Raseswar Saikia Barbayan, the legendary Sattriya guru, established Sangeet Sattra in 1968, after he returned from Kamalabari Sattra to Guwahati. He got married and started teaching young maidens Sattriya dances. This was a revolutionary step as the celibate monks of Sattras performed in the Sattras and women were not allowed to either enter Sattras, or dance. However, realizing that there need not be any gender bias and women are equal devotees with a right to perform, his earlier students included Indira PP Bora, Sharodi Saikia and his own two daughters Ranjumoni and Rinjumoni....
This being the Golden Jubilee of Sangeet Sattra, Ranjumoni as the principal organizer had planned to present a large number of students to showcase their training....
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This is my first of the monthly column I hope to write for Narthaki for a long time to come. I have titled it ‘Soch’ as each column will have one idea that I will explore, exfoliate and excavate. I debated about calling it some of the more resonant synonyms of soch, like ‘khayal’ and ‘chintan’ because of their more ponderous meaning, but soch is a sufficiently significant starting point for a flight of imagination, light as a bird and ever on wing! I would also like to honour the place where Narthaki founder Dr. Anita Ratnam offered me this column - Malta, by locating the perch of the first Soch in this magical Mediterranean island embedded in the embrace of azure waters. Nestled between southern Italy and northern Africa, Malta’s beautiful shores, baroque architecture, ancient monuments, to say nothing of its mouth-watering cuisine, make it a highly sought after tourist destination.
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Never-say-die art consultant Usha RK has come up with another dance production of divya kshetras, Tirupati and Pandharpur.Roping in bright young dancers Dakshina Vaidyanathan Baghel for Tirupati and Arundhati Patwardhan for Pandharpur, Usha led the audience to these two pilgrimage places in an engaging manner. Both the artists have in their mothers, seasoned dancers, and both the daughters have done their mothers proud.Usha's commentary on Tirumala Devasthanam was well researched with excellent Annamacharyakirtanas to go with dancing. Ditto for Pandharpur and Tukaram's abhangas and ovis, vachanas, with vachikabhinaya. They evoked bhakti rasa and in terms of music, whereas Dr. S.Vasudevan and other accompanists offered melodious music highlighting Annamacharya kirtanas, Arundhati's Pune based musicians brought a whiff of fresh air with Marathi abhangas to which audience clapped and tapped with their feet. The joyous mood lingered on and both the dancers kept us in thrall with their dancing.
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Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (1894-1950) was one of the leading writers of modern Bengali literature. Examples of his highly diverse literary genres are: Pather Panchali (autographical ‘saga on the road’ transferred memorably on the celluloid by the cineaste Satyajit Ray); Aranyak (nature’s saga on a forest trail with all its mysterious intimacy); Chander Pahad (a travel saga of adventures in the then unknown world of Africa); and Devjan (the esoteric saga of the after-life of its hero). A lesser known genre, verging almost on ‘morality’ play was his Athai Jal penned in 1947, where he explored the epic saga of a perfectly normal man’s encounter with the so-called ‘degenerate’ world of the early 19th century Bengal, his plunge into its passion driven turmoil, heart and soul, and eventual resuscitation back into the familiar normalcy.
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It is heartening that The Raza Foundation's Art Matters series, which so far has been largely concerned with music, dance and painting has finally begun to look at theatre too - perhaps the most dynamic of art expressions along with painting, in terms of being largely engaged with contemporary situations reflecting the thirst and fire of life as lived now. The evening at IIC's Kamaladevi complex termed Her Theatre comprised a panel discussion by well known women theatre directors - Neelam Mansingh, Kirti Jain and Maya Rao. Are women directors different from male directors? Does Her Theatre have gender leanings? Do female directors have a heightened feel for democratization? Has the entry of women directors led to more humanized or more civilized theatre? These are some of the points that Ashok Vajpeyi raised in his introduction.
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The Sangeet Natak journal of the Sangeet Natak Akademi (SNA), the premier body for arts in the country is languishing without an editor and with no regular issues coming out. In a country with a population of more than 130 crores, there is no serious academic journal on dance. Much has been spoken about the SNA and the culture departments and the bureaucrats and how they have failed to deliver. But what about the dance community? Impeccably dressed to kill, they light up any party or gathering. Scratch the surface and there is a vicious streak of jealousy and self centred vanity and even intolerance. Standards of dance are not getting any better. The best in most cases is just mediocre. Spouting a few slokas here and there with the torso bent with humility which can vanish to expose claws and fangs at the slightest review of their work by able critics, the dancers (there are exceptions to the scenario) make for a scary world.
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Kolkata, the eastern metropolis, is lucky to be rich in its number of well-groomed Odissi dancers. Thanks to several visits, residency programmes and extended workshops that legendary guru Kelucharan Mohapatra conducted in this part when he was alive, a number of his illustrious disciples today perform and run disciplined centers of training and performance here. Sharmila Biswas and Sutapa Talukdar have been foremost among them and now the young Subikash Mukherjee has joined the rank. Bahana and Ravash were two of the most recent works of the last two choreographers.
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