Bijayini Satpathy in Kalpana - The World of Imagination

I walked into the Leona Wagner Black Box for Kalpana - The World of Imagination (presented by Chitrakaavya Dance) excited to see a traditional Indian dance performance. Little did I know that I would witness magic on stage in the form of Odissi, a historic and sacred dance form from the state of Odisha, on India’s eastern coast. Furthermore, the evening’s soloist, Bijayini Satpathy, was one of the most beautiful technicians and performers to have ever graced a stage. 

After Satpathy took her final bow to a standing ovation, I craved more of her and, as a result, began to research. I was not surprised to learn that Mark Morris, who has attended her performances for the last twenty years, counts her easily among the top five dancers he’s seen in his lifetime. Additionally, I learned that Satpathy, who was born in Odisha, was the longtime star of premiere Indian classical dance company Nrityagram Dance Ensemble, until last year when she decided to push into new territory as a solo artist. 

But it does not take an Odissi practitioner, let alone a dancer, to be mesmerized by Satpathy. This was evidenced by the silence of the crowded theatre during short pauses in between pieces, and as I looked around me, many (myself included) sat on the edge of their seats at times, seemingly forgetting to blink or breathe. 

The combination of Satpathy’s perfectionist attention to detail, physical strength, musicality, ability to be simultaneously grounded and airy, her unwavering balance, and control at all times of every inch of her body would be admired by any dancer; but it is her facial expressions, and more specifically, the power of her gaze, which make her a truly compelling performer. 

In ninety minutes, we watched her transform into a deer, Mother Earth, a mourning woman, a demon, a mischievous five-year-old boy, a tormented milkmaid, a strong woman admiring her physical beauty, and both male and female lovers engaged in a passionate act, to name only a few. In a split second, Satpathy was able to embody a new character, often in a contrasting emotional state, and each time the expression in her eyes would initiate the transformation, her serpentine limbs following suit. 

Satpathy’s eyes had a way of making me feel like she was staring at me and only me, yet her expressive gaze also appeared directed inward, as if she was simultaneously staring into her own soul and internal anatomy, directing her muscles to move with her eyes. In fact, it could be argued that her eyes were all the audience needed to see in order to understand the array of characters and mythical and religious stories expressed on stage. 

It would be a disservice, however, not to reflect further on Satpathy’s remarkable technicality. The Odissi dance form’s theoretical base can be traced back to 500 CE in the Natya Sastra, the ancient Hindu Sanskrit text on the performing arts. The text states that two main dance forms comprise Odissi: nrita, or “pure dance,” which focuses on the perfection of detailed gestures and shapes of the hand; and nritya, the solo expressive dance which stresses the dancer’s ability to evoke and portray emotion. 

While all of the pieces in Kalpana told well-known Hindu stories, pure dance, or nrita, was also shown and celebrated. In the final piece, “Sun Maiyya,” the gesture of making a tight fist was repeated. This gesture is not necessarily new to either eastern or western dance, but here, Satpathy extended her wrist, her elbow gracefully bent with an ever-so-slight external rotation, and wrapped each finger inward so tightly that the audience could practically see air escaping from her palm.

The first piece, “Mangalacharan – An Invocation to the Mother Goddess,” was full of hand movements that a layperson might describe as miming. Instead, a more accurate description of the intricate gestures might be a form of poetic sign language. In each position of the hands, every finger breathed and quivered in tune with the raga music, as if each finger was playing its own musical instrument. 

The dramatic, saturated, red and green lighting by designer Sujay Saple, in tandem with meandering, mysterious, and heavy fog which filled the stage, only further transported the audience to an ethereal realm. Through watching Bijayini Satpathy move, we were all taken to her world of imagination.  

Bijayini Satpathy in Kalpana - The World of Imagination. Photo by Ravi Darbhamulla.

Joanna Emily Reed is a Salt Lake City native currently residing in Pittsburgh, PA. She identifies as an occupational therapist and dancer, and wholeheartedly believes that movement is the most fundamental aspect of life.

Chitrakaavya Dance: Manubhuti - Being Human

On Sunday afternoon, ChitraKaavya Dance presented Manubhuti – Being Human at the Jeanne Wagner Theater. The program’s five offerings brought together a multigenerational cast of performers steeped in classical Indian dance forms. It struck me how elucidating it can be to see young dancers and older dancers together on stage. Even if you’re not deeply familiar with the traditions being presented - I know next to nothing about the history of Indian classical dance - you begin to see how dance traditions exist across the span of many interrelated, individual lives. The evening also featured contributions by modern dance artists Erica Womack and Katie Davis.

Womack’s “Ages” and ChitraKaavya director Srilatha Singh’s “Hyphen-ated” exist as a part of a longer conversation between these two artists about how to collaborate across their distinct choreographic heritages. I spoke a little bit with Womack after the show and she shared stories about moments when Singh and her company members challenged her instincts, ultimately leading her to make a riskier choice. The highlight of “Ages” was Srilatha Singh dancing in silks to Cesaria Evoria’s famed rendition of “Besame Mucho,” as Womack held a large fan, dead-pan. I was reminded of Kazuo Ohno’s Admiring La Argentina, except it was a little more lighthearted and a little less self-serious.

