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A Spirit of South Asia Is Moving in Manhattan
August 20, 2008
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Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
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Erasing Borders, a festival featuring Sampradya Dance Creations.
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
Published: August 20, 2008 |
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A new event within an old one, “Erasing Borders” is a four-day festival of Indian dance under the aegis of the annual Downtown Dance Festival (the 27th of that ilk). “Borders” opened on Monday with the first of two varied and thronged lunchtime performances at 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza in Lower Manhattan.
Even though I have seen open-air dance in a number of New York locations this summer, Chase Manhattan Plaza lends a frisson all its own. Sitting with the audience beneath the tall tower, I remembered a line from Edwin Denby’s great 1952 essay “A Letter on New York City’s Ballet,” in which he describes how, in looking up at a skyscraper, “the air drops down on your head like a solid.”
Chase employees came out for cigarette breaks and stared at the dance in fascination; others gaped from within the building or while talking on cellphones; dozens, even hundreds, sat to concentrate. The music (most of it taped, but not all) was amplified, so that the surrounding city noise - which included extensive drilling and construction work - promptly faded into oblivion.
After both 90-minute programs, the organizers invited audience members to the raised stage to learn a few movements from the performers. This worked remarkably well both times, more memorably on Tuesday, when half the participants were well under the age of 10.
Obviously the borders that “Erasing Borders” means to erase are multiple: between Indian dance and the West, between the many countries in which Indian dance is performed, between Indian and Western dance genres. I assume borders may even be erased between different forms of Indian dance, although that intention is the least likely. The program notes suggest sufficient pride in separate traditions of Indian dance, like Odissi and Bharatanatyam, not to wish them to fuse. (“Erasing Borders” includes a three-day conference at the Ailey Studios that ends on Thursday and evening performances at the Ailey Citigroup Center, with one remaining on Thursday.)
One issue invariably arises when traditional Indian dances are shown here: the works seldom illustrate their supposed subjects with anything like the clarity that Western audiences, trained by three centuries of belief in narrative dance drama, usually expect. You watch a dance that’s gorgeous in detail and architecture, but you can’t see how it’s supposed to be about Krishna and the cow girls (a favorite subject), as the program note tells you. Accompanying words may explain what’s missing, but they aren’t translated. And yet the dance can prove complex and absorbing.
On Tuesday, my heart flew immediately to “Kalinga Nartana,” performed in traditional Bharatanatyam style by Sampradya Dance Creations, even though I never saw how (to quote from the program) “the choreography describes the popular Hindu god Krishna subduing multiple-headed serpent Kaliya.” Did the male singing voice, accompanied by a drum, explain?
The long-held opening tableau of four young women was a thrill, a harmonious grouping (not unlike the famous Romantic ballet lithograph of the 1845 Pas de Quatre, resembling a four-leaf clover), arms all directed along a single diagonal, save for one, powerfully aimed the opposite way. Indian dance can often have unparalleled powers of sculptural fullness; in this case that sense registered before the performers executed a step.
When they did, they kept that sculptural quality while turning it into rhythm. In Bharatanatyam that starts with the feet and is accentuated by the bells worn around the ankles. The vertical descent of the full flat foot on the floor - slap! - is a regular ingredient. The outward advance of one leg and its retreat, each time accompanied by a curve of the corresponding arm, becomes a gloriously three-dimensional effect. And the arc of a raised arm, as opened sideways by a tilting torso, is another.
Here, as enunciated by a group, the dance became complex, as geometry, as sculpture and as meter. And the final tableau, or series of shifting tableaus, was another knockout. Sitting close to the stage you could also marvel at the costumes: pleated, saffron-yellow, two-tier dresses worn over blouses of darker colors; an array of golden jewelry (bracelets and some very handsome hair ornaments); and white flowers in the hair.
Sampradya Dance Creations is from Toronto. This came as a surprise to me. I had assumed such Indianness must come direct from India; and so the title “Erasing Borders” makes further sense. Lata Pada, who choreographed “Kalinga,” also created “Howzaat!,” a lively new work about cricket and its absorption into the culture of South Asia. At first the cricket references were not clear even to this Englishman; later all the running, catching, bowling, fielding became too obvious. But the prime pleasure was that this was always a real dance and that the six female performers, all dressed in cricketing white, were all so vivid. On this evidence Sampradya is a company of rare dance vitality.
Costumes were even more spectacular in the Odissi performance of “Pallavi” by Nayikas Dance Theater Company; they were white and red, with elaborate silver jewelry (especially belt ornaments). The choreography by Guru Bichitrananda Swain and Myna Mukherjee, which explored pure qualities of pattern and movement, was often taxing. And though its demands were often fascinating (a man balanced on one leg, arms raised above his head with palms facing upward, for a very long time), it failed to make the dance’s two women and two men look assured. The more basic lovelinesses of Odissi style, however, often shone through: the wonderfully sensuous shift of weight through the pelvis and shoulders and the marvelous focus of the eyes (sometimes looking under a raised arm).
Other works - “Pipaasha,” by Ananya Dance Theater Company; an excerpt of “Tides of the Moon,” by Thresh; “Nomadic Still,” by Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh Dance Company; and an excerpt from “Quebasian Rhapsody,” by Sinha Danse - may all be loosely grouped as efforts to connect Indian and Western styles. To me they all demonstrate dilution rather than fusion. You see separate dance ingredients, you see a will to communicate, but you see no form that brings these things together.
With Sampradya’s “Kalinga Nartana,” however, you’re encompassed by form. Whether or not you get the story it hopes to tell, you’re gripped by its many layers of beauty.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/arts/dance/21batt.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=spirit%20dance&
st=cse&scp=1 |
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