Een fotoreportage door Maartje de Valk, Valerie de Bie en Arlette Sijmonsma

By Su Yeon Lee

Chavi Bansal, Jolien Michielsen and Kim Hoogsterp from the Fontys Dance Academy will make the performance with the melody of Indian classical instrument, Tabla, played by Heiko Dijker.

Team leader Chavi Bansal, who is in the fourth grade of the Choreography Department, came from India to Holland to learn Indian choreographies about four years ago. She came up with this performance to let people know about infanticide, which is a custom to kill the newborn girls. These atrocities still take place in India and China, where infanticide is a ritual. Chavi told her story about living in India as a woman and also answered to several questions of this unfamiliar and interesting theme.

What is your performance about?
‘It’s about the concept of ‘Infanticide’ which is a custom of killing baby girls in India and China. They dip the child in a bucket of water to kill her. Actually, it’s a ritual. They don’t give the child up for adoption, because they say if you do that, then you will not be blessed with a boy. However, if you kill the newborn girl, then you will be blessed with a baby boy. The first image of my piece is just a baby in a womb and the story develops from there. In this piece I’m not really showing the killing, but more the struggle of the baby in the womb.

How did you come to think that you’d make a performance about infanticide?
‘In India, actually, the discrimination between men and women is very high. Even if a woman is very educated, sometimes, she is not allowed to work once she is married. Even a very rich family always wants a boy. It still is no matter how well educated you are, and it doesn´t matter how rich you are. That just the way it is. That’s because the women are considered a weaker section of the society and you can’t communicate as a woman. You can only speak as a man. The women are always told to shut up because women are not allowed to speak. When I was at home, I saw the news that twenty unborn girls were thrown in a well wrapped in plastic bags. The babies were aborted illegally, wrapped in plastic bags and thrown in the well. Only the girls! That news touched me a lot. It’s really happening and still continues, in the 21st century. At the same time, India is growing and becoming more important. They are adopting everything from the west, but the mentality is not as modern as in the west. This hypocrisy of culture astonishes me sometimes. It’s a very conservative, hypocritical and a very incredible point.’

Have you also experienced discrimination in your country?
‘My mother didn’t have any freedom of expression and my father could do everything he wanted to do. We didn’t have any freedom to express a point of view. Actually, I had never really said anything until I came here. I think that’s why I got interested in dance because it’s a very non-verbal way of communicating and it gives me the freedom to communicate without saying anything. Actually I found my freedom of speech here in Holland because I can really say things out loud and that was really new for me. Therefore it took a long time to adjust in the Choreography department. I didn´t know how to open up and it was a challenging process to have this change of culture.
My parents have five kids and my brother is the youngest. They have four girls and they wanted a boy. Mostly, I didn’t have a birthday party celebrated. It was always my brother. The women in the family didn’t have the birthday party. Now, of course, everything has changed. My father is funding my education here. All my sisters have good jobs so my parents now say ‘it’s okay´. Women can also be…’, but it’s also a very old concept that the women should be pressed down and the women should just cook and clean. It’s still going on everywhere.’

If this keeps happening, do you still want to get married? Have you ever thought not to marry in the future?
‘Yes, I do. I’ve been a real rebel all my life. Everything I did was against the tradition actually. I want to stay in the Netherland because now I have many friends here, and I don’t want to move any more. I can also marry an Indian guy but it depends on what kind of person he is. If I meet a good person, I’ll marry him in India, I get really scared at the thought of a marriage though. If the marriage is arranged by the parents in India, it’s a destiny. We cannot choose the person who we´d like to marry .’

If infanticide is common in India, how could your parents have four girls? Wasn’t it that a big burden to your family?
‘My father is very rich so he could afford it. He wanted to keep all of us, 4 girls and he is also more open-minded than other normal Indian guys.’

What do you think about infanticide?
‘It should definitely disappear. It’s ridiculous. If you see the images on Youtube, you will come to know that it’s really horrible. It’s really bad.’

Don’t you want to perform this in your country, India?
‘I would like to if I can get funding, and if there is a place where I can show it. Though I don’t have any specific plans yet, someday, I would like to go back to my home country and change people’s mind with my performance.’

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Door: Nicole Jachmann

[See post to listen to audio]

Trapeze
” Ik ben alleen onder stress bang voor ongelukken”, vertelt Bert Loenders (20) uit België. Hij is tweedejaars student op de Fontys Academie. Als kind turnde hij al, en op zijn vijftiende ging hij bij een jeugdcircus. Zijn specialisatie is  de ‘Washington trapeze’.  Met deze trapeze kun je zonder handen op je hoofd balanceren. ” Ik hoop dat het weer mee zit tijdens het optreden, want ik kijk erg naar de voorstelling uit” , aldus Loenders. Hij excuseert zich dat hij nog even moet oefenen voordat de show begint en loopt naar zijn trainingspartner.

Show
Geconcentreerd kijkt het publiek toe wanneer een van de artiesten in de hoge touwen klimt. Als ze een salto maakt, houden de toeschouwers hun adem in. “Het lijkt zo eenvoudig die kunsten, maar volgens mij gaat er heel veel repeteren aan vooraf”, zegt een oudere vrouw vol bewondering. Veel stelletjes zitten knus tegen elkaar aan terwijl ze naar de negentien jonge artiesten kijken die aan het optreden zijn. De performers zijn allemaal gekleed in het wit en hun ogen glimmen van plezier als ze aan de volgende act beginnen.

Internationaal
De Fontys Academie voor Circus is een kleine opleiding met veel internationale studenten. In een klas zit gemiddeld vijftien man. De leerlingen komen uit heel Europa en zijn allemaal rond de 20 jaar. Dit jaar is er voor het eerst een samenwerking met een circusgroep uit Kenia, Sarakasi genaamd.

Succes
Doordat de muziek voor de juiste spanningsopbouw zorgde, de artiesten erg behendig waren met de trapeze, en vanuit het publiek vele oh’s en ah’s klonken, was dit optreden een groot succes.

Dat debat verliep zeer succesvol. De discussie over vluchtelingen die in hun eigen regio opgevangen moeten worden, werd een verrassende discussie van beide kanten. Het team van deskundigen kon zich duidelijk schikken in de scherpe meningen van het debatteam. Gedurfde uitspraken en idealistische meningen werden goed onderbouwd. Het standpunt over de opvang van vluchtelingen dat aangepakt moet worden vanuit het land zelf, kon op veel steun rekenen uit de zaal.

Ook discussie over de nieuwe soort vluchtelingen stroom waar de wereld mee overspoeld gaat worden, namelijk de klimaatvluchtelingen, gaf maar weer eens aan hoe hoog hun niveau is.

Het debatteam kon aan het einde van de discussie rekenen op een groot applaus van uit het applaus. Iets waar het ROC Tilburg trots op mag zijn.