| Parijat Desai
and group had the entire audience stunned with their remarkably fresh and
strong presentation of contemporary dance. Quiet/ Fire, a musing upon the
different spiritual perceptions of the role of a warrior, had the freshness
of a dream. Dressed in elegant cream costumes and executing martial movements,
the dancers established the atmosphere of intense physical discipline and
austerity.
“Quiet”– a
quality of sound…a quality of the absence of sound…”Fire”- the most brilliant
visual idea…Quiet/Fire… a simultaneous existence of both…in the consciousness
of the warrior…where an absolute quiet must be accompanied by the power
and vigour of the fire.
Severe antithetical
demands are made on a warrior. He is not just the one who fights and kills.
He must do so with no hatred. He must even be compassionate. A hard and
testing life of inner conflict, where these paradoxes are brought to reside
together, was portrayed through the nature and speed of the movements.
Seen from this perspective, even the deft usage of Pathaka (open palm)
and Mushti (clenched fist), which is very common in the martial arts, seemed
to suggest the necessary coexistence of seemingly opposite things.
It can also
be seen in an expressionistic sense where all these appear to be symbolic
of the diasporic condition – all the dancers of the group being Asian-Americans
- which, more often than not, means operating in the zones where seemingly
contradictory cultural values merge and flow into each other without leaving
a definite boundary.
As this reviewer
had just finished reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s path breaking work, The
Woman Warrior, he was rewarded with a beautiful experience where the image
of the warrior developed on the stage juxtaposed with that in the text.
This is the peculiar strength of contemporary dance. Promising no closure
of meanings, it permits you to freely draw from other experiences and synergize
them to create a new one for yourself.
The retelling
of A K Ramanujan’s “The Wall” was poignantly done using a diaphanous blue
cloth that acted both as a saree and as apparently weak (yet strong enough
to weigh her down) patriarchal control. Interestingly, because of the way
it was handled by Parijat, the widowed woman’s resorting to tell her story
to the wall did not evoke pity as much as admiration for her conviction
to speak at all.
The interactive
session at the end of the performance digressed into a discussion of the
semantic limitations of terms like “fusion,” ”modern,” and “contemporary.”
One wondered how sensible it is to weigh the relative merits of terms that
have different frames of reference. While “fusion” refers to the nature
of a work, “modern” and “contemporary” have temporal resonances. And the
mindless use of the word “fusion” has eroded it of any positive sense at
all and it has come to refer to a “mixture of things” as one member of
the audience put it. However, just as the term suggests, fusion stands
for a harmonious coming together of styles – a process at the end of which
it is almost impossible to pick out the individual influences like distiches
from a bad poem.
In Parijat
Desai and her dancers’ presentation, one could see a judicious use of different
vocabularies - Bharatanatyam, martial arts, modern dance and yoga. Together
they constituted an organic whole, and indeed, the whole was larger and
more powerful than the sum of the parts. It would be total injustice not
to mention the strong and impressive performances of Aditi Dhruv, Cindy
Chung and Shobana Ram.
Aniruddh
Vasudevan is a Bharatanatyam dancer based in Chennai.
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