“Thari” is what one calls a loom in Saurashtrian as well as Tamil language. Inspired by the looms of Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu and her own experiences with saris , Bharathanatyam dancer Malavika Sarukkai premiered her group production “Thari” in Chowdiah Memorial Hall last Thursday. The production explored the physical and the philosophical aspects of a sari by tracing its journey from being just a thread to becoming a whole fabric.
Even before the dancers became visible on stage, clickety clack sound of the loom filled the auditorium, immediately engaging the audience. The performance opened to an image of a busy loom with its repetitive sound and movement. Touching the most fundamental aspects of weaving – the thread, the warp and the weft, the opening pieces of the production left the deepest impression in the memory of the audience. The choreographic formations on stage brought forth the physical as well as the visual structure of a sari developing an imagination of a sari that is stretched out to its full length. Walking along the rectangular boundaries of the stage to depict the edges of a sari, crowding to one side of the stage to reflect the richness of a “pallu” or having pairs of dancers dancing parallel to each other to mirror the Ganga – Jamuna border of a sari were some striking instances of creative choreographic formations. Besides the visual aspect of the dance, the first half of the performance that explores the fundamentals of the process of weaving also allowed the dancers to remain in the basic geometry of the form of Bharathanatyam. The representation of the warp and the weft brought the focus to the vertical and the horizontal lines of the Bharathanatyam.
Spilling into the latter part of the performance, the sari moved from being an object of visual beauty to a metaphor of life. Offering a philosophical interpretation for each part of the sari, the performance here begins to rely a lot more on textual narration. However, it was a relief to see a non literal and more poetic representation of the text in movement. The traditional motifs of peacocks and swans on a sari were mythologized as vehicles of Muruga and Saraswati respectively, although it was difficult to contextualise these narratives to the textile. While the movements of the dancers remained visually engaging, at this point, the performative concepts became more contrived and less evocative. While the performance gave a pictorial experience of a sari, one missed the subjective perspective that the dancers could have brought to the performance. What is their own relationship with a sari as young women dancers? What is the meaning that a handloom sari holds for each of them as they go through their everyday lives in the 21st century? After the performance, there is a sense of having witnessed expert dance and choreography but without getting a glimpse into the world view of the artists themselves. The story of a sari begins in the life of a weaver. Even though the performance opens with the depiction of a handloom, for a project that involved engaging with the weavers, the performance could have been more emphatic in its acknowledgment of their lives and their connection with the saris they make. Apart from the opening audio-visual of a loom, one isn’t able to place the weavers in the overall arc of the sari story. Yet the performance stands as an example of the creative space one can make within the physical structure and the idiom of a classical form like Bharathanatyam.
