Bewildering variety in Narthaki's Devi Diaries continues - Taalam: column by Leela Venkataraman

After such a varied impression of deified manifestations witnessed in Devi Diaries, how can one forget the everyday woman in real life, whose lot, to say the least, leaves much to be desired? Narthaki, very rightly felt that sans this realistic touch, the project on the feminine mystique would be incomplete. Five young modern dance practitioners, (considering the fact that generally as a group, artists of this genre like to function in their own orbit) generously responded to Anita Ratnam's invitation, and these individual takes on woman in everyday life, make for a very interesting contrast.

Flattened on her back on the floor, face secured in a steel mask with grills, Paramita Saha's goddess, the Dayvi Everyday in her home, raises herself to face yet another multitasking day, hurrying through household chores and much else - not losing her nurturing personality, or sense of joy in dancing within the small space of her home -looking at the outside world from her balcony- her equanimity and optimism undaunted, even as she faces daily challenges from systemic forces of patriarchal oppression. Apart from a convincing dance portrayal of Paramita's brief glimpse into the Everyday Woman, the work was complemented by good camera work catching all angles with clarity.

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Cultural (il)literacy - Dance Matters: Column by Ashish Mohan Khokar

It is amazing how literate our people are about Indian culture. Or illiterate. Appalling actually. A quiz master of a popular TV show - an ageing film icon no less - didn't seem to know what Bhavai was when a participant from Gujarat spoke about it. It is folk theatre. Very popular like Nautanki of Uttar Pradesh or Therukoothu of Tamilnadu or Yakshagana of Karnataka. Unless he was joking or acting. At another forum, a babu asked, "Can you play Carnatic sarod?" Eeks! Third gem reserved for end of this opening, was the best: "When was Ali added to Kathak to make it Kathakali?" It's not just in arts; even normally 95% population knows zilch about Indian culture. Basic things. I roam all over India like a yogi or migrant person, I see it firsthand. Still, ALL south Indians are Madrasi and for them ALL north Indians are Punjabis. All Eastern folks are Bengali and West means abroad! Few know the seven sisters of North East. Their map, capitals or cuisine. Madhya land, forget it, one big blob. Even in cultural institutions they don't know Baroda had Maratha rulers who also ruled Tanjore in Tamilnadu. They don't know Kashmir except for in films. Rajasthan means camels. Epic means a TV channel.

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Let us talk today about honorary degrees given to artistes. This is not coming from the discourse in the country about dubious degrees, misleading titles, and unheard-of domains of study. Instead, it comes from the fact that Padma Bhushan recipient, Kumudini Lakhia, the grande dame of Kathak, the senior most Kathak dancer and one of the most highly decorated artistes of the country, was awarded an Honorary degree, of Doctor of Letters (D. Litt.), by the ITM University, Gwalior, on 20th November 2021, on the occasion of its 6th convocation. I am so happy to be concluding the Soch column for this year, an annus horribilis in many ways, with a positive story.

ITM is a private University that has honoured distinguished personalities in the past too - since 2016. Among them are a mixed bag of journalists, sports persons, activists, media personalities, and arts icons, numbering almost forty in these six years. With this recognition, Kumiben has joined the ranks of arts icons like music maestros Dr. L. Subramanyam and Pt. Ajay Chakraborty, renowned artists like Prabhakar Kolte, Krishan Khanna and Arpita Singh, poets like Ashok Vajpeyi, film makers like Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani, actors like Naseeruddin Shah, and in dance Pt. Birju Maharaj. These are all past awardees from the arts.

It is remarkable that a university that is primarily a Technology and Management University has seen such value in the arts.

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Interview - An imaginary interview with Guru Gopinath - Part 5 - Tapati Chowdhurie

Was your program at Kavadiar School a success?

At the end of our performance, the Maharaja and Maharani came to congratulate and praise us for our presentation. He wanted to know our next plan. When I expressed my desire to stay on in Thiruvananthapuram with his grace, he promised to do the needful. He wanted us to request the chief secretary of the palace for a scheme to start a school and that was an indication to the success of our program. We laid the foundation stone of our school. G.P. Shekhar and I chose to name the new school 'Sri Chitrodaya Nartakalayam.' We then prepared a plan in English for its running. It was naturally going to be run under the guardianship of the palace administrator and presented it to the chief secretary Dr. Kunjan Pillai. He replied that he would inform the palace (Kottaram in Malayalam) and get back to us. Shekhar did not expect a reply before ten days.

