A shell-shocked audience, watching the flagrantly rustic performance of the Vedantam Radhesyam Kuchipudi troupe, wondering how it merited performance space at the Academy Festival, would have reacted with understanding, if the leader of the troupe, a Sangeet Natak Akademi awardee, had been introduced as a Kuchipudi veteran of over 75 years.
Watching his bristling energy as he conducted the nattuvangam or sang in a base voice for other dancers, before appearing in stree vesham as the heroine Satyabhama in ‘Bhama Kalapam,’ nobody would have guessed his age. The elaborate but badly read-out introduction left out this vital information. But the real problem lay in the totally unfinished ‘nartakudu and nartakimanis’ in his group, with no hint of sophistication either in technique or in group discipline. To say they were amateurish would be an understatement.
The preliminaries of paying homage to founder/composer Siddhendra Yogi, prayers to Balatripurasundari, the purification ritual of the performance space, and the Gajanana Stotram seemed never-ending.
Choosing a play like 'Bhama Kalapam' with its innumerable lyrics portraying the varying moods of Satyabhama was a mistake. The time slot could not accommodate so many daruvus in all their nuances. ‘Bhamane Satyabhamane’, the entrance, then ‘Siggayenoyamma’ where shy Satyabhama refuses to take her husband’s name to tell Madhavi of his identity; the censure of ‘Madana’ as virahotkanthita; then ‘Maaruni saramula baairi korvagalenu,’ where she expresses her inability to bear the arrows of Manmatha; then, after handing over her nose ring to Madhavi who is to act as the love messenger, Satyabhama sits down to pen a love letter to her husband Krishna ‘Srimadratnakaraputrika’.
Apart from these is the dialogue between Madhavi and Satyabhama, where the jokes from the more sophisticated ‘nakhashikhaparyantam’ or ‘shikhanakha paryantam’ also had some coarse village humour (as when Satyabhama describes herself sitting on Krishna’s thighs and sighs that she weighs only as much as five jasmine flowers, and the sutradhar replies, “Look at you. Like a bullock cart.”
But the pure Telugu dialogue was hardly understood and by the end very few people remained in the auditorium.
V. Satyanarasimha Sastry as sutradhar and doing the nattuvangam for Vedantam Radheshyam, was good.
V. Siddhendra Varaprasad as Krishna in the brief appearance was a capable dancer. But the alinganam scenes between Satyabhama and Krishna after they make up, was to say the least, embarrassingly crude.
While along with the more sophisticated versions of an art form, it is necessary to provide space for these traditional and rustic forms, they have to be suitably introduced, so as not to be wrongly judged.
