ALBERT CAMUS AND UDAY SHANKAR

                                      

                           ( Uday Shankar dancing in Paris )

Albert Camus and Uday Shankar

In Notebooks 1935 to 1942, translated by Philip Thody, at page 114, entry dated December 1938, Albert Camus makes a remarkable observation on what the French press then called Hindu dances. The note reads: “ Slowness the basis of Hindu dances. The spreading out of the limbs. The detailed efflorescences in the group movements. Like the accumulation of details in architecture. A proliferation of gestures. Nothing is hurried, everything takes its course. It is neither an action nor a gesture, but a participation.”

Camus had not travelled to India. He saw this in Paris. The description corresponds precisely to Uday Shankar, who was resident in Paris from 1931 to 1938 and performed his Hindu Ballet at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, the Théâtre Mogador and the Musée Guimet. Shankar's art recreated temple sculpture in living form, the tribhanga, the slow unfolding of mudra, the frieze-like grouping that Camus likens to architecture.

The observation is acute because it grasps the theology of Indian classical dance. The body does not press toward climax, it abides. Gesture does not tell a story, it participates in a cosmic measure. This idea of theatre as ceremony rather than action, as presence rather than plot, became central to Camus's mature theory of drama.

The Paris avant-garde : Jean Cocteau, Paul Valéry, André Gide, Michel Chekhov, Kurt Jooss, and Rudolf Laban were all in Paris at the time and documented as meeting Shankar after his Champs-Élysées performances ( popular dance themes in Paris were : Radha Krishna and A Hindu Wedding) . He had founded Europe's first Indian dance company on his return to Paris in 1931 with Swiss sculptor Alice Boner and musicians Vishnu Dass Shirali and Timir Baran. With French pianist Simkie [Simone Barbier] as his dance partner, and under American impresarios Sol Hurok and Aaron Richmond, his troupe was billed as “Uday Shankar and his Hindu Ballet” on a seven-year tour of Europe and America.

What Camus notes in December 1938 in Notebook II (p.114) about Hindu dances is none other than Uday Shankar. His description of “spreading out of the limbs... accumulation of details in architecture” is exactly Shankar's temple-frieze style.

A magazine dedicated to performing arts writes this:

"It was a very important occasion when his French pianist, Simone Barbier (whom he called Simkie), started to learn dancing from him and became his partner, for she had enormous talent and mastered his style to perfection...The combination of tandava and lasya is as crucial in Indian art as it is in Indian religion and philosophy: the great god Shiva is helpless, lying in a slumber, and needs his shakti-his feminine aspect before he can be creative. Uday Shankar understood very clearly this aspect of Indian religion and aesthetics, and it enabled him to give magic to his ballets...Shankar radiated masculine power onstage, and Simkie's charming femininity acted as a perfect foil for his masculinity. Together they created magic."  (Honouring Uday Shankar) 

( Avtar Mota)

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