Offload your notions of traditional art form to watch Kathakali without elaborate make-up, costumes and bright colourful face masks. This combination of ballet and Kathakali embraces ‘Mithuna’ without preconceived ideas about dance forms.
Mithuna, a new artistic style of Indo-French contemporary dance, leaves you in awe and with a void to be filled purely with the pleasure of experiencing the art. In Mithuna, Director and Choreographer of La Compagnie Annettee Leday/Keli has created a new artistic style of Indo-French contemporary dance.
This dance, performed by Hélène Courvoisier , trained in ballet and contemporary dance, and Kathakali artistes Kalamandalam Unnikrishnan Nair and Sadanam Manikandan, sets up a fertile ground for imagination.
“Mithuna is a Sanskrit word for couple, pair, etc. Locked in embrace, one can see this in temples of Khajuraho and Konark Sun Temple in Orissa. It is the reflection of gender in words, beings, the conjunction of diversities, jolting confrontation and contagion of differences, and their fertile and creative seeding,” said Olivier Litvine, Director, Alliance Francaise of Pondicherry, while introducing ‘Mithuna’.
She added: “Mithuna is like poetry. It is left to the imagination of the audience to interpret the meaning of this dance. What interests me is to have the opinion of the audience and their story in it. This is like an open book. There are elements and it is up to the audience to make their own story. It is poetry. When you read a poem, you have to make your own opinions.”
Annette Leday specialises in inter-cultural contemporary creation, especially the dance and theatre traditions of India and France. After being trained as an actress in France, she came to India to learn Bharatanatyam and Kathakali in Chennai. She spent several years in rural Kerala, practising and performing Kathakali with the Sadanam and Kalamandalam institutions. La Compagnie Annette Leday/Keli’s popular creation Kathakali-King Lear was staged in several venues.
“I have been working with the artists on productions for a long time. This is the continuation of the other works we have done together. It is a piece of maturity. They are not young boys or girls. I wanted to work with what they are and get an essence of that from their work,” she says.
