Hear the words NaTyatra and an image of a mystical journey of dance towards salvation is evoked in the listener’s mind. Only in this case, NaTyatra is a journey to Bharatanatyam where Bharatanatyam danseuse Rama Vaidyanathan, under the conceptual brief of Tanusree Shankar, is bringing eight young practitioners of jazz, ballet, contemporary, Kathak, Odissi and Kalaralipayattu willingly renunciate themselves to Bharatanatyam and bridge the gap which exists between the classical and contemporary dance worlds.
Such incredulous feat is being attempted by these performers for the Serendipity Arts Festival which is India’s premier interdisciplinary arts festival to be held from 16th to 23rd December in Goa. As per Tanusree Shankar, the curator of the dance genre of this interdisciplinary festival, “This dance project envisions the grammar of Indian dance to go beyond both traditional and classical.”
In a similar vein, we delve deeper in to NaTyatra by having the Guru Rama Vaidhyanathan talk on how she is bringing this mega production to life.
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Edited Excerpts:
How did NaTyatra come into existence?
Tanusree Shankar, who is the curator of this segment of Serendipity Arts Festival, called me up one day and asked am I up for a challenge! I immediately grabbed hold of the idea when she told me that I would have to work with eight contemporary dancers, give them an insight in to the world of Bharatanatyam and topping it all to create a 45 minute piece with these professional contemporary artists, that too keeping the vocabulary strictly classical!
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How did the journey to creating NaTyatra begin and what hurdles were faced by you?
I knew from the start that it cannot be a solid Bharatanatyam dance piece as the dancers have a totally separate background. But I anyway said let’s go for it! The best part of working with these dancers was that they all had amazingly conditioned body, they also had a great yearning to know Bharatanatyam.
Besides it was great opportunity for me as well to work with bodies which have been trained differently. So we began training them by teaching adavus.
Mornings were all dedicated to training the basics and once that was seated in their bodies did we move forward. It was a really hard process for all of us.
Why train contemporary dancers rather than bringing trained Bharatanatyam dancers themselves to do the pieces?
That is the core point of this entire experiment. The point of doing so was not to train these contemporary dancers to become classical dancers but to inculcate the understating of classical arts. The piece called NaTyatra is all about the journey towards fathoming the other side. The chasm between classical and contemporary worlds spoken and unspoken is quite deep.
They look down upon us, we look down upon them. And that is what we are trying to mitigate here. The purpose of arts is to take the dancers and the audiences on a journey within. If we as a dance community, be it classical or contemporary, are not able to have mutual understanding and empathy about each other’s arts, then why are we even dancing? This, precisely is the whole point of creating this feat.
Please tell us about the production
NaTyatra is being divided in to three parts by me. First is called ‘Bhoomi’, it is all about mother earth. Bordering on a Pushpanjali this piece is still abstract. We explore the vocabulary of Bharatanatyam through this piece. Moving on, I knowingly chose an abhinaya piece called ‘Kashi’.
Going by the name it is all about Banares, the ghats, the temples, the crowd, the bhakti! I really wanted the contemporary dancers to comprehend the deeply spiritual and emotive part of classical dance. And finally we end with a tarana, a composition of Pandit Ravi Shankar where all dancers are introduced to complicated rhythmic patterns of our dance and the mathematical accuracy involved with it.