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Online Culture: The idea whose time has come - The Eastern Eye: Column by Dr.Utpal K Banerjee

In the West, the new vogue word in the face of pandemic and the decline of all cultural institutions and practices is the revengeful coinage: 'cancel culture'! This critic would strongly recommend we counter this notion in India, take the bull by the horn and use the pandemic to create our own vogue word: 'online culture'. This is keeping in view our technology scenario: the number of computer users in the country is 14% of the population, the Internet users are 6% and the people who possess mobile is 63%. The percentages are not negligible, considering the fact that our population is around 138 crores in 2021. Working on these figures, there are roughly 19 crores of computer users, out of whom 8 crores use the Internet, while 45 crores of people possess mobiles, mostly smartphones. These are not inconsiderable figures!

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Prism - Reviving a lost tradition of dance - Kiran Java

A dance is deemed as an Indian classical dance when its theory and practice can be traced to the Natyashastra, a performing arts treatise dated to 200 B.C - 200 C.E. attributed to Sage Bharata. Bharatanatyam, Kathak, Kuchipudi, Odissi, Kathakali, Sattriya, Manipuri, and Mohiniyattam are recognized as classical dances by Sangeet Natak Akademi. Chhau is included in the list by the Ministry of Culture.

While other classical dances have evolved their art form from the standpoint of dance treatises, it is no secret that Kathak in its current form is difficult to link with the practices stated in the Natyashastra, the very text that marks its classical status. As a result, tracing Kathak, the principal dance of northern India, has long been a source of debate among Kathak dance practitioners.

To this end, Dr. Pt. Puru Dadheech recently presented a daring blueprint connecting Kathak classical dance to its texts. Dr. Dadheech, a Padma Shri, Sangeet Natak Akademi awardee, and Ministry of Culture Tagore National Fellow, has spent over 60 years researching, practicing, documenting, and teaching Kathak. According to him, the only way to reconcile Kathak dance with its theory is to research relevant dance texts from the medieval period, notably from the 11th through 19th centuries.

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Dance expressions built round manifestations of divinised female and male energies - Taalam: column by Leela Venkataraman

While conceiving of male and female principles as two halves of one unified deified entity, in the form of Shiva/Shakti, Hindu pantheon has, in the midst of this ingrained principle of complementariness, visualised each half in independent manifestations of supreme power. Coincidentally, separate dance events during the week, brought out the polarities of the dynamic and the gross, the physical and metaphysical, the manifest and unmanifest qualities, each of the divinities male or female is symbolised in. The one in the many and vice versa, despite all the apparent differences, ultimately represents forms to meditate upon in the endless search for that state of perfect equanimity regarded as the highest goal in life.

DEVI DIARIES
Trust arts activist and fierce advocate for the rights of women, Dr. Anita Ratnam, founder and managing editor of Narthaki.com, to conceive of dance built round the theme of the 'Devi'- as the ideal expression for Navaratri celebration. Curating Devi Diaries for Narthaki, Anita Ratnam was ably assisted by members of her crew, Lalitha Venkat (manager), Seher Noor Mehra (line producer) and Surya Rao (Editor). Narthaki's 'Devi Diaries' in its second season add up to a staggering variety of dance interpretations woven round the Devi - contributed by a selected group of dancers comprising established seniors and talented youngsters, male and female, pertaining to all dance forms, classical and modern, comprising contrasts representing the idealised and the realistic.

FACETS OF SHIVA
Coincidentally, with this ongoing celebration of divinity in the feminine aspect, alongside came its complementary opposite of male divinity in Facets of Shiva, a group offer by Sankhya Dance Company from Mumbai, in Bharatanatyam, presented at the India International Centre's Fountain Lawns, as part of this year's IIC festival celebration. Choreographer Vaibhav Arekar's approach to group presentation, no matter how oft treated the subject, always has a unique quality. 

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Obit/Tribute - Dr. Liesbeth Pankaja Bennink (1955-2021) - Jeetendra Hirschfeld

Drs. Liesbeth Pankaja Bennink passed away on November 4, 2021. ('Drs' is a specific Dutch Academic title, similar to 'Dr'.)

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Interview - An imaginary interview with Guru Gopinath - Part 4 - Tapati Chowdhurie

Master, what was the result of the driver's visit to Kunnamkulam village where Thangamani lived?

The driver returned to give me the bad news that both her father and Mukundaraja were not in favour of our getting married. The driver in fact advised me to give up my wish to marry Thangamani.