One of the most exciting elements of Sunday’s performance was an excellent live band: Suchinth Murty singing, Tarun Gudipati on the tablas, Abhishek Mukherjee on sitar, Sriram Krishnamoorthy on violin, and Shreyas Hoskere on keyboards and flute. Their presence raised the bar, particularly in “Hyphen-ated,” which began with an intense exercise in mirroring between Srilatha Singh and Malavika Singh, whose opening number at the top of the show was the evening’s namesake. (I don’t know if the two are related.) As they peered at each other through the empty wooden frame, I was drawn to their different strengths as performers. In Srilatha’s dancing, I watch her hands, and how quickly she can shift my focus without my expecting it - in short, the mastery of someone who’s been at it a while. In Malavika’s dancing, it’s her expansiveness, the ability to fill the empty stage, and her proclivity for off-balance rests and unexpected pauses - a hip tucked at an obscure angle, a lunge that seems too deep to sustain and then crumbles silently. I’m eager to see more of these conversations in the future.

Samuel Hanson is the editor and executive director of loveDANCEmore. 

Renjith & Vijna in Samarpanam: A sublime offering

If you missed ChitraKaavya Dance’s presentation of Samarpanam: A sublime offering, you made a mistake.

The area non-profit regularly creates and performs Bharatanatyam, a classical Indian form, but also presents guest artists including Renjith and Vijna last night in the Eccles Regent Street Black Box. The duo, described as partners in dance as well as life, offered a stunning series of duets and solos. ChitraKaavya founder Srilatha Singh described beautifully the way in which she aims for these performances to not only share and preserve Indian heritage but also to form cross cultural relationships. In all her performances, Singh ensures that the form of Bharatanatyam, movement as visual poetry, is also described through program notes and onstage narration which bridge the gap for audience members who may be new to classical Indian dance.

This narration describes how the first piece, Panchadeva Stuthi, is an invocation for five Hindu deities and that the composition (by Professor C.V. Chandrasekhar) uses both abhinaya (expression) and nritta (physical movement) within a single phrase of music. Without this knowledge, all of these facets are still revealed through the dances as both performers offer inherent reverence through the slightest rotation of an ankle, a settling within their chest, and the soft fluttering of Renjith’s fingertips.  

Other works offer different narratives and, while Devaranaama - Chikkavane Ivanu would be enjoyable without being spoken, it is nice to decipher from my seat the way in which Vijna interprets and physicalizes the poetry of Purandara Daasar. Vijna’s onstage pre-teaching of specific gestures allowed me to fully enjoy the pranks of Little Krishna as he disrupts the lives of two young maidens.

This solo was followed by another composition dedicated to facial expression and performed by Renjith. At this time I’d like to implore all regional modern dancers working with facial expressions to take several seats. In fact, take all the seats because Renjith is an expert at revealing the ways that our face not only carries expression but also the way that expression must be driven from, and exist in relationship to, other parts of the body. Part of this is built into the composition by Indira Kadambi, but other parts are because of his own performance; which is virtuosic beyond measure and evokes physical and emotional textures in complex rhythmic relationship to the music.

During the entire concert I was aware how different the audience is from other concert dance productions in our city, and it made me think about the way that cultural forms are often treated in both training and performance settings in the United States (as a workshop elective, a supplementary technique, a community practice). With that context, it’s easy to dissociate how much more similar Bharatanatyam is to ballet than it is to the other cultural forms with which it’s frequently grouped.

When I was a child my family had season tickets to the ballet. Part of the experience was watching the dancing but another, much bigger, part was how we dressed up, ate shrimp puffs in the founder’s room during intermission, and talked to my grandmother’s friends. At Samarpanam, I was able to get a window into the Indian heritage not just of the art form but also the nature of theater-going. Turning around to see children dressed in their nicest clothes, alternating between watching intently and lounging on their parents or flipping through the program, I could see that there was much in common between this performance and my own formative experiences of viewing dance.

This comparison even extends to any critique or curiosity some new audiences may have of the work. When I watch ballet, I often tire of the number of solos and pas de deux between what I’m really after, a corps de ballet moving in idyllic unison. In Bharatanatyam, this ebb and flow is similar -- there are those who may revel in the small and specific solos, but others who (like me) wait for the rush of compelling rhythmic duets that rise at just the right moment in each piece. While the ultimate objectives of the two forms are different (one extends and balances, the other grounds and subtly shifts), the structure is always going to be traditionally clear and presentational of its respective, centuries-old objective.

In the case of Samarpanam, these objectives are matched with lovely and engaging performers who share their traditions with revelatory and expressive joy.

Ashley Anderson directs loveDANCEmore programs as part of her non-profit, “ashley anderson dances.”

