Nritarutya, the dancing team

Usually I am not excited about dance. I have issues getting into it's mortal essence. 

Most dance performances I have gone to I have done because they were glorious names with godlike capacity to dance. Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra, Pt. Birju Maharaj, Pt. Durgalal - were classicists in the strictest sense. If some of them 'broke' the law, it was because the depth and the intent of emotion they temporally became capable of were too transcendental to obey a convention. For instance, when Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra fell to the ground in the middle of a performance, rolling as if in pain, tears glistening on his cheeks in the stage light, there was no format in universe's language of dance to contain his supremely intense bhakti, or devotion. There was his ardent and aspiring being and the object of his aspiration, Rama, that's all! All else had served its purpose to bring the two face to face. The tenets of classical dance had lost their very purpose to a point where whatever Guru Kelucharan did became the new decorum in classical Odissi dance. He became, for that brief moment, a God.

Modern dance never claimed such lofty goals. There the word 'ardent' had a different intent, beauty an agreeable hue. The one 'format' it followed was not clearly formulated; its themes were the more mundane travails of an office goer, more in desperate pursuit of bread than blessings.

I would not have gone for yesterday's concert of Nritarutya had I not been assigned, by Tejaswini Mistry, the task of announcing the concert. To me the name Nritarutya sounded like a gimmick, showy and deliberate. I needed more to be impressed.

The dancers were young and they looked confident. But so what? Now a days confidence can be a studied wear: a flowy garment you throw on your nakedness.

As usual nothing was organized in Bharat Nivas in a way I would have liked. I was given a paper to edit ( do what you like!). No instruction except  the three-fold request Jean whispered  in my ear just after pressing the mic switch on, even as I was speaking! I goofed up, but no one cared, really, no one cared that I made a mistake and said a wrong thing! That unimportant my task was; I went for it simply because I wanted to say a 'yes' instead of a 'no' to whatever was asked of me.

The first piece was non descript : it was a pop bhajan lauding godess Lakshmi and all her eight, four-limbed aspects.

The next was, what I thought, interesting. It was composed by two separate teams on two different venues and then the choreographer had fused them into one congruent dance. It was a joyous piece, but the joy was the joy of middle class kids. I could enjoy it.

The third one was also interesting . The dancers danced in Indian dance styles to Scottish music. An innovative way, I thought, to make the point that ultimately rhythm is universal. There can be inter- musical marriages; this was a perfect one.

The last piece of the evening was the piece de resistance: it was multimedia projection on the backdrop, of  dancers as they danced on the floor. The inspiration for this was the early morning 'suprabhatams' and the 'rangoli' we see in India, South in particular.

The choreographer Madhuri Upadya, an artist who is also passionate about dance was part of that piece. I met her back stage and I liked her. She carried a certain dream in her eyes.

But it is her sister, Mayuri, whose explanations after each piece made us enjoy the dance much more, that was really the force behind Nritarutya.

I am glad I went to see the performance. It broke that vague prejudice I had against modern dance. Most of all, I saw that the Indian youth have come of age. Those days have passed when the easiest thing anyone could do was brow beat an Indian youngster. Not anymore. These lads and young ladies had firm faith in India. That was great to see. It justified my nationalistic ardor at the beginning of the concert as I stood up for India's national anthem.