The average sari wearer first meets the garment in stores, rows of bite-sized packages crinkling in starchy glory, producing tiny whooshes of wind when unfurled. The sari elicits only clipped and subdued sounds – quite unlike the loom it is woven on – which suffuses the space with its clickety-clack rhythms. The unfailing regularity of the loom lends itself easily to other practices of rhythm, such as dance. And this is what Bharatanatyam dancer and choreographer Malavika Sarukkai plays with in her touring production, Thari – The Loom, which will be performed as a fundraiser ballet for the crafts NGO, Paramparik Karigar.
Reading an article about the weavers of Kanchipuram, Sarukkai was struck by the process of making the sari, a thought that demanded expression in movement. In the course of conversations with the filmmaker Sumantra Ghosal, who is her collaborator for Thari , Sarukkai evolved a script that could encompass the abstract and the particular. Thari is Sarukkai’s first full-length group production in an uninterrupted innings as a solo performer. After having spent decades in “solitary splendour” on stage, the dancer had to get accustomed to feeling like one element of a larger design, changing the way she looked at space. But it was a feeling she liked. “I just knew it had to be a group work,” she said, adding, “But it was not enough for them to dance the dance; they had to dance the concept, and that demanded a deeper investment. The dancers of the next generation are open to new influences. They were willing to be moulded and to apply their body intelligence to something new,” says Sarukkai.
The sentiment seems mutual. Dancer Jyotsna Jagannathan credited Sarukkai with giving the group the time they needed to grapple with some of her more abstract ideas. She explained how the piece about the design of the sari was tackled first, given its compositional similarity to pure dance in Bharatanatyam. Over a series of conversations about the concept, the dancers felt more empowered to take ownership of it. “With each performance, things change for us and new dimensions are uncovered. She (Sarukkai) would teach us the movement and then explain what kind of energy she wanted to convey in the movement. There is a lot of imagery in her teaching, where one word or image would make all the difference and shift our body language radically,” Jagannathan explained.
How does one dance a sari? Three distinct sections in the piece draw from the loom, the warp and weft of cloth, and the motifs and borders of saris. Sarukkai was sure she didn’t want to dance the product, finding a linear path across six yards of cloth. “That did not stimulate me,” she said. Through the warp and weft representing the horizontal and vertical, Sarukkai was drawn to the idea of the constant and the variable, delving into mythology to find fitting allegories. “Finally, it is the dancing body in space and time, but with a larger vision of what informs the dance. I feel I am walking out of the known and risking everything to say what I find in the constant and the variable. A lot of internal exploration went into creating and designing the movement of the dancers,” she said.
On a trip to Kanchipuram, Sarukkai’s sound designer, Sai Shravanam, sat under a loom to record its sound. She remembers being fascinated by the rhythm, each beat taking the sari closer to its final form. For Sarukkai, no piece on the sari could be danced without bringing in her own memories of it. A voiceover intersperses the formal elements of the performance, as she narrates her first introduction to the sari, speaking of the landscape of feelings and emotions it catapulted her into. Though voiceovers are used extensively in performance, they can seem dissonant in the mythic and temporal settings of classical dance. Sarukkai recalls never wanting to break the spell by explaining compositions during the course of her solo performances. For many years, she had her mother speak during her performances, while she illustrated the speech with actions and gestures. Yet, for a piece like Thari , Sarukkai was reluctant to insert explanatory interludes. The voice-over, she observes, offers audiences a window into the thought process of the choreographer.
The lights by Gyandev Singh play a significant role in denoting the expanse of the sari on stage. With spindles for props, the dancers slice sharp lines through space, sometimes jumping off the cloth. They emphasise on difference by denoting the Ganga-Yamuna borders in saris, where each end of the fabric carries a different design. The borders are metaphorical, framing fabric as they reference philosophies around time, treating life and death as bookends in the human journey. Sometimes, the piece feels too tightly woven, rather like the shop bought sari, with no stray threads dangling off its borders. The dancing is so synchronised and measured that the very thought of asymmetry, of a surprise intervention, seems delightful. If one element of the warp and weft is dislodged from regularity, how could it transform the landscape?
Thari will be performed this evening at Jamshed Bhabha Theatre, NCPA at 7 p.m.
