French dancer and actor-choreographer Annette Leday’s book is a ready reckoner on the contemporary dance scene in India

French dancer-choreographer and theatre artiste Annette Leday on her book and film on contemporary Indian dance

Annette Leday’s face becomes animated when she talks about her discovery of India, especially dance and Kathakali. A performer, choreographer and director, Annette kept returning to India, to learn and to hone her skills as a Kathakali dancer and actor.

More than four decades after that first trip to India in 1975, the dancer-chreographer has authored a book, Contemporary Dance in India Today.

“While travelling with my productions, I came across Indian practitioners of contemporary dance who have evolved and developed their own aesthetics, fusing dance techniques with modern methods of narration and performance,” she says during a conversation at Hotel Residency Tower in Thiruvananthapuram.

She found that with pristine classical performing arts, there were several practitioners of contemporary dance on the Indian stage.

However, Annette found that while classical dance and Bollywood were popular in France, contemporary dance in India was quite unknown to many.

In 2010, Annette was researching contemporary theatre in India and she translated plays of young theatre practitioners into French. She also contributed an article on contemporary dance to a special issue of Theater Public, a French magazine in 2016, which was dedicated to the Indian contemporary dance scene. “That encouraged me to do a more extensive study of contemporary dance. With the support of the Centre National de la Danse un Paris, I travelled to India in 2017 and 2019,” she says.

Talking about the book, the end product of two years of extensive travel, research and conversations, she says the work provides a bird’s eye view of contemporary dance in India through the words of its practitioners.