What goes on in a dancer’s mind as she sits down to choreograph a piece? This question is akin to asking a writer about his writing processes or a musician about the genesis of the intricate turn of phrases as he or she sings at a concert. And yet, even though the creative process remains elusive to most artists, the curiosity to get to the heart of it or our tendency to want to grasp its essence fully, is never diminished. One such attempt was made during the three-day annual dance festival organised by MES Kalavedi.
Before they went on stage, dancers were invited to spell out their method of working and the inspirations behind each piece performed on stage. “Normally, when I sit down to choreograph a piece, I first examine the subject of the piece. Then I try and sift through the images that come into my mind as I think of the concept. What does agni or vayu or jal remind me of? These images or references help me visualise a suitable formation on stage. Then, I take each line of the composition and choreograph according to the meaning..,” said Odissi dancer Madhulita Mohapatra, one of the performers at the festival.
Madhulita along with her Nrityantar ensemble performed Panchabhuta , a performance depicting the five elements of nature. The idea was to witness the lines, formations and associations that emerged in Madhulita’s mind finding expression on stage through the vocabulary of Odissi. But even though Madhulita’s explanation for the piece seemed simple enough to grasp, the sheer beauty of the performance on stage was baffling. Moreover, what also became apparent was the fact that the other four dancers too bought into her vision and embodied it through their body with absolute conviction — a factor crucial for choreography to succeed according to Madhulita.
“Someone once asked me if I use computers to plan the formations on stage. I told them my dancers are my computer,” said B. Bhanumathi, veteran Bharatanatyam dancer during her performance on the concluding day of Kalavedi. “When my dancers come in front of me, I get ideas,” she added. But Bhanumathi conceded that there is only that much of the process she can explain. “I really don’t know. Sometimes one thinks a particular idea is stupid but when executed on stage, it works really well. And there are other days too when one thinks one’s ideas are fantastic but they are actually stupid when tried on stage. It is also a collaborative process between the choreographer and the choreographed. My students tell me that it is not possible to move a certain way or get to a particular position or sometimes they even suggest what would work better. After all, the dancers you are choreographing have to buy to your vision…,” she explains, echoing Madhulita’s explanation the previous day.
And yet as we watched both Madhulita, Bhanumathi and their teams perform, it was difficult to objectively trace their choreography and their interpretations of the concepts alone. One found that one was drawn into the dance and after a point it did not matter how the formations were conceived. What suddenly came into focus was how those formations made us feel - the experience of rasa , in other words. For instance, when Madhulita performed Ramate Yamuna Pulinavane , a piece from the Gita Govinda about Radha’s thoughts on Krishna frolicking with another Gopi, the mind was torn between tracing the concepts spelled out by Madhulita or allowing oneself to be consumed by emotions of anger, hurt, anticipation - all of which Radha experienced on stage. “What is abhinaya? Perhaps my teacher can explain the story to me. But the manner in which I internalize it and create rasa in the audience is very important…” explained Madhulita.
There is also another aspect to choreography and that is the interpretation of a concept. What more about Ramayana can there be, that which is not done before? Bhanumathi and her Bharatanjali ensemble made sure there was room for more ideas. “We’ll show you the entire Ramayana in five minutes,” she announced. The concept was born when she was planning a production for another event. “It was for an event on Gandhi Jayanthi and I was told that Gandhiji loved the bhajan Shri Ramachandra Kripalu Bhajamana . Then, we searched for a good version of the song, and Lata Mangeshkar’s rendition of it came up. It is so beautiful that we had to use it. Sheela, my sister-in-law, suggested that instead of sculptures and painting depicting dance, let us try to use dance to depict paintings,” explained Bhanumathi. And so, in five minutes, as Mangeshkar’s version of the song played, Bhanumathi and her team presented a quick summary of Valmiki’s epic by stopping every episode with a tableau, a painting like pose. So we saw the swayamvar which ended with the pose of Sita garlanding Rama, then the episode of Bharata coming to the forest froze with Bharata taking Rama’s padukas and keeping them on his head and so on.
It was an overwhelmingly beautiful festival of dance that one witnessed in the quiet auditorium of MES College. Both Nrityantar and Bharatanjali ensembles comprised talented dancers whose commitment to their gurus was evident in their dance. At the end of Kalavedi’s festival, connoisseurs of dance were certainly brought closer to the experience of dance- the closest we can get perhaps to the mystifying process.
