Much to the cheer of the Capital’s connoisseurs and dancers, a new annual dance festival has been added to the City’s colourful cultural calendar with launching of the Maarga festival at Rabindra Mandap on Monday. “It would be an annual festival of dance, music and meditation with the mission of bringing in peace, harmony and spiritual awakening in the society. We believe in the power of Indian classical dance and music in igniting such a spiritual campaign,” explained Sindhu Brown, the brain behind the festival that is being supported by Sparsh, a city-based organisation for promotion of social harmony and spiritualism. The first edition of the festival featured three prominent Odissi dance troupes – Guru Bichitrananda Swain’s Rudrakshya, Ileana Citaristi’s Art Vision and Meera Das’ Gunjan Dance Academy – besides budding and gifted soloist Geetanjali Acharya, disciple of Sujata Mohapatra. As expected, the well-groomed Rudrakshya ensemble - that performs more frequently abroad than in India - staged the most memorable performances. While its all-male dancers troupe literally stormed the stage while presenting Tala Madhurya, Guru Bichitrananda’s choreographic masterpiece, Debagandhari pallabi, his other classic creation, was a superb piece of dance of delight presented by the four female and one male dancer. Known for her innovative choreographies, Ileana Citaristi along with her co-dancer and disciple Saswat Joshi presented two of her critically appreciated choreographies – Tantra and Ganga Yamuna. While the duet numbers were neat and intense, the group presentations by the junior artistes of Art Vision failed to impress. The other group presentation – Surya Stutee choreographed by Meera Das and staged by the budding dancers of Gunjan Dance Academy went off well. Performing as a soloist, Geetanjali Acharya, this year’s Naveen Kalakar national Odissi dance festival topper from Bhubaneswar, proved her worth as a worthy disciple of the renowned danseuse Sujata Mohapatra. While dance is seen more often as drill with most of our upcoming dancers, this young dancer has duly internalised dance that was evident from her subtle movements and expressions