VILLAGE VOICE Tuesday, March 27th 2007

Cultural Grafting:
Two artists mingle the ancient and the up-to-date

by Deborah Jowitt

Rajika Puri and Dancers Joyce SoHo March 22 through 25

“How do dancers and choreographers raised or schooled in a particular native tradition expand on that without losing its essence, hybridize it without betraying it? With care, taste, and imagination. . . .”

"Rajika Puri calls her gently provocative performance Conversations with Shiva: Bharata Natyam Unwrapped. With the help of director Yuval Sharon, she has deconstructed and overlapped the numbers of a typical Bharata Natyam solo program to create the image of a village of women, where movement patterns become conversations. Shobana Ram, beautifully clear in the style's flashing sculptural designs and piercing rhythms, opens with an invocation to Shiva, but sometimes reappears to lead the group. Kneeling with her back to the audience, she demonstrates the alphabet of single and double hand gestures, while the other women move from docile classroom rows to cluster at the back-their hastas gradually expanding and differing until they resemble a bouquet of varied flowers."

When Puri and Nirali Shastri chant the rhythmic syllables that accompany the basic steps (adavus) of a Bharata Natyam class, they vary their facings and timings to create a sisterly dialogue. In Svara, a dance celebrating the proud, swinging gait of Indian dance, the six women who walk backward in curving paths acknowledge one another as they pass. Forming a circle to execute the rhythmic footwork extrapolated from a varnam, Nirali Shastri, Malini Srinivasan, Pavithra Vasudevan, and Puri look as if they're exchanging girlish confidences.

In addition to transforming traditional, frontally-oriented solos into group dances, Puri has further expanded them by breaking single phrases into two or more contrapuntal ones. When each of three soloists - Sonali Skandan, Vasudevan, and Malini Srinivasam - performs a padam, and Shobana Raghavan sings the poetic words, she is not alone. When Srinivasan - face alight, hands intricately caressing the air - "tells" a friend how Krishna's lovemaking transformed her, others seated near her cast sympathetic glances. While Vasudevan speaks, perhaps as Radha, rebuking Krishna for his amorous exploit with another woman "right there, next to your peacock chariot!;" Puri shadows her in the background, as if she were that rival (or perhaps a thought of her), and at the end of the poem, she takes Vasudevan's place in the spotlight.

One of the concert's most magical effects is achieved during the pallavi section of Varna; while Ram, as temple dancer, addresses Shiva with her mobile hands and body, another of the women holds up a shiny metal plate to reflect soft light onto her. The concert as a whole, however, makes tasteful use of more contemporary technology. The traditional music provided by vocalist Raghavan and A.R. Balaskandan, playing drums and violin, is augmented by electronic drone and a vocal echo, and sometimes supplanted by less effective sugary-sweet piano music. Julie Ana Dobo's attractive lighting effects are augmented by occasional videos - such as repeated closeup shots of Ram's pleated red "apron" fanning out as she sinks into a plié or of her eloquent feet stamping.

Although the dancers Puri has assembled - all currently living in the States - have been finely trained, her “unwrapped” Bharata Natyam doesn’t offer long, rigorous works. In this charming and intelligent program, however, the visual and rhythmic variety and communal exchanges more than make up for not seeing complex patterns develop on a single body over time.

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