A perfect couple complement each other. They complete each other’s sentences too, literally. That is how it was with Kathak dancers Abhimanyu Lal and his wife, Vidha Lal. They were in Thiruvananthapuram to perform at the Nishagandhi Dance Festival. In a chat with Friday Review , they spoke at length about evolving as performers, experimenting with the dance form and taking Kathak to the masses.
They have been trained in Jaipur style by celebrated Kathak exponent Geetanjali Lal, Abhimanyu’s mother. “We have had individual training from her and that has really helped us to identify our strengths,” says Vidha, who started learning Kathak from the age of six. Abhimanyu, however, started much later - in his teens. “Somehow I was not in a frame of mind to learn. But over the years when I saw performances of my mother and other artistes and people appreciating and respecting them, I started taking an interest in Kathak. It was not easy to learn it because I started my lessons late. My mother warned me that once I started learning, there would be no going back on my decision,” says Abhimanyu, who currently teaches Kathak at Kathak Kendra in New Delhi.
Kathak dancers Vidha Lal and Abhimanyu Lal
Even though they are strong solo performers in their own right, they look forward to their duet performances. “When we get stages to do, we ask ‘Can we do a duet?’ We want to show the best of feminine and masculine charm on stage, the beautiful combination of lyricism and vigour, lasya and tandav.... That makes a complete package,” says Vidha. Perhaps that’s why many say that when they perform together, there is a dhamaka (blast) on stage? “(Laughs) May be. That dhamaka comes from the positivity..,” she adds.
The reason for their remarkable camaraderie, apart from their being in love, is that they relish every moment on stage. “We perform for the audience, so we don’t stage only what we rehearse. We improvise during the course of the performance,” Abhimanyu stresses. The impromptu additions depend on many aspects such as the character of the audience and the region where they are performing.
“Sometimes we take scripts or works from the place where we are performing. For example, when we are in Gujarat, we take a bandish. When we performed at the Nishagandhi festival eight years ago, we staged ‘Bho shambo’,” says Vidha.
Involving the audience in their recital happens in different ways. They request the audience to clap and keep time with their footwork sequence or call for their participation while enacting various scenes.
“In a scene where Krishna is shown as playing with a ball, we throw the ‘ball’ to the audience, ask them to catch it and then throw it back to us... Such interactions happen even in places where they don’t understand the language. Everywhere the response has been incredible,” she adds.
So each stage is a challenge and they give all credit to their guru. “She always encourages us to experiment within the framework of Kathak. We take her opinion on every aspect, including our costumes. When we went to South Africa, the organisers asked us whether we could perform to the accompaniment of African drums. We had to squeeze in the time to do make-up and rehearse with the team. But it went off so well that they wanted us to do it again! At another instance, we performed to Carnatic kritis, such as ‘Krishna nee begane’, ‘Bho shambo’ and a thillana, accompanied by South Indian instruments,” says Abhimanyu, a trained Western drummer.
One aspect they keep reiterating is how they complement each other. Don’t they have arguments, differences of opinion and ego clashes. “Not at all. We understand each other, our strengths and weakness and each of us avoid what we can’t do,” Abhimanyu says.
For example, while Abhimanyu is a master of footwork, Vidha excels in doing the spins - in 2011 she entered the Guinness Book of World Records for doing the maximum spins (103) in one minute and can even do reverse spins.
“We have been married for 14 years and used to perform together even before our marriage. We give each other a lot of space, in fact he always pushes me to do more solo performances. We are not competing with each other; at each performance we try to show how good we both are,” says Vidha, who runs AV Dance Company Kathak Resonance.
So is there a dream that they share?
They look at each other and Vidha says, “We want to get more stages... we want to perform as much as we can. God is truly keeping an eye on us.”
