Nadam organised a three day dance festival “Kalanadam” at ADA Rangamandira last weekend. The final evening opened with Ranjana Gauhar’s Odissi recital. She performed abhinaya pieces where she danced to three Ashtapadis from Jayadeva’s Geetagovinda.Geetagovinda , a collection of hymns composed by the 12th century poet Jayadeva celebrates Krishna and his relationship with Radha. His hymns thrive today in popular imagination through the performances by the Odissi dancers. Performing the role of a Gopika, Ranjana Gauhar describes the spiritual and the physical aspects of being absorbed in love with Krishna in various settings. Like most abhinaya performances, all her three pieces relied on building a complex imagery to narrate a story. Her first piece “Rati Sukha Saare”, which is set to the choreography of her Guru Mayadhar Raut, animates the environment where Krishna is imagined to be waiting for Radha. The tree, bed of leaves, the breeze and birds come alive in the dancers movements. This exercise of building imagery within classical dance bestows a primacy to hand gestures, mudras and facial expressions. One can witness Ranjana doing the same either from using codified mudras or generating multiple gestures using the codified mudras. For example making a bird with a Kapitta hasta and caressing it or indicating a bed of leaves by gesturing a horizontal square with trippataka.
Similar to the first one, the two pieces that followed “Sakhi He, Keshi Madana Mudaram” and “Kuruyadu Nandana” also revolves around the theme of distance and proximity between Radha and Krishna. The main difference in the three pieces is the voice of the narrator. The first one is told by a Sakhi to Radha, the second one is the other way round where Radha is narrating the story to her Sakhi in past tense and in the last piece we see Radha addressing Krishna directly. As Ashish Khokar rightly observed, in a context where high speed is falsely trending as a criteria to identify a capable perfomer, Ranjana Gauhar attempted to revive the slow lyrical beauty of Odissi dance and poetry through this recital. However, one cannot state that the idea of exploring the slow rhythm was actively engaged within the performance.
While emotional stories can be narrated through imagery, emotions invariably dwell in our bodies rhythmically – the speed of our heart beats, rhythm of our breath all remain connected to our mood and our emotional experience. Therefore without an active engagement with rhythm in performance the dancer doesn’t connect the audience to the pulse of the emotion (or the drama) that a story embodies. Much like how most of Sanskrit poetry draws is affective value from its rhythmic quality and as well as words, decoupling nrtta from abhinaya reduces the affective scope of a performative narrative.
The second set of dance pieces was performed by Kathak dancers of the Nadam ensemble. They began with an invocatory piece on the Hindu goddess Durga, celebrating her as a destroyer of evil and benevolent to the good. One finds some iconic images of Durga across the performance such has wielding a trishula as she destroys the demon Mahishasura or as a goddess with many arms. The second piece is based on the composition “Govindam Vande” where the dancers narrate the mythological story of young Krishna emerging victorious after an underwater battle with the snake Kalinga Sarpa. The dance ends with a tribute to the diverse personalities that Krishna assumes across his lifetime such as a friend and mentor to Arjuna, a son to Yashoda or a lover to Radha and the many Gopikas. However, though the dancers danced both these pieces with a great flourish, it is hard for one to tell how the dancer’s imagine themselves in relation to these mythological stories during the course of the performance.More often than not, one felt that these characters and mythic personalities were being depicted rather than being embodied.
The Kathak troupe ended their recital with a Tatkaar, a rhythmic exploration of space and time in the Kathak idiom. This piece came as a much needed relief in the whole event where one could truly see the dancers being themselves on stage, breaking out of the otherwise falsetto expression that most classical dancers are conditioned to hold during a performance.
Apart from breezy choreography that creatively took over the stage, this piece gave a glimpse of the dancers and the relationship they share with each other to the audience.
The last section of the evening involved a Bharathanatyam recital by Avigna dance ensemble from Chennai led by dancer G. Narendra. As the only troupe to have a male representative for a dancer for the evening, this troupe stood apart. Unlike most invocatory Ganesh Vandanas, they opened their recital on an atypical note by dancing to a Marathi bhajan “ Ganaraja Rangi Nachuto”. Presented in duet, it describes the qualities of a young Ganesha’s dance and the happy chaos that it creates in the heaven as Shiva and Parvathi continue to watch. The second piece was performed to a contemporary recording of the Purandara Dasara classic “Aadisaleshoda Jagadodharana”. In both the above pieces, Narendra chose to embody characters that significantly differed from himself i.e. Ganesha and Yashoda respectively. As a group, their style is marked by crisp, brisk and sharp movements that becomes more emphatic in nrtta renditions such as in the Ananda Nartanam piece which they performed. Though the straight lines of their movement were dramatically delivered, it made one miss the softer contours of Bharathanatyam especially in the Ganesha Bhajan where the high jumps and angular side bends did not sit well for a god that wears his paunch like a happy embellishment.
Kalanadam brought together a long series of performances presented by dancers from Odissi, Kathak and Bharathanatyam traditions and the closing day of the festival featured a mixed bag of nritya, abhinaya and nrtta numbers across the three classical forms.
