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Dance fete off to a grand start

Photo: Ashoke Chakrabarty

Spellbinding: Biswajit Das performing Odissi dance at Marga Darshana during the birth anniversary celebration of Guru Kelucharan Mahapatra in Bhubaneswar. —

BHUBANESWAR: Showcasing nine promising male Indian classical dancers of the country, the 2nd annual Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra Marga Darshan Purush dance festival kicked off at the Jayadev Bhawan in the city on Thursday.

The unique festival – designed exclusively to highlight and promote the marginalised male dancers – has been a brain-child of Odissi Guru Ratikant Mohapatra, son of the illustrious Kelucharan Mohapatra. The festival, named after him, coincided with the 83rd birth anniversary of the late legendary guru.

Interestingly, two prominent male dancers – Bimbadhar Das and Kanduri Charan Behera – inaugurated the event jointly while Ratikant Mohapatra presided. “Despite the viewers’ obsession with the female body, male dancers have accepted the challenges of this career and some of them like Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra and Pandit Birju Maharaj emerged as legends and they have been our inspiration. This festival salutes all those male dancers who have made it a career,” outlined Ratikant, director of the host organisation Srjan.

It is ironic that the founder fathers of Odissi dance were male dancers of high stature and at present there have been a large number of talented male dancers. But lack of any platform has failed to highlight them, observed Kanduri Charan, a senior Odissi dance trainer at the State-owned Odissi Research Centre. Guru Bimbadhar also aired similar sentiments.

Doctor-turned-dancer Biswajit Das of Rourkela opened the festival with an Odissi recital that was followed by Assam’s Sattriya dance recital by Bhabananda Borbayan and concluded with a brilliant Odissi presentation by Amulya Balabantaray of city-based Rudrakshya Foundation.

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