At a time when solo recitals often become trite displays of rigour and virtuosity, two recent iterations distinguished themselves by demonstrating how solos can be both expansive in vision and thorough in execution. Krishnendu Saha’s performance at Gyan Manch was the first of the two extraordinary presentations. Saha’s dancing is buoyant, energetic and soulful. A beautiful performer of Odissi, he is a light mover with the accuracy of classical training, who, however, is also capable of pushing the contours of the form in his quest for adventure and freedom. The result is altogether dazzling while being intensely expressive.
Saha (picture, left) opened the evening with Panchamukhi Shiva, his own choreography on the journey of life. A thumri followed, exploring love as a transformative act in which the self dissolves into the beloved only to emerge with a deeper understanding of its own essence. The recital reached a high point with the bhajan, “Hari tuma haro janaki peer”. Sharmila Biswas’s rich choreography interweaves episodes from the epics into Meera’s devotional plea. Saha navigated the shifts in character, mood and narrative with fluidity, transforming the piece into compelling storytelling. He brought the evening to a stirring close with the uplifting Moksha Mangalam.
The second of the remarkable solos was Sayani Chakraborty’s Nritta.Bhava.Anubhava at Padatik. Exploiting the intimacy of the black-box theatre, Chakraborty (picture, right) interestingly began by turning the audience’s gaze towards the green room, revealing the physical and the mental rituals that precede performance. She quietly dissolved the boundary between preparation and dance, proposing that the performance begins long before the dancer steps onto the stage.
Chakraborty’s pada varnam, Aharya Alarippu, choreographed by Rama Vaidyanathan, approached love as a force in which the boundaries of the self gradually dissolve into surrender and devotion. In the subsequent piece, Chakraborty examined an artist’s lifelong engagement with her craft as a process of relentless interrogation, deconstruction and recreation. The work located creativity in a state of perpetual incompleteness, where excellence remains an ever-receding horizon that both frustrates and sustains the artist’s pursuit. The concluding thillana, much more than a display of technical accomplishment, was joyful. With a riveting stage presence, Chakraborty combined precision with grace, transforming complexity into mesmerising effortlessness.
Kolkata Centre for Creativity recently hosted an ambitious dance experiment inspired by Raktakarabi, one of Rabindranath Tagore’s most layered and symbolic dramatic works. Conceived as a dialogue between the classical traditions of Manipuri led by Bimbavati Devi and Odissi under the direction of Arnab Bandyopadhyay, the production grappled with the play’s enduring preoccupation with greed and power and the violence they inflict upon love, beauty and truth. Few modern Indian texts lend themselves so readily to reinterpretation, and fewer are as resistant to over-simplification. Beneath its lyrical surface lie dense metaphors, philosophical inquiry and political dissent. To translate such a work into dance is fraught with challenges, as, in embodiment, the danger lies in reducing its complexity to illustrative representation. A new adaptation also enters a formidable lineage of interpretations.
It has to be said that the Manipuri part of the performance emerged as
the more accomplished and satisfying response. Its choreography possessed an organic relationship with the text, with meaning arising through spatial design and collective movement. The costumes, too, seemed to grow naturally out of the production’s aesthetic world. The Odissi section, by contrast, rarely penetrated beyond the play’s thematic surface.