Later that evening my meeting with an acquaintance, a retired military serviceman, Pattyethu Raman Nair, was a godsend. During my conversation with him I told him about my wish. He said one of his relatives lived close to Thangamani's house and he would go there next morning and try to talk to Thangamani and gauge the situation there. True to his word, the very next day he left for Kunnamkulam to meet Thangamani and returned in the evening.

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Article - On self-expression - Yazhini SP

 In the performing arts of India, the audience is not a spectator, but a participant. This principle implies that a responsibility is placed on the audience. But does this matter concern the artist?

Today, there is a cloud of anxiety centered on the experience of dancing. It must be truthful, it must be spiritual, it must be profound, revelatory, meditative, and so on.

There is no cloud of anxiety centered on the audience. After all, the audience is "led" by the artist to the inner experience of rasa. No artist wants to be known for "playing to the gallery." The audience must be "uplifted" in a performance, from whatever low depths they have sunk into. Dancers very much care about the number of people in the audience. But as far as the craft of the dancer and the stuff of dance are concerned, the audience is an irrelevance.

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Bharatanatyam dancer and choreographer Divya Ravi has been producing some interesting content from her home during the lockdown. Along with her Carnatic vocalist husband Dr. Sharan Subramaniam, she has produced some made-for-camera pieces that explore the new medium to the fullest. She is among the dancers I have seen in the past year who are not simply filming stage presentations at home, but developing a new way of thinking about choreography amid restrictions that make stage presentations impossible.

One of her recent works is ‘Kanhopatra’, an abridged version of a potentially full-length work about the Marathi courtesan-turned-Varkari poetess Kanhopatra. I spoke to Divya about filming works like that, and dancing for the camera.

What happens to these short made-for-camera productions in a post-pandemic future?
Kanhopatra is a work in progress. And I do intend, at some point, to build it into a full-fledged work for the stage –about an hour and 15 minutes. Right now, it’s only a 30-minute work. I have all the material ready with me for the stage; because I had to do it in a digital format, I had trimmed a lot of the content, mainly to reduce the time, considering the digital attention spans of the audience. Even musically, when I take it to the stage, it will be a full-fledged orchestra. So far, we have only used the voice with no other instrument.

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Dance Criticism - A few principles for writing about Indian classical dance: Column by Janaki Patrik

In her article MOURNING MY PROFESSION published on 29 October 2021 in the VILLAGE VOICE, eminent American dance writer and critic Elizabeth Zimmer wrote a eulogy for the demise of dance criticism. Ms. Zimmer's thoughtful observations prompted me to revisit some thoughts I had about writing dance critiques of classical Indian dance performances. I had originally organized my thoughts into an essay written in 2014, which I have revised considerably for this article.

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Unmute - Power and what it does - Paramita Saha

In our recent Arts & the Law sessions organized by Unmute.help, one question returned often: 'If the person on the other side is a really powerful one, what should we do?' That brought me to the question of what power is and how was it perceived and by who. What makes the powerful truly powerful, what corrupts the powerful and how do they wield their power.

The earliest perception of power is in the family when we are children. Who makes the rules, who calls the shots, who decides, who pays for things, where does the buck stop. Then in school: who knows more, who can instruct, who can punish. Then in our relationships, who decides what happens, who apologizes more often, who has more money, who knows more about how things work, at work who reports to whom, who can force you to do more, who can make you work on your holidays, who can taunt you, goad you, ridicule you, bully you.

Coleman says that power is associated with personal characteristics of individuals or groups whereas authority is tied to social positions or roles. Abuse of power in the arts happens as a strong decoction of both of these. Traditional authority invested in our gurus or teachers is socially legitimate, historically valid, morally conforming to precedent. Students are supposed to 'obey' and not question. Students of the arts, especially dance, are physically vulnerable, open to corrections by the teacher or seniors acting as teachers or seniors assuming to be teachers who find bullying a common way to impose their authority.

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Anita says...November 2021

 “In all affairs, it is a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”

- Bertrand Russell


After two years, I returned to the USA. And spent most of my time walking the streets, absorbing the gorgeous Fall colours in Central Park and observing the many changes that Covid had forced upon this vibrant city. Especially in the arts. As Martin Wechsler, consultant for New York’s FALL FOR DANCE festival confessed, “Even as dancers stayed home with no shows, the producers, directors, fund raisers, editors, camera people and administrators worked harder than ever to keep this sector alive and ready for a time of return.”

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Roving Eye curated by Anita Ratnam - Nov 2021

 

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