The first half of ‘Ya Devi’ dance presentation at the India International Centre was a tad disappointing to an audience who were lured by the Tantric textual phrase from the revered “Durga Saptashati”. It focussed on a totally different aspect, viz. dance forms. An invocatory verse to the mother goddess was the only strain relating to the title.
It seems danseuse Devika Rao forgot that the audience are usually classical aficionados and have a fairly good knowledge of the art form and its variants.
Dividing the theme into two acts, Devika made the first one, a dance introductory to the various classical forms ranging from Bharatanatyam to Kuchidpudi to Yakshaganam and so on. In doing so, she and her two young pupils performed short pieces to either pre-recorded mnemonic utterances (sollukattu) or to pure percussion and music. A briefing to each dance form was given in English for better appreciation. And to be fair to Devika, she was the only one who pulled the show through, more with her Kannada Yakshagana style of dance rather than anything else. Her agile jumps and leaps, her eye-movements to convey the required emotion, her attempt at the digna (angular jumping swirls) displayed her Yakshagana training while the Kuchipudi she tried to do was marred with incomplete avarthan and improper footwork (adavus). The Bharatanatyam bit by the two pupils was devoid of the mandatory araimandi (semi-squat stance); hasta mudras kept changing like quick silver with no clarity whatsoever. The artistes’ immaturity was quite evident by their basic stance and gait as they entered and exited. It doesn’t amount to misjudgement to say that both have a long way to go if they are to establish themselves as classical dancers. After the peeks into various styles of classical dance marred by continuous hitches and halts in the recording which sent the half the viewers out of the show, we had a glimpse of ‘Ya Devi’ through a highly digitalised dance performance in Yakshagana tradition mostly by the lead dancer.
In a solo act of vigorous dance movements, more martial than artistic and good facial expressions, Devika represented woman power in the form of goddess Durga annihilating the wicked and vile of the world. In doing so the various weapons that are usually found in each of the ten hands of the goddess were shown vividly through gesticulations by the artiste; the gory war cries, the seething anger with a beastly hunger to devour human blood was brought out with conviction. The changing figures on the digitalised backdrop was more of a diversion to the viewers’ eye which was trying to concentrate on the stage and dance per se. Trying to make the dance contemporarily relevant is fine but then getting to depict issues like AIDS and other diseases into an artistic medium is unwarranted. Relevance of a dance theme to the present day is alright within the parameters of artistic license. To justify the title, finally, we were treated to the ‘Ya Devi sarva bhooteshu...’ shloka towards the end when the three dancers mime a meditation to invoke the goddess to empower them in all walks of life.
