An illustrious young dancer of the Vazhavoor School of Bharatanatyam, and winner of the Ustad Bismillah Khan Puraskar from the Sangeet Natak Akademy, Lavanya Ananth’s recital was suffused with grace and intensity. The danseuse proved her stylistic ingenuity yet again by presenting items that entranced the spectators.
Lavanya began with the visualisation of a sloka by Adisankaracharya eulogising the wide-ranging manifestations of Goddess Parvathy.
The dancer impressively sculpted images of Parvathy as one equivalent to the luminosity of a million Suns, as the affectionate mother of Shanmukha and Vinayaka, and as the immaculate dancer who is accompanied on the mridangam by none other than Nandikeswara. One could almost hear in her movements and sense in her expressions the mellifluous sound of Parvathy’s anklet-bells, the veena, the flute and the mridangam.
The visualisation of Kumaran Asan’s poetry in the codified language of dance is a huge challenge as his verses are loaded with connotations and imagery.
Lavanya took up Chintavishtayaya Sita as the evening’s piece-de-resistance. Sita wonders what wrongs she had committed to incur the wrath of Rama. Lavanya poignantly depicted the recollections of Sita at the hermitage of Valmiki; the test of fire ordained by Rama to prove her chastity, her state of abandonment in the forest, the birth of Lava and Kusa and the agony resulting from the suspicions raised by her beloved husband about her fidelity.
Visually rich
While the inner sense of the lines, “there is no certitude for anything……man is loitering for something/none knows the secret of the universe”, is beyond the purview of angika (movement of the body and the limbs), satwika (emotive acting) comes to the rescue of the dancer. With the micro-movements of her upangas (eyes, eyebrows, cheek and lips) Lavanya could tangibly convey the import of the lines to the audience. Sita rejoicing at bountiful nature and her plea to Mother Earth to be one with her was an amazing visual frame.
As the third item, Lavanya presented a Kshetrayya padam in which three ladies are propositioning Lord Krishna. The first one is younger than the two and is noted for her innocence. The second one is well experienced in the art of romance and the third one is pragmatic. The dancer drove home the blamelessness of the first, the explicitness of the second and the steadfastness of the third with her histrionic dexterity. The sensuality of the heroines was expressed within the paradigms of the classical structure of the dance form without deviating from the subtext of the lyrics.
The concluding item was the familiar thillana of violin wizard Lalgudi Jayaraman in raga Desh.
Dharani, a school for Indian classical dance-based in Ernakulam, organised the recital at its theatre.
