During the 8th Olympic Theatre Festival organized by the National School of Drama and Ministry of Culture, Piyal Bhattacharya from Kolkata presented Bhaanaka at LTG theatre, Delhi, on 17th March, his recreation of uparupaka Bhaanaka under the aegis of his Chidakash Kalalaya Centre of Art and Divinity, which he established in Kolkata in 2013. On the next day at NSD during the ‘meet the directors’ program, there was an interesting discussion about this particular production. Piyal has received attention especially for his work on the practice of Marga Natya, as research and reconstruction of practice of the performance tradition of Natyashastra. I had known him as a Kathakali dancer with his friend Kalamandalam Gautam during my tenure as a Professor at Rabindra Bharati University. When he began work on Marga Natya, I had only seen one early performance of his work. During the past ten years, Piyal has worked on reconstructing the ancient musical instruments mentioned in Bharata’s Natyashastra with help of a grant from Sangeet Natak Akademi. He has undertaken this project for further research with special grant from Ministry of Culture under the scheme of ‘Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage of India.’
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Two endearing take-offs on Shakespeare, one delightful spoof on Jules Verne and one hard core realisation of African reality constituted a substantive spread of the ongoing 8th Theatre Olympics panorama.
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After two decades of conducting annually the Bharat Rang Mahotsav with great aplomb since 1999, National School of Drama unfurled – with the hand-holding by the parent Ministry of Culture -- the biggest venture of its existence: the 8th Theatre Olympics from February 17 to April 8 this year. Having begun appropriately in Greece at the end of the 20th century and having traversed through Europe and Asia in the last several years, the Theatre Olympics was a matter of national prestige and honor for NSD to host in India, comprising several hundred theatre performances hailing from all parts of the globe and simultaneously showcasing them in 17 cities of the country. The first three plays witnessed by this critic revolved round the agonizing question of existence: societal, personal and political.
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An evening of dance centred round the poetry of women bhakti poets Andal and Meera, hailing from the South and North of India respectively, was in keeping with the mood of International Women’s Day celebrated in early March. Designed by cultural activist R.K. Usha, the evening jointly mounted with Sangeet Shyamala at the latter’s venue in Vasant Vihar, Delhi, featured two young dancers Shreyasi Gopinath and Shipra Joshi, representing two forms of Bharatanatyam and Kathak. In terms of taking programmes to audiences in different localities (the large formal auditoriums being too far away), this intimate performance area in Sangeet Shyamala’s basement facing a gallery style seating, attracted an enthusiastic turnout and seemed an excellent way of familiarising people in various areas.
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It is with great grief that we try to cope with the irreplaceable loss of Subraya Bhat, a prolific theatre personality- actor, writer and director, ‘Method-Drama Specialist’, and a student of Prof. Ranganath Bharadwaj, on 14th March 2018. He held the position of Secretary and Technical coordinator at Karnataka Haridasa Scientific Research Centre and Theatre Faculty at The Structural School of Fine Arts. He specialized in the ‘Structural Method’ under his Guru’s guidance and continued schooling young students through his theatre activities and pedagogy. He published his works under the banner of ‘Natyabhoomi Prakashana’, penning several works in the past two decades.
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The Gaiety Theatre
After our last visit to Shimla in September last year for a seminar at Institute of Advanced Studies, when I received an invitation to attend a three day classical dance festival organized by Department of Language and Culture of Himachal Pradesh, I was delighted to accept. More so, as my confrere Leela Venkataraman was also invited and the artists from Delhi - Jaipur Gharana exponent Rajendra Gangani, Bharatanatyam dancer Geeta Chandran - and from Kolkata, Manipuri exponent Bimbavati and her troupe were to perform, we knew we would have a dance fare that would not only be enjoyable but also the company of the artists would give us opportunity to catch up with the latest.....
The Himachal Pradesh University and Art Gallery of Prof. Him ChatterjeeI had met painter Professor Him Chatterjee at Khajuraho few days ago at the dance performance. He invited Leela Venkataraman and me for breakfast on Sunday morning to visit his residence and gallery, some seven kilometers away from our hotel.
Son of Sanat Kumar Chatterjee, the celebrated painter, disciple of legendary painter Asit Halder from Shantinketan, Him Chatterjee is a prolific painter. He is at present Dean and Professor of the Visual Arts Faculty. He has obtained two acres of land on which he has built two storey residential quarters and also his studio and a gallery which houses rare Bengal School paintings of his father, few of Asit Haldar and a couple of rare original photographs of Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore. Well designed, it is a treasure trove and I recommend that visitors, dancers, must visit it......
The Dance Festival
Shimla is on the hills and its hairpin roads would scare those who are not used to it. The experienced drivers and those who have been living here can negotiate the small roads with ease. Whenever we went to the Gaiety Theatre for performances, our hearts were in our mouths, as the driver negotiated the car. If a car came from opposite direction, he drove back to let the other car go. The plaza, the more than hundred year old Christ Church, the view from the top, the 108 feet tall statue of Hanuman, the restaurants etc., located on height, people walking and some sitting on the benches made the scene colourful. The crowds strolled in the evening. By six in the evening the lights illumined the hills. The festive mood prevailed....
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Indian Contemporary dancers, a vibrant presence but without the kind of establishment support their colleagues representing other dance categories seem to command, have over almost a century functioned as an isolated group comprising diverse individualistic movement expressions. The odd stock taking events looking at this side of Dance Exploration were The East-West Dance Encounter in 1984 and later in 1993, and new explorations featured in Sangeet Natak Akademi’s ‘Nava Nritya Samaroh’ in 1989. Now, in Kolkata comes the latest effort at bringing dancers, scholars and writers to interact on the nature of Contemporary Dance in India, and its future prospects.Curated with great care by Sudarshan Chakravorty and Paramita Saha of Sapphire Dance Creations of Kolkata, the two day SAMABHAVANA effort on new directions in Indian dance, churned out varied thinking on the dancing body, which, through history, has had to deal with institutions of power controlling culture – whether temple, court or an elected government. The entire history of dance in India at one time was written on the body of the Devadasi, resulting in this traditional group of professional entertainers being crushed.
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