Role of gender in Dance Like a Man

          Introduction

"... that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one put on clothes in the morning, that there is a 'one' who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today."

                                              -Judith Butler, 

                                               Gender Trouble

That theatre is an effective medium of expression is universally acknowledged. It can at times be propagandist and negotiating and even subversive too. Mahesh Dattani, seen as one of the pioneers of Modern Indian Theatre, effectively uses it to uncover issues which have traditionally been kept hidden so as to maintain the status quo and keep away any speck of rupture which can put to question their 'normative' existence. Among many such issues is the question of gender representation which is brought into relief by situating it into the complex structure of Indian family system, which upholds the father as master of the house. A study of Dattani's Dance Like a Man therefore must be truly rewarding when he read through the prism of gender and its naunced presence in the Indian context.

Feminist Discourse and Contemporary Gender Studies

Feminism's key aim is to foreground that the roles performed by women as daughters or mothers are not natural but social constructions in which a woman is 'trained to fit in'. Traditionally sex has been differentiated from gender on the grounds of being biological as opposed to the social. Contemporary theories on gender, however, consider sex as a social category too, for the biological body itself is studied as the site where socio-political understandings of the onlooker are mapped on. Feminist theory, therefore, argues that gender is an ideology because it naturalizes what are social 'performatives' and it proposes and reinforces the differences in social performances as natural, pre-ordained and unalterable. But remaining in proximity to deconstructive thoughts, the postmodern thinkers argue that gender is not a fixed or stable category across the world. Gender, like a text, is a performance, the playing out of roles, that has to be repeated and validated within a specific social and cultural context, but which is also open to contest and negotiations. The postmodern views of gender are also anti- essentialist. Critics like Butler do not believe that there is an 'essential' woman or man because these are meanings that emerge in performances relative to each other. The post modern theories of gender even reject the notions of authenticity, authority, universality and objectivity. Hence, texts such as Mahesh Dattani's Dance Like a Man question the desperately strict adherence to gender roles in the conventional social framework which gives birth to a caustic relation between a father and a son and ruins an artist of his innocent passion for his art. 

Gender Issues in Dance Like a Man

Dance Like a Man with one of Dattani's favourite pet concerns gender through one of his innate passion - dance. The automatic assumption when on refers to gender as a principle concern is that the exploration would be of women's issues. Says Dattani of this play- " I wrote the play when I was learning Bharatanatyam in my mid twenties... a play about a young man wanting to be a dancer, growing up in a world that believes dance is for women... " Characteristically, Dattani raises a few unlikely questions about the sexual construct that a man is. The stereotypes of gender roles are pitted against the idea of the artists in search of creativity within the restrictive construction of the world that he is forced to inhibit. Jairaj with his obsession for dance is all set to demolish these stereotypes. This is the twist that the playwright gives to the stereotypes associated with 'gender' issues that view solely women at the receiving end of the oppressive power structures of patriarchal society. The play dispels this notion and explores the nature of the tyranny that even men might be subject to within such structures.

Dance Like a Man revolves around the couple, Jairaj and Ratna, both Bharatanatyam dancers, and maps the struggles they had to face in the course of their Bharatanatyam careers. Amrit Lal Parekh, Jairaj's autocratic father opposes their dancing and becomes the epitome of patriarchal subjugation in the play. The themes which Dattani explores in his plays are far from conventional and centrally focuses on meals stereotyping and gender identity crisis. The title 'Dance Like a Man' itself is suggestive of the central challenges faced by the male protagonist, Jairaj, "[if] he [can] dance like a man", as the very notion of dance is opposed to that of maleness and considered only as a female enterprise. Jairaj finds his passion condemned, his gender questioned and his identity stigmatized.
Gender is deemed performative and seen to be a cultural process and a pre-established pattern of behaviour which in the play brings Jairaj's plight to the fore. The widely accepted view among the general public is that men and women fundamentally differ and that a distinct set of fixed traits characterize masculinity and femininity. Dattani comments gravely on gender binaries and highlights the bias society fosters against the act of dancing in the play, voiced by Amrit Lal - " A woman in a man's world may be considered as being progressive. But a man in a woman's world, pathetic." Jairaj is thus seen to struggle under the weight of a patriarchal subjugation, depressed desire and traditional constructs.

           Conclusion

In early rigid societies 'gender role' was labelled as masculine and feminine. However, today the traditional notions about gender roles are undergoing transformation; changing roles in the social and economical spheres had led to the change in the gender roles as well. Gender roles are for the most parts, compulsory performances ones which none of us force to negotiate. The patterns of posture, movement, dress, adornment, intonation, speech and the like associated with cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity build up a constraint on practice "in the social structure of gender", thereby affecting individual potential.