Administrator's Note: To view a recent cross-pollination of the forms mentioned in this review, you may visit Chitrakaavya Dance's Facebook page for video footage of a workshop Renjith and Vijna recently taught for Ballet West Academy students.

Ragamala at Kingsbury

On Saturday at Kingsbury Hall, Utah Presents hosted an evening with Ragamala Dance Company.  Directed by the mother-daughter team Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy, the internationally touring company holds a venerable reputation as purveyors of the traditional Indian form, Bharatanatyam.  During a time where the world is brimming over with unrest and antipathy, the evening felt like finding the calm sacred eye of a storm.  Ragamala opened up space to share a blooming enthusiasm for life and to examine the threads that tie us together at the heart of it all.  

Performances by two local companies preceded Ragamala.  The dancers of Salt Lake City based Nitya Nritya Dance Company started the program with a traditional offering to the space known as Pushpanjali.  Although not always in total synch, the Nitya Company radiated youthful energy and charm in dances inspired our very own Utah mountains and the god Lord Shiva.  Chitrakaavya Dance performed next, another local project that aims to use the tradition alongside new collaborations to explore inter-cultural commonalities. They presented one piece fusing Bharatanatyam with the movements of modern dance, and another where Indian dance was meshed with English poetry. Chitrakaavya’s performance expressed themes related to the shared joy of moving and our connection with each other and the earth across generations.

The second half of the program was devoted to Ragamala’s Sacred Earth.  Conceptualized and choreographed by Renee and Aparna Ramaswamy, the piece mingles Bharatanatyam with two other great Indian traditions: the poetry and song of South India’s Tamil Sangam people, and paintings in the style of the Warli of West India.  Sacred Earth is designed to “explore the interconnectedness between human emotions and the environment that shapes them.”  The extensive program notes on the different cultural aspects at play were a welcome supplement, as they helped to further contextualize the musical and visual aesthetic.  The symbiosis of these elements was even clearer knowing that the Warli people painted to celebrate the spirituality they found in a balanced coexistence with nature, and that the Tamil Sangam poets created characters to explain and teach us about the human condition by linking different landscapes of the natural world to specific emotions.  

Although Sacred Earth contains eight clearly defined segments, it really draws a single golden line from the musicians’ first breath to the last dancers’ last.  Never truly pausing, variable combinations of dancers, songs, and poems shift together and apart to embody distinctive feelings and stories.  As they navigate these complex ranges of emotions, the dancers ultimately gravitate to a central tenor of harmony.  Even when the emotional tone dips towards the negative they don’t stay there for long, choosing to re-center on joy instead.  Bharatanatyam is extroverted and overtly presentational; the dancers engage in direct conversation with the audience and an emphasis on animated facial expressions is an integral part of that communication.  The dancers also rely on a highly gestural movement vocabulary and literal interpretations of lyrics to convey their stories.  Yet, it never feels pedestrian or cheap, and there are no “filler” steps.  Every flutter and twitch of muscle is precise and dense with meaning.

The five women of Ragamala showed absolute mastery of technique and control over the body. Whether imperceptibly slow or whirlwind fast, each movement was made razor sharp. Their ability to concurrently move each part of the body, at such dizzying speeds, to distinct and independent rhythms is mind-bending.  At one point Aparna Ramaswamy’s limbs were flying and contorting so quickly, I’m almost sure I caught a glimpse of her transformation into one of the many-armed Hindu deities.  

I also noticed that in Bharatanatyam the torso appears to remain largely calm and suspended upright, and everything else then unfolds and revolves around a manipulation from a midline at the heart.  This centering force present in each body provides a complement to the overall shape and directionality of movement, which is more so created by groups moving and flowing together rather than contained separately in each individual.  Bells around the ankles became another tool for interconnection as the dancers playfully added up an intricate game of sub-rhythms and accents that bounced from one body to another.

I found the duets where mother and daughter or the two sisters danced together powerful as well, feeling in the choreography a subtle acknowledgement of their familial ties.  Often times on stage a dancer exists as an isolate blank, their identity and relationships totally subverted.  Allowing their personal and performative identities to coexist was yet another way the Ramaswamys illustrated deep connection and a sense that all are part of a whole.

To tie the work together, the Warli paintings were projected in vivid monochrome behind the dancers.  Depicting images from differing natural settings, they shifted to match the dawn of each new segment.  As the piece drew towards its conclusion the scenes began to repeat and recombine, ultimately zooming out to reveal that all are connected as one.  

With a furiously joyful meditation on our shared place in this world, Ragamala Dance produced one of the most finely articulated performances I’ve seen in a long time.  It feels extremely rare and precious to see a work realize its intentions so absolutely and plainly in presentation.  The message of these classic traditions is ageless, and the reminder that our personal inner world is really part of something larger we must all share and protect together is more vital and compelling than ever.  

Emily Snow is a new contributor to loveDANCEmore. A graduate of University of Utah's Ballet Department, she most recently spent several seasons dancing with Central West Ballet in CA.

Photo (top) courtesy of Utah Presents