Nritya Bharati festival: Third edition - Dr. Sunil Kothari

The renowned scholar Dr. Subas Pani is an author, translator of Odisha’s cultural heritage with research interest in Jagannath, Jayadeva and the Gita Govinda. He has curated the Nritya Bharati Festival as its Creative Director. As a bureaucrat, he has held several positions and during his tenure he has pioneered dance festival at the temple sites. The most memorable one he had visualized was at Mukteshwara Temple in Bhubaneswar in the early eighties, when the legendary gurus Pankaj Charan Das and Kelucharan Mahapatra had presented their choreographic works and the lights wizard Tapas Sen had arranged the lights.

The two ashtapadi festivals adapted to his original music score for Odissi dance were a runaway success, with leading Odissi exponents, participating, exploring various layers of ashtapadis.  Dr. Subas Pani has also composed music for Sampoorna Gita Govinda presenting the total experience of Jayadeva’s immortal classic in a set of five audio CDs, released by SaReGaMa. This is a major and unique musical composition presenting the entire Gita Govinda, all stanzas of each of its twenty four songs and all of its seventy two shlokas with distinctive flavor of the original musical traditions of Odisha. For this, he has used, for the first time, the authentic text of this classic based on his extensive research.

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