late to go back to chemistry, or you know how unforgiving those sciences are. 

So I stayed the course, I started to make my own work. And here I am today. So you were also like doing performances in college and stuff? Yeah, I mean, in college, there was kind of quite an active like cultural scene, as you know, there was the dance club, theatre. 

And I was just engaging all of those things just because it was a fun thing to do. But, but the work that I started to do with Chandralekha was very different and a different world altogether. So how was your understanding of performance evolved from that time when you started and doing college performances till now? What, what, what is the difference? What is the change? 

So I mean, college performances were more about sort of social engagement, you know, some kind of release from all of these like engineering courses. 

It was about, yeah, some outlet for one's creativity, but it was very derivative in terms of one was doing the standard English dramas, those kinds of things. With Chandra, I learned that for dance to mean anything, it has to be political, and it has to ask kind of serious questions. And we have to keep relooking at the form, we can't just carry on implementing the same ideas endlessly. 

And so that's the ethos with which I continue to work today. It's always from one performance to the next, constantly asking, even wondering what is the relevance of even doing this. And, you know, in contemporary dance, even worse than in the independent music scene, audiences are very small, platforms are even fewer. 

So if one has to spend one's life doing something like this, one has to find a conviction. Now, and that conviction is all not easy, especially when one is fairly isolated, there are very few contemporary dancers in the country and in Chennai even fewer. But the community tries to engage the form with seriousness. 

And so we know now it's not any more about just putting on a show and entertaining people. We have to ask different questions about the body, about what it means to dance on the stage, why dance, all of these things are constantly something we need to engage. So it's not just that you have an idiom or a form, you make something and you stage it. 

No, that's still people, what they do at a college level. But if one is proposing to be also an artist, then the role of the artist is to also somehow engage the world politically, which doesn't mean activism, but it just means in a political way. Wonderful. 

I was going to ask these questions and you answered it before. Great. So it's like, I know that like all these traditional dance performances are linked with spirituality. 

And what is your opinion on that? Is there something beyond just your performance and beyond the technique and the skill and the entertainment and the activism and the politics? Trying to get me into trouble? No, no, no. See, for me, so Chandralekha had a very famous sort of a tagline, we could call it. She said for her dance was the meeting point of sensuality, sexuality and spirituality. 

So the spiritual element was not negated from our practise. Nevertheless, by spirituality, she didn't just mean losing yourself to the gods or sacrificing yourself to some higher. She meant spirituality in a sense that any kind of practise, I think, from the body always takes us, has the potential to produce a moment where we can something outside of the body's materiality always might come into the picture. 

I think that is what we can maybe people call it spirituality. I mean, I don't use those that kind of language, obviously. But I think that the thing with dance is it has the potential to create a kind 

of an embodied response from an audience. 

And to produce some kind of affect in the audience where the audience starts to respond physically or starts to think or have a sensation that might not be about what the movement is. It's something that we can't explain always. And it isn't about being sublime or like forgetting oneself in the world. 

No, it's absolutely not. It's very much about a kind of a hyper presence, I would call it. And for me, that's what's interesting. 

I'm not interested in just numbing people's senses through watching the beauty of a performance. For me, that that ship has sailed a long time ago. But can you disturb people? Can you make people sit up a little bit straighter? Can you make people question? Yeah, just what life is? What does it mean to stand? What does it mean to walk? These are the things. 

What is the body, essentially? So these are questions I think are more interesting for me. And the answers or whether we attain spirituality or not. For me, that's not the role. 

That's everybody's private preoccupation. I don't believe in a sense that spirituality should be like a collective public experience. Great. 

I want to talk about the preparation process. Let's assume you have your creative material all down pat. And you have a show coming. 

Yeah. So how does it work? What is the what is your regimen? What is the Yeah, how do you guys train? So unfortunately, in today's context, there's no choreographer who has a permanent studio and a company of dancers. This we used to have in the 90s. 

I had a studio, I had dancers on a salary every month. We used to meet six hours a day and practise, train, teach all of this. Sorry. 

