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nytimes.com
Indian Dance via Bollywood, by Way of Russia, Near Wall Street |
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Dance Review - nytimes.com
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
Published: August 19, 2012
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Indian Dance via Bollywood, by Way of Russia, Near Wall Street
Indian Dance at Downtown Dance Festival
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In February, as I stood in line to collect my visa to go to India, the man next to me said: "You're interested in Indian dance? But then you have to go to Bombay." He was referring to dance in Bollywood movies.
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Downtown Dance Festival Members of the Mayuri Dance Group, from Petrozavodsk, Russia, performing at 1 New York Plaza on Friday during the "Erasing Borders" program of Indian Dance. |
That memory came back on Friday at 1 New York Plaza, as the weeklong Downtown Dance Festival closed with its annual "Erasing Borders" program of Indian dance, presented by the Indo-American Arts Council. The organizers, devoted to the classical forms of Indian dance, have offered several rare examples in previous years, but they don't exclude other Indian dance forms. And despite the Indo-American label, they include countries other than India and the United States. So you had to laugh on Friday: not only did the 90-minute concert begin and end with several chunks of Bollywood dance, but it was also Bollywood by way of Russia.
I've never seen the plaza more crowded, with many standees. Who wouldn't cherish the juxtaposition of the financial district (with traffic visible on two sides of the plaza) and Indian dance (with its complex evocations of faraway culture, its bright attire and the lavish color of its generously amplified music). Every year I look forward to the contrast.
The Russian dancers - the Mayuri Dance Group, from Petrozavodsk - were big hits, performing eight numbers with zest, glee and an array of costumes so admirably vivid that audience members exclaimed about them. Combinations of azure with gold, emerald with cream, and black with scarlet flooded the cityscape with color. The dancing, often with lip-syncing and flashing eyes, had all of Bollywood's engaging vivacity. As so often in Bollywood, shoulders or pelvises would throb to the beat like pulses. (I read with happy fascination that the Mayuri group was founded in 1987 at the Railway Workers Cultural Center of Petrozavodsk; training there also includes the Indian classical idioms of Bharata Natyam and Kathak.)
In a final bhangra number, "Jatt Ho Gaya Sharabi," three male roles were so well played and the performers so convincingly bearded that few in the audience realized that the dancers were women (whom we'd seen dancing as such earlier). The most breathtaking item was "Mera Naam Chin Chin Chu," a long and energetic solo danced by Natalia Fridman to a 1950s song (recorded by Geeta Dutt) of very bubbly Indian rock 'n' roll. You could tie yourself in knots over the politically incorrect ethnology here. The words "Chin Chin Chu" may have been based on the 1916 London hit show "Chu Chin Chow," a vision of Chinese Orientalism now coming back to us via India via Russia. Ms. Fridman's unflagging brio was cause for delight.
The three classical genres represented on Friday were Bharata Natyam, Kathak and Kuchipudi. Impressively, the Bharata Natyam group - the choreographer Sonali Skandan and Jiva Dance from New York - included a Nigerian dancer; while Bageshree Vaze, the Kathak dancer, though born in India, was raised and lives in Canada and performed to her own recordings.
The two Kuchipudi dancers - Jaikishore and Padmavani Mosalikanti, a husband and wife - came from southern India. Mythological narration, expressive mime and pure dance all took their turn as part of their "Durga Taranga." She plays the goddess Durga, he the evil demon Mahishasura. I loved the way in which duet sections would often show them dancing or acting in different ways simultaneously; and how acting would suddenly give way to pure dance, characterizations would melt into a less specific but deeper sense of humanity. In victory she would lift one foot to the knee or the other leg and balance there, becoming sculptural in resolution. Later she would slowly unfold her raised leg by sweeping it backward through the air.
Another charm of their dancing occurred in simple walks backward: their heads and shoulders, gently jaunty, moved in graceful opposition while their arms stayed still. One style succeeded another; the rhythm kept changing but never faltered; the dance grew steadily more engrossing. The final section featured a plate dance. Each dancer stood with bare feet planted on the rim of a bowl-like brass plate: the fun was in how the complex rhythm of their feet would send each plate turning and traveling around the stage.
The three dances choreographed by Ms. Skandan for Jiva Dance showed technical precision and geometric skill but stayed in the foothills of Bharata Natyam style. I felt I should be ticking off points in official approval even while my mind started to wander.
All the music was taped. Bollywood dance is the genre that this suits best. (It's hard to imagine it danced to live music anyway.) But the classical forms suffer without the stimulus of live musicians. In theory no form should suffer more than Kathak, which reaches its most particular brilliance in the jazzlike improvisatory interplay of movement and sound. Ms. Vaze, however, dancing to her own recordings, made marvelously fast effects using synchronicity, arriving with the beat, finding tiny moments of stillness within spinning sequences, punctuating turns with gestures.
This was dancing where you kept noticing further felicities of style. Sometimes during a phrase Ms. Vaze would bring her arms into a formal arc, and then, a beat later, turn her head and eyes to resolve the position and bring it into focus. It felt like an archer lining up a target, then with a mere glance firing. The subtle plasticity of that turn of the head, the isolation of the eyes' arrival: ravishing.
Yet just as often she would bring arms, head and eyes all into the same perfect alignment on the same beat. Here was spot-on archery without preparation, striking effortlessly home.
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| Source:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/arts/dance/indian-dance-at-downtown-dance-festival.html?adxnnl=1&smid=fb-share&adxnnlx=1345425869-qOfyP8wHQvMuMjgSxNwH1Q |
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| The Indo-American Arts Council is a 501 ©3 not-for-profit secular arts organization passionately dedicated to promoting, showcasing and building an awareness of artists of Indian origin in the performing arts, visual arts, literary arts and folk arts. For information please visit |
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