HYDERABAD: The dancer’s hands gesticulate and bloom celebrating the beauty of flowers. She recites verses from Kalidasa’s Ritusamhara against the plaintive Flower Duet from Delibes’ opera, ‘Lakme’. Behind her stand the ancient rock formations of Hyderabad that have been the sentinels of the city for millions of years.
Bahar-e-Hajar (Garden of Rocks) is a tribute to these mute components of the city’s landscape which are fast disappearing. This audio-visual project is the fruit of a collaboration between dancer Pujita Krishna’s ‘Feet on Earth’ and art evangelist Sudarshan Vig’s ‘Pseudography’. In a four-minute video, music, literature, dance, nature and fashion come together to create an artististic experience with the rocks in Kokapet as the backdrop.” The idea was to create an audio-visual experience where you bring in movement, expressiveness and music. This is the first offering of a series called ‘Vantena’. We have juxtaposed verses from Kalidasa’s Ritusamhara with a 19th Century opera piece. Both these artworks speak about the beauty of flowers. We decided to fuse our creation with a cause and draw attention to the changing landscape of the city,” says Pujita.
While she has received training in Kuchipudi and has dabbled in various dance forms like jazz and ballet, she is one of the few practitioners of Vilasini Natyam in the country, a rare dance form from Andhra Pradesh. Pujita’s costumes in red and black designed by Sourav Das, rise in contrast against the grey-brown rocks, elevating the visual appeal of the video. Except the blouse, the rest of the costume is unstitched and has been draped to add an extra element of drama.
Sudarshan, who has co-produced and shot the video, explains how the theme of rock conservation came to be incorporated into the video. “I had gone to Kokapet to do a recce for another video shoot. The project kept getting delayed, and I ended up making several trips to the place. I was astonished to see that the terrain kept changing every two days. The sound of drilling and blasting never stopped, and the rocks were disappearing right before my eyes. That is when I realised that we need to highlight the issue. In fact, I have used the jarring sound of rocks breaking at the beginning of the video, so that the consumers realise the poignancy of losing a part of our heritage,” says Sudarshan.The video will be released on February 19.
— Kakoli Mukherjee
kakoli_mukherjee@newindianexpress.com
@KakoliMukherje2