Chennai swamped by Margazhi music/dance deluge - Taalam: column by Leela Venkataraman

Come Margazhi Season and with the deluge of music /dance and lectures on art in Chennai, one jumps grasshopper like from one Sabha to another, trying to absorb as much as one's energy and trafficking through bumpy and in places water-logged roads and alleys, will allow. In the desire not to miss out on opportunities, one often misses out on the luxury of sitting through entire events, ending up seeing parts of festivals playing out at various centres.

LECTURE BY BRITISH HISTORIAN WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

NRITHYA CHOODAMANI AND SANGEETHA CHOODAMANI

NAVIA'S VIRODHABHASA INTENSITY STRUGGLES AGAINST AUDIENCE RIGIDITY

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Anita says...January 2025

Happy New Year, everyone!
Here we are at the start of yet another year.
A year that brings with it all the hopes and promises of something better and brighter than the year that has just gone by.

Are you looking back at 2024 with gratitude, joy, delight? A twinge of regret and sadness? Are you a better person today than a year ago? It is a brand new start and moving beyond resolutions, there are 12 brand new months to reset, pivot or simply get up, dust the knicks and scratches off our knees and keep going-dancing!

For me, 2024 has been one of big ups and downs. A broken bone mid year and weeks of rest put me in a reflective mood about my own journey. It's been 60 years since my arangetram! How much and how far I have travelled in my life and art! How many new initiatives, new platforms, new brands. So perhaps 2024 has rightly been a year of pause, reflection and perhaps a pivot!

My travels took me to many countries but in December alone I went to villages, towns, cities, mountains and the seaside. I watched a gamut of performances - ritual theatre, folk art, mythic plays, classical and neo classical dance, performance art, film music orchestras, contemporary dance and, skipping (almost) the entire Chennai Margazhi season. I felt a huge surge of gratitude for the opportunity to encounter new cultural experiences while staying curious with a multitude of questions about walking the creative path.

To take the entire month of December off was always the plan. Knowing only too well that Chennai would be drowning in too many Bharatanatyam shows from morning to night, I intentionally planned to turn my lens onto other kinds of creative endeavours. I wanted to absorb a greater diversity in arts programming, to personally witness the push of bristling young minds curating inter-disciplinary events with courage and bravado - to acknowledge (with a wistful twinge) the shrinking space for classical dance and to envy classically trained musicians who are able to easily straddle so many worlds simultaneously. 

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25 years of Kala NADAM Festival 2024 - Dance Matters: Column by Ashish Mohan Khokar

Murali Mohan Kalvakalva is a rather foolish man. His partner in crime, Nandini Mehta, is more foolish. Between the two of them, they have shared and given much of their worldly wealth (time too and health) in promoting all shades of artistes - dancers, photographers, gurus, musicians, teachers and more. Youngsters. Wannabes and have beens. Could have been and never should have been (on stage!). They do this for their love of the art of dance. They also mount two of Bangalore's most popular and professional festivals: one in end-November every year and one for kids in August called Chinna NADAM. Lots of new, upcoming talents get a chance to dance. 

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Profile - Greatest dancers of our times - Vazhuvoor Saravanan

In the entire history of classical dance 'Sadir' later rechristened as 'Bharatanatyam', Maduranthakam Jagadambal Ammal (1873 - 1943), Thiruvazhaputhur Kalyani Ammal (1873 - 1938) and Thanjavur Veenabashini Ammal (1877 - 1962) were revered as the greatest and most accomplished classical dancers on record. All three were born in the late 19th century in Tamilnadu.

Maduranthakam Jagadambal Ammal learnt this divine art from Vazhuvoor Samu Nattuvanar (Grandfather of Vazhuvoor Ramaiah Pillai), Thiruvazhaputhur Kalyani Ammal from Pandanallur Meenakshisundaram Pillai and Thanjavur Veenabashini Ammal from Thanjavur Kannuswamy Nattuvanar. They enthralled the audience with their scintillating performances and showcased the glory of ancient Vazhuvoor, Pandanallur and Thanjavur baani of classical dance respectively. 

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Brilliant metaphoric interplay of life and kite flying in Pagrav Dance Company's Kattam Katti - Taalam: column by Leela Venkataraman

"If Winter comes can Spring be far behind?" said poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Signifying this new life energy associated with the oncoming of Spring, is the festival of Uttarayan in Gujarat, when people shedding social and religious inhibitions, even transgressing geographical boundaries, join in the unique event of kite flying. In its highs and lows, this sport, much like ball play or motion of the swing, becomes an ideal metaphor for the unpredictability of life, with its ups and downs. Kite flying, in the competition for air space amongst fliers, witnesses the thrill of joy and sense of freedom as the kite soars in the sky, and the corresponding sense of deep loss and dejection when it comes spiraling down, its string in the air severed by a competing flier's kite - with the entire gamut of human emotions at play. 

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Prism - CHAALI... taking dance to her audience - Bharat Sharma

Performance thrives in Live Performance - this is fundamental to any Intangible Art. At a fundamental level, it is a conversation between the Body and the Viewer in a defined space of culture. This is primal, if we take stick figures etched in Bhimbetka Caves near Bhojpur in Madhya Pradesh as manifestation of community and participatory exuberance, or sophisticated articulation of an individual's craft of the sharira to the rasika, as expounded in the rasa theory in the Natyashastra (5th century BC). From time immemorial, the relationship between dance and her audience has been crucial for the survival of oral traditions.

Dance as Live Performance is also linked to life cycle of humans - dance is lived while the body has breath. Dance gets activated at birth and dies at death, leaving traces in memory of viewers, or remembered through traditions passed on by generational lineages. These memories of the dancing body are affirmations of the ethereal nature of performance. Dance can be kept alive, in Time and Space, through a system that brings together the dancing body and the viewer to converse. These eco-systems of performance can then be termed as support system within a culture. 

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Beyond margam expressions - Taalam: column by Leela Venkataraman

MANDALA -A MOVING PSYCHOLOGICAL MUSIC/DANCE INTERACTION
Presented at Chennai's Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan auditorium, Mandala was a truly interactive music/dance artistic journey between two classical artistes - dancer Amrita Lahiri and musician Chandana Bala Kalyan. Mandala, the symbolism representing sacred space (in Hinduism and Buddhism) with concentric circles converging in one center, becomes a metaphor for one's search for the sacred, traversing through several journeys in search of that center, which one finally realizes, is within. India's classical music and dance have always been regarded as a search for that oneness through works, in this production representing different states of being - sringar (love), viraha (separation), maya (illusion) and aikya (dissolution), the final state of getting merged into that, which one has been seeking....

 

TO DUST WE RETURN
Yet another non-Margam performance conceived and presented by Anuradha Venkataraman, harnesses the Bharatanatyam technique in a stark dance theatre production - expressing deep seated anguish at how, what one mistakenly deems as Progress, has not only fatally damaged the environment leaving Planet Earth gasping for breath, but has also contributed to creating an unbridgeable chasm between the privileged few as against the largely neglected sections of society....

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