Sorry. But how did how were you able to afford it then? And I was able to afford it then because my work was quite well supported by the international sort of dance festival circuit, etc. But now, as you know, even Europe budgets are being cut for the arts. 

The first thing people will do is cut international projects and keep the money for themselves. So finding that kind of financial support for my work has been impossible in the last years. And I've also thought I want to try and sustain my own practise without depending on these foreign collaborators. 

But I have a very beautiful and dedicated group of dancers who come to work with me whether I can pay them or not. But the work is less regular. So now what I tell my dancers is everybody is responsible for their own practise. 

What does that mean? Every dancer who works with me will know how to train themselves whether it's in their bedroom, living room, two or three of them get together, they will have a 

regimen of like maybe two or three hours a day through which they'll strengthen, they'll stretch, they'll work on some technical elements towards the preparation for a show. And then there'll be some moments where I can get the group together, where I'll rent a studio or go to spaces and depending on how much money I have, and we'll actually rehearse the material of the show itself. So what is the blueprint for the material? Like we might have a score in music? Yeah, we have a score in dance as well. 

So we have like, yeah, once the show is ready, we have the beginning, the middle and the end. And it's normally a non stop, say 60 to 70 minute performance. Of course, leading up to the show, say if we're rehearsing one month before, we look at parts like this part needs more work, that part needs more attention, there may be smaller duet sections, trio sections, we'll work on these individual things. 

And say like two weeks before a show, we'll start doing run throughs. Okay, so we'll try to start from the beginning and go till the end. And then we'll see where are the holes which parts need to be tuned very much like you guys do in music. 

And we'll just additionally work on those sections. But nowadays, the nature of my practise is that I have dancers from different cities of the country in my project. So very often, say if we performed in Pune, a couple of months ago, the whole group will come to Pune two days in advance. 

And that's the only rehearsal we have together. And this is not at all an ideal situation. But it's something that seems to have happened. 

Okay, this is because of lack of budgets, lack of budgets, also lack of dancers in Chennai, I wanted to make a work with 10 dancers. There are no 10 dancers for my kind of work. But there are young dancers in different cities who really want to work with me. 

So I said, let me work with the people who want to do the work and not keep looking here in the Bharatanatyam community, which is very closed always. Okay. So you guys do a very like, it's a very physical kind of performing art. 

Yes. So do you have like some kind of a physical regimen like exercise and diet? Yeah, I mean, that has changed over the years, of course. But we always will have some physical regimen. 

I can't say it's the same for every dancer, every dancer will construct their own. For me now, as I've entered my 50s, I mean, until now, it was a lot more intensive practise of yoga, swimming, things like that. As I entered my 50s, I felt like I was losing strength. 

And that always leads to injuries. So I shift my focus now to a more strength based training, along with the required whatever stretching mobility work. And then when is one is getting into towards a performance, one has to say in the last performance, it was very like focussing on rotations and twisting. 

So I have to work specific movement patterns. So I will add that into kind of a practise for myself. So we as musicians, we on the day of the show, we have like a sound check. 

What does that equivalent for you? Yeah, so ours is much more complicated, because we have to also set up lights. And so we'll need at least a whole day in a theatre for so that will be the previous day, previous day, if the festival is kind enough. Sometimes the festival also doesn't have a budget. 

So we agreed to from the morning. So normally, and now I'm also doing the light for my own pieces. So we'll start early morning to rig the lights, focus, etc. 

The dancers will come in midday, they'll get used to this. So every piece has to be reset for the space, who stands where, where are the entries, where are the exits, then we'll try to then we'll also check the sound levels, etc. And then normally like at three or four o'clock, we'll do a full tech run through, okay, we can't perform without this, we'll do a full tech run through, then we hope we'll have like a two hour gap before the main performance. 

And in the morning, of course, the dancers while I'm setting up the light, the dancers will be working on their own. It's a full day like work on the day of a show. Okay. 

Yeah. So it's very tiring also. It's tiring, but that's what we have trained for always. 

So we we can and sometimes we do two shows on a day that also happens. So yeah, people know how to sustain the energy and and yeah, you asked about food. Of course, we have to be careful with what we eat, what we drink, no binges the night before the show, etc. 

