Sweltering in a Dancehouse theatre, text echoes above a violet stage. Ānanda, we are told, is “not a feeling, but a place.”

Christopher Gurusamy appears with glowing yellow orbs in each hand. He spirals and swirls these around his body; two luminous satellites orbiting a darkened form. His arms sweep overhead and when he jumps, it is as if he is foam flicked from the crest of a wave. What follows is six vignettes on the theme of joy, which is embodied in the Bharatanatyam style.

It is hard to fault Gurusamy’s dancing in Ānanda: Dance of Joy. Before seeing this piece from Perth-born, Chennai-trained Gurusamy, my exposure to Indian classical dance was limited to celebrations of Diwali and the poignant Kathak choreography of Shinjita Roy. Although unfamiliar with Bharatanatyam, Gurusamy’s technical skill foregrounds his expertise: his mastery is obvious in Ānanda and descriptions of his “virile glamour” ring true.¹

Throughout Ānanda, Gurusamy's feet strike the floor like thunderclaps. He percussively stamps his heel bones, bouncing out of full squats as his knees flare out beneath him. His arms twist with the rhythmic slicing of oars on water and his hands spring into the ‘thumbs-up’ Shikhara mudra—evoking, amongst other symbols, the God of Love.² As he dances, Gurusamy’s Achilles tendons reach into elastic infinity and with every bound I imagine their growing strain. I find myself waiting for an explosion of flesh and golden bells, but each deep flex of the ankle is met with ease. His mercurial face is alive with movement: eyes flirting and flickering as his lips purse and peck.

It is rare to see a technician like Gurusamy in Melbourne. This is not to say that Melbourne dancers are untechnical. Rather, this is to spotlight the tension between what I have called ‘canonical’ Melbourne dance (“melbpomo”)³ and our prodigal relationship with formalism and (by extension) technique.⁴ We pray for monstrous children, per Deleuze, who might transform our work beyond familiarity and recognition and in turn crown us Yvonne II, Grand Saviour of Dance.⁵ We long for an exceptionalism that might justify our practices; a cure for triviality.

By contrast, each of Gurusamy’s movements are resolved with exacting precision and reverence. Juxtaposing his technique with the often self-congratulatory bravura of Western theatrical dance renders Gurusamy’s accomplishment all the more captivating. He is a sun bedecked in scarlet and indigo, yet he refuses irony or ego. The recorded score conjures a similar splendour. The vocal agility of singer Adithya Madhavan is sublime—his timbre and accuracy are as pure as quartz—and Gurusamy’s physicality is enriched by the intense instrumentation.

Gurusamy drops his poise but once in Ānanda, quickly adjusting his necklace in a pause between chants. The sweat on his cheeks looks like tears and a single line of moisture divides his stomach from sternum to navel. I am captured by this sudden vulnerability and it elicits the strongest emotional response from me—a swell of curiosity.

I was fortunate to attend a lecture-demonstration before Ānanda opened. Gurusamy is a charismatic lecturer, often apologising for covering swathes of material at speed. On the facial movements that form part of abhinaya [dramatic dance], Gurusamy explained that his mission is to ‘lead’ the audience towards an emotional state.⁶ “It’s not about me feeling,” he clarified. Rather, his goal is to evoke emotion in the audience; to act as a vector for joy. However, Gurusamy also suggested that his emotional state was not entirely secondary to the goals of abhinaya. Referring to Beyoncés alter-ego, Gurusamy noted, “There is no Sasha Fierce version of me.” In other words, the dancer we see in Ānanda is wholly Gurusamy: he is not just an emotional usher.

Joy is not an uncomplicated emotion and the title of this piece implies a bold thesis from Gurusamy. Though we are granted insight into different expressions of joy throughout, I am not convinced of the cohesion of the work as a whole. If Bharatanatyam is not primarily about Gurusamy’s feelings, as he suggested in his lecture, but the artist’s feelings remain central to the performance of the work, then how do we understand emotion in Ānanda? Is this sincere affect or affected melodrama? Gurusamy presents an essay on bliss that does not yet justify his description of dance as a “universal path to joy,” nor resolve the inner conflict between leading an audience’s emotions and embodying one’s true interior state.

This tension between subject and objective is the norm in dance—a genre unavoidably created and read in the context of politics. Despite calls for art that ‘brings us together’ as one happy family, theatrical dance has more often been used to divide and impose than to unite.⁷ Images of hands held around the Earth are a fantasy when juxtaposed with the Manifest Destiny of Martha Graham’s Frontier, 1935,⁸ the revolutionary fervour of The Red Detachment of Women, or the Blairist gooning of Billy Elliot.⁹ Dance is an art form of the body and as such directly interfaces with the politics that create a body: race, gender, sex, class, ability and national image. If you truly believe that theatrical dance brings people together in some utopian way, ask yourself who is being brought together next time you sit down in a theatre or gallery.

At its broadest, Ānanda traces important questions around the role of joy as the dominant affect of political power and though Gurusamy focuses on the personal facets of joy—queer love, humour and dancing itself—Ānanda arrives in Melbourne at a time of flux.¹⁰ We must be willing to examine theatrical dance as an arm of empire regardless of the content of a work, not because we should ‘inflate’ the importance of art so it attains consequence, but because the body is not an unaffected entity; not a ‘joyless’ thing. Whenever we hear calls for universal, positive art, we must listen with sceptical ears.

The richness of Ānanda lies in the contradictions Gurusamy navigates while delivering his dance of bliss: his desire to guide the audience without consideration of the self crossed with an irrepressible need for self-expression. There is something deeply intriguing about Gurusamy’s work here, particularly as state powers press and lead us towards (uncritical) joy. This is a complex bliss, then. With Ānanda, we have an artist at the edge of his technique, poised to break new thematic ground. As a work of dance Ānanda is peerless. As a work of art, I can only look forward to what comes next, joyous or otherwise.