Dance cannot be held captive by boundaries. It is rightly said that evolution commanded the conception of contemporary dance and the thirst for improvisation in the human mind caused its birth. The brilliance of contemporary dance was recently at display in Samakala, a festival of contemporary dance that was organised by Odisha Sangeet Natak Akademi.
The festival saw fine recitals from contemporary dance exponents, two of them were Ananda Shankar Jayant and Madhu Nataraj.
Ananda is an accomplished Bharatnatyam and Kuchupudi dancer, she made her foray into contemporary productions with Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
“Initially, I experimented with Carnatic music, but it did not jell with the theme of a seagull’s search for excellence. A theatre friend compiled some jazz melodies for staging the production and it struck the right note,” she said.
It did not end here. She had problem blending the theme and music with Bharatnatyam and its foot-tapping routine. “Jonathan could fly and that was his life breath. I could not express the feeling of lightness by stamping my feet,” she said.
“Find out what you already know and you will see the way to fly.” These golden words from the book again did the trick, soon she tiptoed into a new realm.
“I abstracted from the Bharatnatyam format, eschewed the embellishments and choreographed this work,” she said. Her flying birds wore leotards with skirts, along with a kind of netting cape for the torso. Against a black backdrop, she used lights to convey the mood changes with movements stimulating emotions. “In contemporary, the entire body is used to convey an emotion,” she said.
Ananda’s visual vocabulary integrates the innate stances of Bharatnatyam with metre and nuances of poetry, simultaneously with the expanse of space.
It came naturally to this disciple of Rukmini Devi, who pioneered the use of the dance-drama format for presenting Bharatnatyam and sophisticated versions of folk and devotional dances.
Ananda brought her production, ‘Panchatantra’ to Samakala. “I intended to reach out to the younger generation through this presentation. They relate to its core emotion and versatility of the contemporary form. I view it as a stepping stone to the larger gamut of Indian performing arts,” she said.
For Madhu Nataraj, her interface with contemporary dance took her back to the roots — Kathak. Despite her early training in Kathak under the tutelage of her mother and guru Maya Rao, she did not take it up as a profession initially and instead dabbled with theatre, writing and visual art. “I attended a dance workshop during the American Festival in New Delhi where we were asked to create 30 different expressions using an index finger,” said Madhu. The possibilities of innovation and limitlessness of the human form made her delve deep into the tradition. The deviations, as she would call, proved to be a boon as she assimilated her training in Kathak, Yoga, Limon technique and Indian martial arts to evolve a vocabulary of her own.
Madhu has worked with eminent artistes, designers, dancers, and musicians exploring entirely new possibilities for productions. “My approach has been collaborative as I believe any dance form cannot exist in isolation,” she says. It’s through this principle of collaboration that Madhu staged her choreography ‘Vajra’ at the festival. A fusion of Kathak, Yoga and Japanese martial art Ninjutsu, the production explored the brilliance and refractive qualities of light symbolising the imperishable spirit of human.
She is currently working on the biography of courtesan Gauhar Jaan. “Every production comes with a challenge and exploring the possibilities makes the journey exciting,” she says.