Tuesday 25 December 2018

Adoration and Abstraction - The Eastern Eye: Column by Dr.Utpal K Banerjee


Uday Shankar Nrityotsav organized by the State government’s own culture department, has become now a hardy annual over the years in the eastern metropolis. Bringing in a cross section of the State’s major dance institutions, this perhaps provides the largest forum for the dance bodies to present their latest compositions and be assured of a large number of viewers at Rabindra Sadan, the largest and the best-equipped auditorium of Kolkata.

It would be salutary to quickly recollect that Uday Shankar and Rukmini Devi Arundale – the two icons of Indian dance from the middle of the twentieth century – were both, most coincidentally, gifts to India from the great Russian ballerina, Anna Pavlova, whom these luminaries had approached, in own way, early in their career for assimilation in the Western genre and who were successfully and definitively sent back to their vibrant sub-continental roots. How both proceeded to give Indian dance “a local habitation and a name” is now part of the recorded history of Indian performing arts scenario.

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