No hangovers, no. What role does improvisation play in your work? No, not much. To be honest, I don't. 

I ask I have a process in which the dancers contribute towards the choreographic material, but it's in a very systematic. It's got very tight parameters. So for instance, I might set a question and say, can you produce three actions which fulfil that question? It may be like three rotations, two in one direction and one in a counter direction. 

Now, it's not really improvisation, but it gives them room for their creative input. And then finally, when I collect the inputs from multiple dancers, it sort of broadens the aesthetics of my work. Beyond that, I'm very carefully constructing the material to build the work. 

So so far, and there are some moments in the piece where I'll allow for some choice making in the time of the performance. For instance, I'll say, yeah, on count four, you have to step on count five, you have to internally rotate. They can choose how to do those things. 

But that's not easy always for dancers, especially if dancers are trained in a classical background. We don't have it's like a classical Western musician. They struggle with improvisation. 

So I try to limit the amount that I leave open. Generally, my work is quite tightly composed. Okay. 

What's the most challenging aspect of the performance process for you? And what is an aspect that you dislike? Is there something that you don't like at all in the process? No, in the process, I like absolutely everything. What I dislike is, I dislike having to like still hunt and look for gigs. I mean, after 35 years of being in the field, so I've stopped doing more or less, I just sort of wait till people invite me. 

I've started to dislike touring as an action as an activity. I find it very, yeah, the bad hotels, the bad food, like organisers who don't really take care of things which they should. I love being with the group, the moment of the performance, I love all of those elements. 

But I mean, there's some tours, of course, which are nicer and more comfortable. But generally, I think I stopped disliking touring per se. And so I'm working now, more and more, I find myself working through film, like making film projects and having the projects in visual art context, and where they don't always need you to go. 

I mean, it's better if you go for the instal. But you can also just send your file and say, just do it like this. Okay, so I think I've become a little I mean, yeah, maybe I just travelled too much in the last decades. 

So like, lots of things go wrong during a performance, no? Yes, yes. And your performers can forget things. Yeah, something can happen. 

Yeah, somebody's knee may cave in all those things. Yes, absolutely. Do these things like affect you? Do they fluster you? Do you? How do you recover from it? And no, actually, it doesn't bother me anymore. 

I've come to accept a great deal. Okay. I mean, I think with experience and age one is more forgiving. 

Yeah, I think that I always prefer it. For instance, as you know, Martin always composes the sound for me. I always prefer it when he's there in the show to take care of sound. 

Otherwise, I have to take care of light and sound. In fact, the last show my daughter Janhavi was operating the lights. Because I had to the light and sound booth were two different levels. 

And I couldn't keep going up and down. So I always prefer it if I have an additional person with me for tech support. Because I've realised with sound also things can just suddenly go wrong. 

And if you're working with a recorded track, if suddenly it glitches, or it pauses in the middle, you're really like in trouble. But no, over the years, I've also started also being one of the most senior choreographers in the field, one can get away with a lot. Okay, so I've decided to take that liberty. 

Okay. What role does the audience play in your work? Quite a large role. So and over the years, I've stopped working in these formal proscenium spaces where there's a stage and an audience, the audience is dark, the stage is lit, etc. 

And now I work more in the round, which means there's a central performance area. And the audience sits on all four sides. And in fact, in the last piece I made, which is called stilling, the dancers sat with the audience. 

So it's almost like when you enter the when the performance starts, everybody's wondering what's happening, because they don't realise but a dancer sitting on a chair somewhere has started the performance. And I love this idea of not having this barrier between the performance and the audience. But the risk is also if you have an unsettled audience, or somebody who's going to keep shaking their foot through the show, or somebody who looks visibly bored, all this is there. 

There's no hiding. Yeah. Also, if somebody gets up from the chair and walks out, there's also no hiding it, it affects everybody. 

So in a sense, I like that idea, not to make the audience uncomfortable. But somewhere, people have to come there with, with the decision, having made a decision to actually participate and engage something which might not always be easy or fun or entertaining. But it's a decision and you have the audience, I think has to work a little bit. 

