Ramli Ibrahim, a Malaysian, is many dancers rolled into one, giving expression to the topic of this interview which was carried out for SRUTI by MURRAY BRUCE TURNER.

Ibrahim was initially trained in traditional Malay dance styles. He was sent to Australia on scholarship to study engineering but he used the opportunity also to train in classical ballet and Modern dance techniques. After obtaining his degree in engineering, he spent another two years at the Australian Ballet School to complete his dance training. Following that he was invited to join the prestigious Sydney Dance Company where he worked for five years before returning to Malaysia in 1983.

As a member of the Sydney Dance Company, which is the leading Australian Modern dance company, Ramli Ibrahim' broadened his dance training to include another dance discipline, the Indian classical dance. Indrani Rahman introduced him to Guru Deba Prasad Das, who became his Odissi guru. He studied Bharatanatyam under the guidance of Adyar K. Lakshman of Madras. He has presented his Indian classical dance repertoire in Australia, London, New York, Singapore and Malaysia. Created many new roles and accompanied the company in highly successful international tours which took him to London, Rome, New York, Washington, D. C., Hong Kong and so on. Ibrahim has contributed much to the present interest in Contemporary Dance in Malaysia with his innovative choreography and fresh interpretation of the dance. 

Ramli, where was your first encounter with dance?

In Malaysia, where I was born — I can't remember a time when I wasn't dancing. I have danced since I was a child, and my encounters with dance then were the many traditional dances of Malaysia. Not with dance composed and performed especially for the stage. Then I was always dancing with friends, and it wasn't until later that I took part in school productions. Unfortunately, I was forced to hibernate my artistic impulses at military school, but it was there that I gained a scholarship to study engineering in Australia. That's where my life in dance had its second birth.

But what made you take up dance? You were studying engineering, no?

Once removed from the cloak of military discipline, I found I was like a plant exposed to the sun. It needed just one exposure and I was going to the theatre, enrolling in ballet class and Modern dance class, and soon, within a year, I was performing with the West Australia Ballet in most of its productions. This incidentally made me quite sought after for musicals like Hello Dolly and The Boyfriend which, though they were commercial, were very good professional experiences. My later training in classical ballet was in the Cecchetti style, a bravura approach to execution which I find personally enriching.

Is ballet as a dance form completely satisfying for you?

Ballet as a technique is basically a means to an end, in the sense that performance is the goal of ballet technique. The stage, not the classroom. I know a lot of students in Australia simply hopping from one class to another. Perhaps this is satisfying for them. But even then, I always thought of the choreographer as the greatest impulse for the work, and I was simply preparing myself and my body for choreography.

For choreography in ballet? Isn't creativity inhibited by strict movement codes and themes?

On the contrary, there is complete freedom for the choreographer in ballet, much more than in many other forms I can think of. Because the ballet technique is neutral. Basically one understands that the technique prepares me dancer for the creativity of the choreographer.

What are your boundaries — conventions, themes, movement rules?

When one talks about a ballet tradition, one implies several techniques, styles and ballet traditions. Preclassical dates from the seventeenth century. Classical from Imperial Russia. And modern ballet from the turn of the century with Diaghilev and Massine, running through to Frederick Ashton, Robbins and Balanchine. And on the other hand, you have the techniques thrown up in Modern dance. So nowadays the dancer has to know many techniques. The dancer should be versed in aspects of the ballet tradition and also in the Modern tradition because die contemporary choreographers will draw inspiration from both sources.

Isn't there a certain amount of conflict involved in using both ballet and modern techniques in the same work?

There is most certainly not! — There is no conflict at all in genuine dance. At one stage, the Martha GrahamIsadora revolution was in the context of ballet as a limitation, but now you find the Graham company will employ techniques from classical ballet. I want to make it quite clear that for the dancer, the dance technique is neutral. The choreographer will form the dancer into a shape desired, and so the form of that Unique dance piece, alive within the choreographer, will be revealed. There is no conflict. If art is true to itself there will not be conflict, not at the highest level. Extrapolating this thought, neither can I see any conflict between Western and Indian dance. One small example. The basic stance in Bharatanatyam is aramandi. In Odissi, chauk. While the plie, so called from its balletic origins, is very much used in Modern dance. The turnout of the knees happens to give the greatest opportunity for movement development though, of course, what develops is different. In ballet, a jump, in Modern an expansion and in Indian dance, the jati and korvai. Half your life, you're trying to increase^ your turnout, increase that degree of skill. What this shows is not so much a common stance, but a shared desire to increase the range of expression of the body.

