Obit/Tribute - Veteran critic Satish Mehta no more - Vijay Shanker

Veteran dance critic, Mumbai based Satish Mehta, left for his heavenly abode, on the afternoon on 9th February 2021, after a heart attack. He was 86 and a bachelor, who lived in Virar, one of the western suburbs of Mumbai, during his later years in a rented flat. He was a Gujarati, was connected with several cultural organizations and would regularly attend dance festivals around India and abroad, in spite of his physical handicap of polio in one of his legs.

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Obit/Tribute - Modernity to Bansi Kaul was to reinvent - Dr. S D Desai

Theatre offers a modest space. Working within it, a genius of a theatre person sees vistas illumined in front of him, at times limitless. Bansi Kaul (23 Aug 1949 - 6 Feb 2021) was one such genius. Born in Srinagar, he studied at the National School of Drama, became director of its Repertory Company and later joined its faculty. Then came the time when the work he did gave him identity - he formed 'Rang Vidushak' (1986) in Bhopal that remained rooted in traditions not yet integrated into the mainstream theatre. As art director for Khajuraho and prestigious national festivals abroad and at the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony, he projected the theme of Indigenous Indian Culture putting aside a mere entertaining spectacle.

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Prism - Chidaakaasham: Myriad Expressions of Art (Day 1) - Hari Shankar

Last year had been a tough time for the entire mankind, especially, when it comes to the fraternity of artists and art lovers, it was annus horribilis. But nothing could stop the art enthusiasts and practitioners from getting themselves involved during this challenging time with some contribution to the field of their expertise. To everyone's surprise, there evolved a new idea of conducting online festivals and webinars. Even though the performing artists would not be able to do a complete justice to their presentations, leaving both the performers and the connoisseurs dissatisfied due to the unavoidable technical constraints at both the ends, webinars turned out to be a well-accepted and well-participated cultural affair.

In 2018, a remarkable national seminar on Mohiniattam titled 'Kaisiki Vritti', after 60 glorious years of the All India Dance Seminar (1958), where Mohiniattam had its first time national level exposure was organized by Trikalaa Gurukulam, a pioneer organization in Delhi under the aegis of Sangeet Natak Akademi, Delhi. This time, Trikalaa Gurukulam in collaboration with Aatmalaya Academy, Bangalore, organized Chidaakaasham, a two-day International Webinar (Dec 26 & 27, 2020) featuring eminent artistes, scholars, academicians from Indian universities, institutions abroad who enlightened the audience with their talks and performances on a wide array of topics that focused on rare metric patterns, rhythmic combinations in various genres of music and dance, both classical and folk, pan Indian, western music, Indian philosophy and rituals.

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Dancers' sojourn in distressed days - The Eastern Eye: Column by Dr.Utpal K Banerjee

Mahagami Gurukul, the unique performing arts institution of its kind, has now grown into a branch of MAHAGAMI University, having completed 20 years of a flourishing existence in 2017. Since then every year, past and present students converged from faraway places to be part of this celebration. Past students from USA, Brazil, Austria, Argentina, Delhi, Bangalore, Kochi, Pune, etc. travelled to Mahagami to be part of the dance offering, VAYAM (I, we) that aimed at celebrating their attachment with the Gurukul.

In 2021, due to the long months of lockdown, the Mahagami team led by their gifted director Parwati Dutta, came up with an online version of the VAYAM festival with an aim to encouraging talented dancers and celebrating the spirit of dance even in the existing restrictions. She had been artistically active since the beginning of lockdown in mid-March 2020 and had designed, curated and initiated a variety of projects and immersions in the past 9 months. Dance immersions were aimed at re-igniting the learners' minds towards form making abilities of dance movements, creating dance motifs and metaphors, and internalising multiple facades of dance. She immersed herself in the sudden silence around in the Gurukul and came up with a range of new compositions - from a Sanskrit ditty glorifying a blossom, to re-looking at taal Rupak from the perspective of the sound-form dialogue, a pada by Nanda Das describing spring time love frolics, to a highly imaginative Krishna Tandava (pure dance in Odissi) in which the divine dance of Krishna was imagined as if he wandered in the silent pathways of Mahagami! Indeed, the sculpted gardens and decorative motifs on all the buildings of the Gurukul provided a fascinatingly varied and picturesque backdrop of the 2021 virtual programme of VAYAM.

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Two titans and their travelogues - The Eastern Eye: Column by Dr.Utpal K Banerjee

Rabindranath Tagore and Swami Vivekananda have been two illustrious icons of our land, who were born only two years apart (1861 and 1863) and both within the perimeters of north Kolkata, but they seldom met. With their ideas and ideologies, they went their own eventful sojourns through life, remaining far away from each other. While Tagore lived a long and fruitful span of eight decades, Vivekananda blazed his trail over just thirty-six years, before coming to rest his mortal remains in Kolkata, not too far from where Tagore would breathe his last. It is interesting to look at what, very broadly, they held in common in their upbringing as well as in their future world views....

Rabi Kare Bibek Jyoti (Vivekananda Illumined with Tagore's Aura) presented on January 16 by 'Srijan Chhanda' under the noted Odissi dancer Rajiv Bhattacharjee - incidentally as their first venture on proscenium stage coming out of the thralldom of covid virus- attempted to place Tagore and Vivekananda side by side.

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Roving Eye curated by Anita Ratnam - February 2021

 

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Anita says...February 2021

 Are we in February already?

The days continue to whirl by and the blur of the hours passing seem almost like a monotonous hum. How long can we continue to pretend that dance and the breathing, dancing body can find a hybrid space via the digital platform?

Meanwhile, there has been quite a ferment in politics and art.
As the Capitol building was stormed in Washington DC by white supremacists, India's national flag was dishonoured by a group of protesting farmers on Republic Day.

Rumbles in Andhra land as Kuchipudi dancers resist attempts to prevent their paid recordings from being used for online performances.

Collaborations across communities in 20th century Tamilnadu occurred even during the seismic events of the independence struggle. An occasional series begins this month.

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