And so yeah, that's so you think the audience has a responsibility even? Yeah, I think so. First of all, in today's age, it's not difficult to find out what you're going to see. See, if I have to go and see some musician I've never heard of. 

And if I'm worried, and if I'm fussy about what music I want to listen to, it's not difficult to Google and listen to something and say, Oh, this is not for me, then don't go. Or this is not for me, but I'm curious anyway, then go. But don't just go to be disruptive, or, you know, just to be negative. 

I think try to do a little bit of research, a little bit of reading, understand, because the performing arts is so wide and varied, right? There's no one size fits all. So yeah, go be curious, find out what it is this artist is trying to do. And then that always helps to have some context to read a work, rather than just going and saying what was this about, you know, that's a kind of a stupid response. 

So does audience feedback or say a critic's feedback affect you? And does it make you change some things? There are a few very close friends and colleagues who have been following my work, who read my work very well. I listen to their feedback. A general population of people who I don't really trust their opinions, it's less important to me. 

It doesn't make me make any changes or influence my work in that sense. So yeah, I listen to the feedback of a few people who I will invite and ask for feedback, and who I trust. So you 

were talking about how the work is political, and how about your personal identity and your personal history? Does it also like inform your work? I'm sure it does. 

I think it's, I'm sure it does. But I never, I never use it as the narrative for my work. I mean, for instance, so, I mean, I don't know if you know this, but I wasn't born in India. 

I was born in England, and my family moved to India when I was seven. But I was immediately put into a Bharatanatyam class. I didn't know any Tamil. 

I think, in a sense, I've always been a little bit outside of everything. That feeling of being the outsider has never left me, though I've lived in Chennai all my life since that moment. And I think there's something that informs my aesthetics, that is Western, that I can't explain why it's like this. 

Because I know other people who've lived abroad all their life, who don't have that aesthetic confusion, I would call it. So there are things which we don't know how, what affects us from early childhood, you know, at times of movement, what affects us. I very much know for a fact that those four years at BITS Pilani, studying chemistry, or my tendency to love logical scientific elements of construction affects my work a lot. 

So in a sense, we can't ever keep those things out, right? Like, what you grew up reading, what you grew up listening to, who you grew up with, those things, I think, eventually come into work. But I think that it's difficult to find these threads and to really understand why the work you do is the way it is. I saw what you did the elements and chemistry. 

Yeah, that was a good one. So you, you briefly touched upon the organisers. So what, what do you expect from an organiser? What do you think is an ideal organiser? Is there one ideal organiser? Yeah, there are, for instance, so there's a platform in Calcutta, it's called Pickle Factory. 

They are, it's so wonderful to be in their festival. So they take great care, like picking you up from the airport. That's a big one for me. 

Okay. Um, they don't have big budgets, but they there's just an element of care and everything they do, like the green room will have. Something like fruits, nuts, tea or coffee, you know, they'll always, they'll try their best to facilitate, to provide within difficult circumstances. They have an incredible audience that over the years they've built, so you never have to go to pickle factory and wonder if people are going to come. They often, what they do very nicely is they partner, they partner up with other institutions in the city. 

So for instance, for my work, they'll partner with like a visual art gallery so that I have also an allied sort of exhibition. So it's not just one performance, they try to make a kind of an umbrella of works, maybe that span three or four years, and there'll be different conversations and workshops. So you're going to pickle factory, it's a whole week long and it feels rich, it feels full. 

You've met many, many beautiful people, people who've been following your work because it's a, like I went to pickle factory six years ago and this year, and then it feels like there's some continuity. And I like platforms like that, not just hit and run or one time we'll do that to tick this box, but organisers who've really followed your work, found out what you're up to, who bring the work knowing it's not for everyone, it's difficult, knowing I'm difficult to deal with as a choreographer. So, you know, those are interesting spaces for me and we don't have too many of those. 

And often in India, I mean, the contemporary dance platforms are all run by dancers and choreographers. So the funding is never huge, but some places there's an element of care and concern that's actually like, that's really important and special. Do you have a lot of bad organisers? Well, these days, I often just avoid Yeah, but there are there are bad organisers. 

