A few years ago, when dancer Keerthana Ravi approached corporate houses seeking support for her festival, EVAM, the response was lukewarm. Classical dance wasn’t mass entertainment, and so not economically viable. This got Ravi thinking – why wasn’t she reaching out to those who actually loved the arts, instead of faceless corporate giants? Through a crowd-funding campaign, she raised the money needed, connecting with many new arts-lovers in the process. Even fellow artists supported the festival, doing whatever they could to make it happen. This collective energy continues to form the crux of Ravi’s vision for EVAM, which is now in its fourth edition. From Friday to Sunday, the festival features six performances by classical and contemporary dance practitioners.
EVAM opens with two group productions, Amaara: A Journey of Love by choreographer Ashley Lobo’s Navdhara India Dance Theatre and Gandhi by the Chennai-based photographer and dancer C.P. Satyajit. While Amaara uses a love story as a premise to experience movement, Gandhi reflects on conceptual dimensions of Gandhian history and theory using Bharatanatyam as a framework. “This is not entertainment. It doesn’t have a fixed musical or literary content. It is not going to give you numb bhakti — the ideal Gandhi preaching vaishnava jana to — and we all go back happy. It will disturb you,” warned Satyajit, when talking to The Hindu about the forthcoming performance.
A non-narrative engagement, Satyajit’s piece examines this notion through the ideas Gandhi’s ideas and practices from his life. The artists’ own experiences of conflict in their environments underline their engagement with the conflicts that shaped Gandhi’s life. For Satyajit, this meant finding dancers and collaborators who were willing to think beyond their classroom training to unlock new ways of moving in Bharatanatyam. Audiences steeped in Bharatanatyam were sometimes alienated by this treatment of form and content, he found, while newer dance audiences, with their lack of stylistic baggage, found it easier to access the ideas and propositions put forth through the piece.
The festival moves to an intimate performance space for the weekend. There is a healthy dose of Bharatanatyam in store. Dancer Meenakshi Srinivasan presents a solo margam, Madhuram Madhavam, structured around the concept of devout love, as explored through the personas of Andal, Meera Bai, and Radha. There are two group performances — Sat-Gati by Bengaluru’s Parshwanath Upadhye and his Punyah Dance Company, and Amba Shikhandi by the Maryland-based Prakriti Dance Company. Dancer Kasi Aysola, Prakriti’s co-founder, explained that their choice of the Mahabharata’s Amba as a protagonist was meant to highlight the resilience of the human spirit.
He said, “Amba goes to (great) lengths to avenge herself in her quest to destroy the indestructible Bhishma, after she is ostracised due to unfair circumstances. This is a social commentary on gender through dance. What role does gender play in society? Who always holds the upper hand? Is there no more room in the world for acceptance of the unknown or different? Amba is ever evolving, ever transforming — as are we. No matter what adversity she faces in life, her inner resilience shines through, breaking boundaries and carrying her forward.”
Bharatanatyam apart, the festival also showcases Jheeni, an improvised performance that counts dancers, musicians and lighting designers as its collaborators. While the piece was triggered by the collaborators’ interest in bhakti poetry, it now extends itself to contemporary poetry. Vocalist Shruthi Vishwanath, one of the collaborators, found that making the piece made her reconsider the ways in which she improvised and explored the nuances of a song. “There is the idea that it is a collective exploration — that the tabla or guitar or dance can and should make a song — and not just the vocalist. That different bodies can inhabit space and ‘dance’ — not just what we consider the ‘dancing body’. That lights can sing and dance too. Jheeni is about blurring boundaries through the art and within the art. It is what the mystic poets spoke most poignantly about,” she said of the piece. In Jheeni, instead of being interpreted in translation, the bhakti poems are refracted through modern poems that speak to similar ideas. This poetic weave resonates with the collective spirit of the work.
EVAM 2018 - A Dance Festival starts from today at 7 p.m until February 25; venue and details on bookmyshow.com
