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Class Nonsense! - Ratikant Mohapatra, Bhubaneswar e-mail: srjan.bbsr@gmail.com April 16, 2011 This super class nonsense needs an immediate protest. Posted in you tube on 28th April 2010 is this video of a so called Odissi dance performance by an individual who is a doctor by profession and is deemed to have a great "passion" for Odissi dance. God help us and God help Odissi dance when such people develop a passion for the classical dances of India!! The doctor, in her passionate embrace of traditional Odissi, had the insanity of puncturing her traditional performance with a demented dose of hip-hop music and movements which showed not only her but her guru as well, in very bad light. Traditional Odissi will survive such ill-advised and mad interjections and such unbelievable flight of dancing descending into unheard of crudity. Odissi will survive. But will her Guru? This disastrous performance and this mindless attempt at foolish "innovation" is a lesson to all gurus who allow their wild students who run amok, more like a bull in a china shop than a dancer who has any sense of respect or dedication to the traditional art form - or any regard for her guru's dignity. This is especially true of so called "gurus" who have sprung up overnight and who let their student clientele get into these paroxysms of distorted dance. Classical dances need to be protected from such senseless specimen and their unfortunate gurus. Such gullible gurus and their demented disciples end up not only insulting the classical heritage of India and the Odiya people's aesthetic expressions, but also in making a laughing stock of themselves and the event managers / oganisers who put up these shows. That the audience also has to put up with such indigestible offering of traditional fare is bad enough. That this particular passionate doctor might continue to show off her idiotic mix of traditional Odissi and hip-hop is simply unimaginable. Guru Ratikant Mohapatra is the Director of Srjan (Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra Odissi Nrityabasa) in Bhubaneswar. srjan.com |
