In the begining of the year I contributed a poem अंतराल [
Antaraal ] for a kathak dance performance in London , Resolution! 2016, performed on February 9.
A review of the performance
http://writingaboutdance.com/tag/mohan-rana/
Resolution! 2016, performances on February 9
Posted: February 18th, 2016 | Author: Nicholas Minns | Resolution! 2016, performances on February 9
Resolution! 2016, Drishti Dance, Bridget Lappin, Laura Obiols
Anuradha Chaturvedi of Drishti Dance (photo: Sarah Jex)
This evening of Resolution! begins with an exposition of Kathak by
Drishti Dance, a trio of choreographer Anuradha Chaturvedi and dancers
Meena Anand and Shyam Patel.
Antaraal is a work that weaves
choreography with music and verse in which all three elements span two
cultures: Chaturvedi is based in Reading but brings her knowledge and
mastery of Kathak from Lucknow in India; the score is shared between
Oxford-based Malcolm Atkins and Lucknow-based Ustad Gulshan Bharati,
while the verse is from Mohan Rana, a Hindi poet living in Bath.
Antaraal
is thus a meditation on the diaspora life, rooted in tradition while
adapting to a new cultural context, a place where ‘movement is caught
between two worlds, one dead and the other yet to be born.’ To my
Western eye, however, the elements of gesture, rhythm and costume in
Antaraal
speak of an unequivocal, and very much living, Indian experience, so it
is difficult to know what is ‘dead’ and what is ‘yet to be born.’
Perhaps in placing Kathak in the service of both Eastern and Western
musical rhythms Chaturvedi is suggesting a journey between the two,
somewhere between departure and arrival. But what my memory retains are
the floating, sinuous gestures of the three dancers, their poise, the
clarity of their facial expressions and the rhythmical hand and footwork
responding both intimately and animatedly to the music.
There we have stopped, while the world stands still,
and the endless days that were following us, too have stopped.
There we stand, meeting after a long time,
in a conversation that catches an unfinished past.
Having moved far, been lived, told, and retold
our story is now hand in hand with emptiness,
and we’re left
pondering an elusive end.
- Mohan Rana (translation: Mohan Rana & Georgina Tate)
Dressed in layers of black against a black backdrop on a black floor
seems a paradoxical way of establishing the art of exposure but Bridget
Lappin relishes the challenge, bringing her bright gaze to the darkness
around her in
The Art of Exposure. There is no credit for
lighting but the timeless beginning — a very gradual sensitizing of our
eyes to Lappin’s still, shadowy, spectral form — and her mysterious
disappearance at the end are beautifully staged. Camouflage is central
to the work, and Lappin refers in her program note to a 17th-century
Ninja manual on the art of concealment,
Shoninki, but she
spends the entire performance shedding her camouflage just enough to
establish it, teasing us with her ability to materialize out of the dark
and leave an indelible image. She does this by taking on the disguise
of first a ninja, then, by replacing her warrior mask with a touch of
lipstick, a woman and finally (as in Young Galaxy’s track) ‘just a body’
— what she describes as ‘deceptions in an act of self-preservation
against her environment.’ Her movements are at once assured and
mysteriously quiet, clear and off-balance, her gestures fast and
complex. In the half-light the outlines of her body are erased so all we
see of her is bare hands and face, or, in the final stage, her bare
back inside the v-shaped opening of her unitard. It is the art of
exposure by stealth and suggestion and it is remarkably persuasive.
The final work, Laura Obiols’
Hourglass, is ‘a journey with
Lilly to explore growing up in a society full of expectations and fear
of taking risks, where time seems to be chasing you.’ Obiols pulls
together elements of biography like a magician conjuring rabbits out of a
hat: the talking shoes and boots setting up the family story at the
beginning (set design by Michelle Bristow), Lilly’s transformation from
young girl to a young woman and the appearance of characters one after
the other from behind a sofa. We first see Lilly in the person of Betty
Toogood Sayers sitting long-legged on the floor writing in a diary while
her father, James Finnemore, is (so we learn from the voiceover) going
through a bad phase. Lilly is unaware of his anxt-ridden, gravity-laden
solo and runs to be picked up on his shoulders. By sleight of hand she
grows into Léa Tirabasso but then things start to get fuzzy. Michael
James Gilbert is someone she picks up (or he picks her up) at a club but
it is not clear for whom he is performing. Rosie Terry makes an
appearance as a friend and then Kieran Page dressed like Terry replaces
her from behind the sofa to offer Lilly his hand. The three men in
Lilly’s life bear an uncanny resemblance to each other, which is
confusing; they are distinguished more by their respective dance genres
than by their characters. Only Tirabasso remains her growing or
shrinking self, and there is a tantalizing moment after the four adult
characters manipulate her like a spinning compass when I thought for
sure she would dance a trembling apotheosis but she is interrupted and
never gets to express herself in maturity.
It is an analogy for
Hourglass itself; with the exception of
the two underused musicians — Nuria Sobrino on piano and Charlie Stock
on viola — the talents of her cast and the input of her production team
appear to have turned Obiols in different directions: beside some lovely
symbolism and imagination there are elements of over-literal
storytelling and patchwork dance: building blocks but not yet
architecture.
