Discovering Dance

Discovering Dance

This collection was the start of Sejals journey as a painter. Underlining the works is the essential elemental of the artists unlearning what she had learnt as a trained classical dance about the nature of dance itself. She decided to stop performing, instead turning her energies to restudying dance. Sejal discovered dance in herchildhood and when in college received arts grants to research the evolution of Indian dance and that, she says, made her realize, “how little I knew about the origins of dance and that what we believed to be the origins of dance are very incorrect and contrived. The history of dance is very contrived. So I decided to stop performing until I understood dance and understood my body and how it wants to move and what its natural rhythm is. That took me on a whole new expedition: traveling, studying, observing, learning dance. At first I got stuck on forms of dance like mohinatttam, bhartnatyam, flamenco, contemporary dance.”

But it soon became clear to Sejal that dance is a much larger language and there was much more to movement even when you are sitting or walking down the street (Thats where the collections that followed Discovering Dance have stemmed from). But the initial discovery and research was on realising how large dance was. The realisation that every form of dance has a flip side to it took root, “When you look at a dance form, a tradition you have to see its layers, understand them, see it from different angles. Each piece in this collection describes the full perspective of dance.”