And those tend to be the more like, for instance, a couple of years ago, a museum in Bangalore, which had a lot of money invited me to create so it was a commissioned work for the opening of the museum. And it was really exciting to me because I thought this is a big project, there's a budget, I created like a six hour durational exhibition. But the organiser actually wasn't we were just some kind of a backdrop, the pretty women in the corner kind of scenario. 

They were just interested in whining and dining the VIPs, you know, and there was no communication about who I was about what the work was doing, no connection to me or my work. So you end up then coming away with like a really bad feeling though. It's a kind of a, it's a corporate, it's a gig then. 

But you know, then you put a lot of effort into something. So yeah, I try to avoid those kinds of spaces now. Okay. 

There's any kind of art form, it's very difficult to make it financially viable. Yeah, you're right. And so how, how has it been for you? How do you make it work? What, what would you tell 

future people who want to enter like, the same space you're in? I often just tell dancers to, yeah, have have a job on the side. 

And a lot of the dancers who work with me do have that they teach in schools. They do or they teach something else like special needs, children, or they would take a certificate in yoga so that that can back them up. You have to have some source of alternate income and myself also in lean periods. 

I've taught Pilates, I've taught yoga, I've taught in schools, I've done all of these things. Because it's very few people can sustain just doing this kind of work. And I've been very lucky. 

Well, not very lucky. But I've reached a point in my career now where I have some international teaching appointments and platforms that I work with, which are better paid simply because they're international. But there's not that many positions like this available for an Indian contemporary dancer, right, to work internationally. 

It's, it's, I'm only getting these things now because of my big career over the last decades. And the climate is very different now. It's very, it's crowded. 

When I was starting to do choreography in Chennai, I was the only contemporary choreographer other than Chandra Lekha. And in the whole country, there were only two or three people. Now there are hundreds. 

So the competition is I'm not even I don't feel the quality is better. But for every little festival, residency grant, there are hundreds of applications, you know, but we don't have the amount of possibilities to sustain all of this. So it's people keep saying it's good, more is better we have, but I don't agree with that. 

I think what's the point of having dance schools and churning out 25-30 dancers when there's no work for them? Yeah, what are they all going to do? Are there enough venues as well? No, there are not enough venues. I mean, unless you just rent it yourself and perform yourself, you know, so. So you have to deal with groups of people who are working for you, working under you. 

Yes. So do they do you have to deal with like personal issues, egos? I would say the big advantage of being my age, 55, is that you are you have so much, you have some distance you're able to the dancers who you're working with, sometimes in their 20s, 30s. And because of the gap in our ages, there's some kind of respect and certain lines that they won't cross. 

And I've also over the years learned how to work with people in a gentler manner, without having to push or shout or bully or shame or any of this. So I'd say, actually, my studio is very harmonious at this moment, which is nice. I don't. 

And I think with contemporary dance, especially in group practises, and with the kind of work I do, people know it's never about one individual. It's always about the collective and it's what 

they can create within, in between them. So it's never even if there's a soloist of one solo in my work, I'll always give it to the dancer who won't be egotistical about it. 

Because for me, dance is not about one's private ego or personality. It's something else. So people, dancers who can leave that out of the window are often the best dancers. 

So are like external stimulants, drugs, alcohol prevalent in in the sphere? No, because dancers are have to eventually work with the body, and they are quite cautious not to have like, kind of damaging practises for their health. They're quite moderate as people. So yeah, I don't think there's much drugs. 

And I mean, yeah, after a show, everyone likes to have one drink. Yeah, but yeah, that's about it. Okay, so nothing before the show? No, absolutely nothing. 

Those problems? No, never, never, never. Okay. So what is so unique about a live performance that you cannot get in a recorded medium? It's a, I think that's the main question that you wanted to ask me, perhaps. 

A, I think it's the fact, or it's the whole ritual of, or the, an effort, right? You, you see there's a show listed, you make a decision, you're going to make an effort to go to this venue. So there's this whole social element involved. B, as you say, there's always this, the possibility of failure, which I think is very exciting, always about performance. 

