Dance is the visualisation of music. When Odissi maestro Madhvi Mudgal sings the first two lines of the Kishorechandranand Champu, an oral tradition of Odisha, dance and music meet where they seem to separate. Very much like the eternal lovers Radha and Krishna to whom the champu is dedicated. Such is the truth in Madhvi’s art and bhava. Singing isn’t what she is known for around the world. She prefers to restrict it to rehearsals. Madhvi, who performed at the Champu Utsav, a celebration of the Kishorechandranad Champu held recently in Delhi, believes that having been born into a family of great musicians (her father was Pandit Vinay Chandra Maudgalya, the well known vocalist of Gwalior Gharana and brother is renowned vocalist Pandit Madhup Mudgal) helped her realise dance in totality. It puts the focus on the lyrical and melodic depths of prose and poetry used in Odissi. Music becomes the vocabulary of the ‘said’ and the ‘unsaid’.
She sings the first two lines of the champu, posing several questions from Radha “Ke hila re, kohituno hoi bharati re.” With her bhavas, the finger and hand movements, and her melodic voice, she opens up the musical layers of the text. With that open several layers in the dance form and its stylisation. Laya takes the sacred space it deserves. At the festival, two days were dedicated to the renditions of the champu. Madhvi adds, “The festival helped us focus on what the different ways of singing. Singing all the 34 compositions would have been impossible.”
Champu is an amalgamation of gadya and padya (prose and poetry) and the Kishorechandranand Champu is one of the famous poems from the great Odiya poet Kavisurya Baladeva Rath. Madhvi says, “It’s almost on the lines of Geet Govinda. A story that runs throughout. But the speciality of a champu is that every line of the song begins with the same akshara (letter). This reflects the greatness of the poet and his work.” Odissi’s tribute to its sahitya is inspiring. She adds, “The celebration of the Kishorechandranand Champu means a lot to the art form. There is the Geet Govinda. For abhinaya we have the Sanskrit and Odiya poetry. Its structure is very engaging. Normally, you don’t look at it as a whole. The festival has given the opportunity to look at the champu as a genre.”
Accompanied by vocals, sitar and pakhawaj, the rendition of the champu in Madhvi’s choreography highlights the inherent richness of melody, instrumentation, dance and percussion in music. As Madhvi and her disciples take up the next two lines, “Kalija durauru dekhi, Kadunaa kaulumo aaki, Kaula indivara aarati re…” the stage is set for Radha and her woman friends. It becomes the play field for the champu’s structured form. Radha, surrounded by the gopis waits for Krishna, she begins to describe the many feelings she encounters in her love for Krishna.
According to the maestro, the study of champu is part of the training in the Odissi tradition, especially, the study of the Kishorechandranand Champu. Many of Madhvi’s students are non-Odiyas. Hence, she deals with a bigger challenge to help them understand the meaning of each song. She says, “They have to look at the structure. When I teach dance based on Geet Govinda, I ask them to look at the whole text. Understanding the meeting and the separation of Krishna and Radha in its musical structure is joyful.” This wasn’t Madhvi’s first tribute to sahitya. At a performance in Delhi in the 1990s, she chose verses from Ambarushataka. She says, “Ten dancers performed on the same poem. They had to compose the music as well.” Madhvi has stepped outside Odissi’s musical realm many times. Having performed a varnam in the “challenging” choreography Parakaya last year with renowned Bharatanatyam artiste Rama Vaidhyanathan and Kathak maestro Prerna Shrimali, she reaffirms Odissi’s stylisation. For Parakaya, they chose a varnam, a thumri and a pallavi for solos. She adds, “The challenge was not to make Odissi look like Bharatanatyam.” In Parakaya, though the dancers performed solos, there was a temptation to get involved with the other’s style. She adds, “I love the way you cut into the rhythm, and its details. I could have inserted bol and applied to the three layas, like in a varnam. But I wanted to do a Bharatanatyam bol in Oddisi.” This visualisation of laya, music and text through dance will also help maestros reaffirm that choreography is not a western concept. It’s very much Indian.