Has Modern dance drawn upon the classical Indian tradition?

Oh, most definitely. Martha Graham for one has drawn directly from hatha yoga and pranayama, and her. applications of kundalini are well known. And this I find interesting. We can trace out a circle. At about the same time, in the nineteen thirties, Martha Graham was inspired by Indian dance and Rukmini Devi in turn inspired by Ajina Pavlova and dramatic ballet. Consequently, the choreographic formations of the Kalakshetra dance dramas reinterpret the corps de ballet, the pas de deux and the prima ballerina's solo. This is all very healthy, no.

The universality of dance is reconfirmed and what is truly human, the spirit, passes in and between cultures, in all directions.

Universal values inside a particular dance culture extend the dance beyond itself....

Yes, this is what I'd like to say is an objective rather than culturally weighted truth. Objective rather than culturally subjective, dance appraised in terms of itself, instead of things alien to the theatre, brought forward under an Eastern or Western banner. I have thought and danced in both camps. The final criterion of dance is: Is it good or bad dance, not is the dancer male or female, is the dancer Eastern or Western? There are a terrible lot of bad Indian dancers and some good Indian dancers. There are terrible ballet dancers and a few good ballet dancers. The same with Modern dance. What we want is more of dying good ones. The bad dancer provides us with an experience not worthy of dance.

You have an open mind on performance quality?

If we look not at the culture or the dancer, then the dance speaks. We're talking about the dance but not so much the dancer. Because if we see the dancer openly, we see pure dance, rather than: is the dancer male or female, is the dance Western or Indian? To compare is most immature, and it's not going to do anybody any good.

In your work in Modern dance areas, in ballet areas, and in the universe of Odissi, are you trying to do something in common?

When I'm performing my Odissi or my Bharatanatyam, I've always stuck to the traditional forms. I respect traditional forms. It is one of the reasons why I was open to Indian classical dance. At times I find myself doing some very depressing contemporary work, that to me takes a cynical view of life. Against this depression, I need a celebration of life. For me, Indian dance is a celebration of life. It rejuvenates me. Makes me happy. I'm able to release myself, and let go of what I am, in Indian dance. 

Is contemporary dance so different?

No, not at all. Not all of the Modern dance pieces I do are bad in that way. Some are exhilarating.

How?

For instance, I was working with my artistic director Graeme Murphy in the Sydney Dance Company. I enjoyed working with him immensely but, as a dancer in a company, you aren't able to choose your choreography. It may be that one day — because the company will have several choreographers throughout the year — you may be working with a choreographer who isn't to your liking.... Choreography is a very important factor in contemporary works. Relatively speaking, choreography is not an important factor in Indian classical dance. The word choreography, blatantly overused in India nowadays, refers to the originality of the work, the origin of one's viewpoint.

Isn't choreography what's happening in Bharatanatyam? A choreographer's characteristic varnam, say?

I think it might be happening. You could say that someone tries to reveal a diamond in a different light. I would say that the works of Dr. Padma Subrahmaniam are within the context of the Natya Sastra, but are seen differently. I think this shows a great deal of respect for the far-sighted innovations made by past masters. We can't be all the time practitioners of a past creative period, a shadow of a certain way of looking at something. Within the constraint imposed by the collective psyche, we must be creative.

Does creative choreography within the Indian context reflect a contemporary way of life?

I don't think it can help but do that, because art is terribly honest, and it will reflect, whether one likes that or not, how one functions, and how one lives in contemporary culture. After all, when you talk about classical Indian dance, you're talking also about contemporary* classical Indian dance. Isn't that so? And therefore, the Kalakshetra style says, can't help but reflect its own evolution.

The type of reflection in dance — the uses of reflection of personal experience — in the Indian and Western systems, are different, are they not?

As you know, the West is very much preoccupied with individualistic expression, with the individual, whereas Indian classical dance is very much a matter of collective consciousness. The dancer's personal interpretation is submerged in the mirror of the collective psyche. Though I don't believe individuality is repressed.

