I am brought back to the same vision - a beautiful dancer on the stage, presenting abhinaya as the lovelorn heroine, and then nritta with several movements and chakkars. But your memory cannot retain these visions to be seen later by you or your friends. Words alone would not be able to describe the moment, and that particular movement. And so click, click, click goes the camera, and all is preserved for posterity.Many a time, in trying to explain a movement, I have to consult my husband, who's a photographer, and he can show me the exact picture. And at times, multiple images of the same movement, which are clicked every fraction of a second, capture almost every aspect of the movement. I think my article would be incomplete without the pictures.Here, I am profiling a person whom I've met at several performances in the past few years. In almost every performance in Delhi, he is there with his wife Santosh, sitting among the front row audience. This unassuming person is the legendary photographer Avinash Pasricha, who has worked extensively with many dancers and dance forms for over half a century. His contribution to dance is unparalleled. My husband and I interviewed him together, since there were technical aspects of photography that the two could discuss better.
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For readers who do not know Dombivli, a suburb of Mumbai, it is next station to Thane on way to Kalyan. The well known young Bharatanatyam dancer and teacher Pavitra Krishna Bhat, originally from Mangalore, moved with his parents some thirty years ago to Dombivli. As a child he had great passion for dance. His parents indulged him. He only studied elementary Bharatanatyam from his first teacher but that did not deter him from performing anywhere. His parents also pushed him to perform during occasions like Satyanarayana puja or Ganeshotsava. With complete involvement Pavitra performed and made onlookers happy with his endearing personality and dancing.
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When we think of dance in mainstream corporate entertainment, specifically in North America, we rarely expect to see representation of Indian classical dance forms. Certainly, Bollywood styles have now become very prevalent and en vogue, but the mainstream awareness of the classical forms is still relegated to a niche, and somewhat exotified specialization. As a South Asian classically trained dance artist and choreographer growing up in the Canadian diaspora, similar to that of the United States where “classical dance” meant only ‘ballet,’ there was always a struggle of having to clarify what Bharatanatyam was, and how, no, it wasn’t the same as ‘bellydance.’ There was a certain self-consciousness and self-worth associated with continually having to validate and explain the many years of dedicated rigour required of one’s art form and I would often find myself wishing I had trained in ballet instead. Because at least then there would be an unquestioned validation.
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VrityantHuman civilisations are replete with events where patriarchy has held sway over a generally submissive matriarchy and the latter had allowed the dominant masculinity to take over control and assumed a nurturing role of providing care and comfort in the society. History has, however, known other occasions when patriarchy had bludgeoned the female species into submission and extracted a most heinous price from the latter. The glaring cases – happening mostly in wars and anarchy -- were the “comfort women” forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army in occupied territories before and during World War II, drawn from occupied countries, including Korea, China, and the Philippines. Similar instances, nearer our time, have been the Khan soldiers in East Pakistan before the liberation of Bangladesh and, more recently, by the IS troops in the Middle East “using” women as sex slaves.....
Ananta
The cosmic quest of the world and beyond starts from the viewpoint of Pancha Bhuta (five elements), manifest as an coalescence to form the life force and then disintegrates to ensure a celestial traverse at the atomic level. An innovative production in the lyrical Odissi style, Ananta was an exploration of some of the most profound philosophical concepts from the ancient Vedas and Upanishads. Choreographed by Arnab Bandopadhyay in Odissi style, the visualisation also blended creative movements, classical and contemporary music, and Vedic chanting, with the latter rendered soulfully by the noted classical vocalist Dr. Subhadra Desai.....
Hot on the heels of Kalavardhini’s 40 years Parikrama in honour of Dr. Sucheta Chapekar’s 70th birthday at Pune, Kalavardhini arranged a two day festival of films on dance in collaboration with Pune’s National Film Archive of India, and Loud Applause, on 16th and 17th February in two sessions a day. This was the second year of their screening of films on dance.The venue is one of the finest film halls with latest state-of-art facilities, excellent projection and acoustics. Being national film archive theatre, it is very clean, neat, sound proof and with best facilities for projection. Thereby it adds to the pleasure of watching the films. It was a pleasure meeting the present director Prakash Magdum, who has been in office the last four years.
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The old has collapsed
But tries to stitch together its fallen pieces
To weave another tapestry
To give it a life span
But staggers at every step, and falls apart again
It tries to patch work - but now
Even that doesn't work
It has come to a halt!- Excerpted from the New Vision statement of AUROVILLE Let me open by saying that despite all the social media posts and discussions, reviews and blogs about performances, THIS monthly editorial seems to be more anticipated, quoted, excerpted, dissected, discussed, debated and shared. It is both a compliment and a marker for the changing styles of dance discourse. This once a month observations on performances and dance related events were always meant to be subjective.
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