I'm not so interested in these flawless, virtuosic things. There's this vulnerability, and then this, this dancer standing in front of you, who's just trembling a little bit with nerves. And, and then you feel the audience next to you responding, and you might have a little chat with somebody. 

So there's, it's a whole gamut of experiences, which is very different from sort of sitting in your house and watching the documentation of something, which especially in the case of dance, never does dance justice, unless you have a huge budget, five cameras filming and a fancy edit. Okay, in which case, I think dance can be well documented, but there's very few people who know how to do that, who can replicate the dynamic of dance, because you're not just, if you have a big stage, 10 people, you're not just sitting and watching 10 people all the time from the same angle. No, the eye is shifting, you're watching somebody's foot, you're intrigued by somebody's fingers or an expression, which a camera can never give you. 

And I guess each person is watching something different. Everybody's watching something different. You feel people's breath, you sometimes hear the dancers queuing each other. 

So it's a, it's a whole, it's a completely different experience. Now, is it for everybody? I don't think so. There are people I know who go through their whole life, never wanting to go. 

That's also a preference. Is every live performance worth going to? I also don't think so. I've been to some live performances, but I also thought, why did I waste my time? I might as well have sat at home and listened to some better music. 

So but if it's right, and if there's something in the performance, I think it's a very special kind of a transaction. That's how I would see it. Do you have hope for the future of performing arts? Because we are like everything is going into phones and Instagram. 

To be very honest, in India, I feel more hopeful. Because I feel like we are in a moment where we are seeing more sort of privatised art spaces who actually have some money. We're seeing like, in the visual arts, like a huge kind of growth and presence of like the visual art gallery, who are slowly becoming more interested in or open to the idea of performance very slowly, but at least there's some openness. 

I feel there are more platforms, not that many still, but more than there was. Whereas because I just came back from Canada a few weeks ago, there things are shutting down in a big way. Like the equivalent, the Harbourfront Theatre, which is sort of the equivalent of our Music Academy, has shut its doors. 

So and that's very disheartening for young dancers who live in a city like that. If big theatres, big venues are shutting down, downsizing, arts budgets are being reduced, because 10 years ago, they had a lot. But we, I think in India, we're in a space where things are growing. 

And we can be self-sufficient, we have enough different cities, the smaller cities are, cities like Pune, Jaipur are going to start engaging the arts in a big way, I think in the next 10-15 years. So I think we're going to explore new contexts, new ways of thinking about these things. So I'm optimistic, in a sense. 

I'm happy to hear that. Yes. I forgot to ask you one thing. 

Yeah. Have you felt any specific challenges being a female artist in this space? Like have you felt times when you're unsafe or there have been biases? I've never felt that. Okay. 

I've never felt it. But I think it's also, I come from a generation where I think things were overlooked, or we sort of turned, we, we had a very different relationship to safety. I think we were a generation where we actually thrived on risk and uncertainty. 

And that was a very integral part for me as a dancer in my 20s. And today's young generation is different. There's a, the world is so unsafe, then there's a need in your own personal life to actually find some kind of security. 

And I understand that. But so I think, yeah, we need to understand the times and to respond to that. Brilliant. 

Almost at the end. So if you have to say, what is the essence of performance in one kind of a philosophy or a line, what would it be? What, what is performance to you? Performance is, I'm going to actually paraphrase one of my favourite and a dancer who's inspired me, my whole life, German dancer Susanna Linke, who was giving a talk on a stage in Delhi. And she came right, you know, there's that edge of the proscenium stage where you could just topple off. 

And she walked that line. And she said, this is dance. Standing on the centre of stage is not dance. 

And I think that's the truth of any performative. It's that moment where you take a risk, you come to this point of failure. And we understand the limit, we understand what it is to be human. 

And I think that for me, in any performative moment, I'm not so interested in the cute, cosy, well rehearsed sing along sort of situation. But I'm really wanting somebody to take a risk in that moment, and to find themselves to surprise yourself, I think, as a performer is important. Otherwise, it becomes mechanical, mundane. 

And that's the death. Brilliant. Thank you.
 Thank you so much. This has been like very informative for me. Thank you so much. Yes, and good luck to you.