Might I add, that individuality here comprises the basis of collective expression?

That's right, that's right, it doesn't mean that the individual is totally submerged in the mass at all. Because you find wonderful individual gateways emerging. One sees the collective genius within an individual performer. I think this is how an understanding of an Indian dance like Bharatanatyam, like Odissi, has to come about.

Can you see the day when Western-trained artists will be dancing Indian dance?

I don't know, I've never speculated on that. I can definitely see that Indian dance has transcended its native boundaries. And I'm not speaking simply of Tamil Nadu. Dancers from the North are dancing Bharatanatyam. But not only that, Bharatanatyam has gone out of India so well. It has become world property.

So Indian dance is reflecting a global and international experience? 

Yes, and this is something India should rejoice in, most definitely. And whether a foreign dancer ... now again, we must define what a foreign dancer is. Are we going to say that, in all truth, Siva Nataraja speaks only the Tamil language or the sum total of languages? So I feel the fact that many more non-Tamil dancers are performing Bharatanatyam is something to take pride in. At one stage, it was thought that only Russians could perform ballet. The fallacy, you might say, no longer holds.

In dance, the dancer expresses the concepts and values specific to a culture, a way of life. To dance, "to understand takes much hard work, both inner and outer work. Who really understands Indian dance?   

It is difficult to have another Balasaraswati. She comes once in a lifetime. Like Isadora Duncan. There's a lot of cliched jargon floating around in so much of Indian dance today, especially mystic jargon. Half of which, bandied about, isn't understood by the artist himself. Mainly because we have come to believe, through a process of loss of meaning, that spirituality is the sole prerogative of Indian dance. Most Indian dancers aren't aware of the mask they often wear.

 What mask?

In a way it's surprising, but then not so much, when you recognize what's going on in the Indian psyche, that a dance form, supposedly transcendental, has produced some of the most egotistical dancers. As a witness of both Eastern and Western theatre, I see the irony at work here. Another thing is that the gurukulavasa tradition has become different. Inevitably it resembles the studio arrangement in the West, though with maybe more intimacy between student and guru. In this case, the guru has a prime responsibility to impart the classical relationship between dance and life to the student.

But in many cases, the student is not being sensitized by the guru, and the job of true understanding is very much in the hands of the dancer. And so the classical form is caused to change and accept the present.

Interestingly soul-searching is, by the way, especially obvious in the foreign students'

Is soul-searching part of Western dance?

Very much in Modern dance — more so than Western classical. And that is why one finds that the Modern dance tradition produces intelligent dancers, but the classical form does not. Because of the high degree of specialisation of movement and character type required by ballet, the dancers start very young, and all they do is perfect that body machine. So the general education of young dancers is very limited. For an artist to flower, it's not just dancing, its everything else — including going to galleries, painting, literature and so on.

I'd like to know more about the individualism of contemporary dance. You said that the choreographer manipulates a number of styles according to his or her vision. Does this mean that contemporary dance varies from culture to culture, and is in a sense independent of existing cultures?

That's quite true. For example, what I'm at present doing in Malaysia with the Malaysian National Dance Company is a contemporary dance with a Malaysian. thrust, reworking and representing the Malaysian. experience and mythology in relation to the company dancers and audience. 

Perhaps contemporary dance is the experience of the way you feel wherever you are in the world?

Yes, contemporary is the very essence of the word. Meaning NOW, the present. But again, talking about Rukmini and Pavlova, and Martha Graham deriving her language from yoga, I would also like to relate a personal experience of the universality of dance. When I was in London doing the role of Nijinsky in the Sydney Dance -Company ballet Poppy which is about the life and art of the French poet Jean Cocteau, I invited Ram Gopal along to a performance. He later told me Jean Cocteau had painted him. He also showed me a. photograph of himself and Nijinsky. I was standing in a circle, with neither beginning nor end! On another occasion, I was studying Odissi under Guru Devaprasad Das in Bhubaneswar. One summer afternoon, when I was very, very bored, and hot, I was looking at some of the memorabilia stored in boxes under the bed. Eventually, I found myself looking at a stained photograph of Devaprasad in the company of Martha Graham, Ted Shawn and Matteo in New York. And they are all geniuses! You know, these are the people. who is brought together by the truth of dance?