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 What the gods want you to see- Dr. Arshiya Sethie-mail: arshiyasethi@gmail.com Photos: Pallavi Gaur October 7, 2025 A sudden, unexpected, unpredictable change in my travel plans resulted in my being able to attend, on 6th September, at Oddbird Theatre, in Delhi, the premiere of Shagun Butani's path breaking, off beat and avant garde production "TO SHIVA...Offerings of a fragmented heart". An intensely piercing personal moment ignited the exploration on Shiva - the death of the dancer's mother, a devout believer of Shiva, and that too on the night of Shivratri. This is the night that belongs to Shiva. It is that legendary night on which he danced the tandav, the night he married Parvati, the night he consumed halahal the poison, in an act that saved the world. This is known as one of the holiest times in the Hindu calendar. Yet the artiste experienced this terrible loss. But like all silver linings, something exceptional got born out of the churning. It stirred interrogation, in the most artistic manner - through dance, and through puppetry, with one dovetailed into the other. It was the first time for the collaboration between Odissi dancer Shagun Butani and puppeteer Anurupa Roy. Earlier, there have been examples of dancers working with puppeteers - Geeta Chandran with Anurupa Roy's puppets and the late Astad Deboo with Dadi Padamjee's puppets. This was the first time that a dancer worked with shadow puppets. No easy matter to juxtapose shadow puppets on a dynamic body. It needed fault free and precise movements and split-second coordination, that can only be achieved through focused rehearsals. The treatment was unlikely in so many ways. Much as Shiva himself embodies the contra. He is both the destroyer as he is the regenerator. His Tandav is both Ananda and Raudra - life generating and life destructive. He is both the storm and the stillness. Both artistes pulled from the richness of their lifelong experience in their arts to pull this off, and they did a marvelous job. Anurupa's team of shadow puppeteers, Ankit Ravani and Asha, worked the shadow puppets that Ravani designed and both worked on. Sensitive lighting by Pawan Waghmare made the impact of the shadow and etched movement a powerful visual. I quote two lines from the publicity note: "The dancer's body, limited by flesh and bound by gravity, seeks to mirror the formless, to trace the arc of fire that is Shiva's dance. Alongside, shadows and puppets flicker across the stage - ephemeral, illusionary, like thought itself - drawing the audience into a phantasmagoric landscape where dreams, memory, and myth converges." 
Few productions that break new ground succeed in achieving what they set out to do. In this case it does. When the large Jaganathesque eyes, eyes as projected features, follow the dancers, you realise that nothing escapes the divine visions. When the skeletal construct is projected on the dancer's body, you see the best of life and the worst of death, within a flash. When the projected shadow of Shiva in a Nataraj pose shifts to mimic the movement of the dancer who in that moment moves behind the curtain, you know that this is not merely a performance. It is a performance that stirs becoming in the process, a ritual, a meditation, a descent into the inner self where the line between the divine and the human dissolves. Indeed, a marvelous unison of intersecting arts.  I would fail if I don't mention that the live music consisting of vocals, percussions of several kinds, flute and strings as well as chanting enriched the performance to such a degree that it becomes an intrinsic part of the performance. The initial thought I had about whether there was a lot happening simultaneously, which wasn't really needed for the meditative quality, I revise now as I see the production as a ritual, and like all rituals it needs the sensorial frame, to centre the mind on the essence of the contra in the idea of Shiva. The credits include: Concept, research, script, dance: Shagun Butani, Puppet shadow concepts and direction: Anurupa Roy, Music composition and vocals: Prasanta Kumar Behera, Rhythm composition and percussions: Pradeepta Moharana, Shadow puppet designs: Ankit Ravani. The puppeteers were Umesh Kumar and Asha. The music ensemble included Siddhartha Dalbehera on flute, Vikas Babu on shehnai, and Rais Ahmed Khan on sitar. Pawan Waghmare was responsible for light design and technical support.  Dr. Arshiya Sethi, trained in Kathak, has served as dance critic, commentator, institution builder for the arts, having created both tangible and intangible institutions and equities. She has been a Fulbright Arts Fellow (2003-2004) and a post doctoral Fulbright (2016-2017). Her doctoral work has been on the link between politics and dance in the case of Sattriya. She is presently working on the intersection of dance and activism / social justice through her NGO, Kri Foundation (estd. 2003), and has extended her academic work to Indian dance in the diaspora. |
