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Navagunjara, featuring Sneha Chakradhar as the rooster, Shruta Gopalan as the peacock, Aakanksha Kumar as Vishnu's lotus, Anjana Seshadri as the elephant, Sharanya Chandran as the lion, Amrithashruti Radhakrishnan as the bull, Radhika Kathal as the tiger, Madhura Bhrushundi as the deer, and Kaveri Mehta as the snake
(Pic: Anoop Arora) |
Anekanta was performed again by Geeta Chandran, Bharatnatyam exponent and Sangeet Natak Akademi awardee, at the India Habitat Centre on the 27th of November, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the venue. The production was revisited in a concise, tighter form and also on a smaller stage and frame, as a more up-close experience. Anekanta is a feature of Jaina philosophy, also known as the Anekantavada, which says that accepting and respecting others’ views is as important as respecting our own. Thus it respects all people and their beliefs, and emphasizes plurality. Truth is one, but it can have many forms.
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| Pic: Anoop Arora |
The first piece was an alarippu, which literally means ‘blossoming’, and here it meant the blossoming of an idea. It marks the beginning of a performance. The one performed was a tishra alarippu. The piece showed the action of blossoming in a group formation and included a very innovative action of clapping in vertical, horizontal and diagonal directions.
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| Pic: Anoop Arora |
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| Pic: Anoop Arora |
Pairs of dancers danced differently to the same beat — they retained their identities throughout the piece but united in the sama. The costume had shades from brown to red to magenta. Anekanta was brought out not only in their costumes, but also in the choreography.
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| Pic: Anoop Arora |
The second piece was a jathi vistara. A jathi is a rhythmic pattern. Here, Anekanta was brought out through opposites. You saw the contrast between sound and silence, and the creation of a whole through different approaches to rhythm. The dancers danced in opposite directions, and other times, in coordination or similar directions. The rhythm, agility, pace, footwork and leaps were immaculate. In the last few minutes, you could see many dancers on the stage, dancing in tandem, which was a wonderful sight.
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| Pic: Anoop Arora |
The next piece was Grihabheda. This an example of aural Anekanta, when ‘sa’ shifts to become ‘ri’ and ‘ri’ becomes ‘sa’. The dancers were sitting or standing in twos. To the sargam of ‘sa re ga ma’, they moved up and down. They did footwork in different directions with lifts and rotations, up and down, back and forth. The pace and rhythm were commendable.
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| Geeta Chandran (Pic: Anoop Arora) |
The next, Ravana, was a solo piece by Geetaji. The costume requires a special mention, since it was very different from regular Bharatnatyam aharyam. The upper part was like a jacket with a black patka, and the lower like a black dhoti. According to the Ramayana, Ravana had kidnapped Sita and kept her captive in his palace since Lakshmana had chopped off his sister’s nose. But Sita was very beautiful. According to the Valmiki Ramayana, Ravana was a great Shiva bhakta, and his kidnapping of Sita from the woods and keeping her captive in the Ashok Vatika in his palace was because the temple of his kuldevi was near the complex and Sita was his means to reach nirvana.
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| Pic: Anoop Arora |
Geetaji started with Ravana bathing in the morning, and then doing puja to please Lord Shiva, appeasing him with songs, veena, mridangam, nritya and finally, an offering of flowers and aarti. Shiva’s attributes were shown. Ravana is welcomed in the palace by women in his chambers, where he goes to dress in front of a mirror. He dresses magnificently, selecting a dhoti, ornaments, bajuband, kamarbandh, crown and his shoes. Finally, the narcissist looks in the mirror and says, “Anybody who looks at me will go mad.” He picks a flower to take to Sita as he strides off with his retinue to see her. However, when he sees her, his arrogance disappears. Instead of finding her mesmerized by his beauty, he is stunned by hers. He is unable to view the whole of her — he keeps getting stuck on each part of her person. He lands in a trance and feels the chills in his body. She is so beautiful — ‘charusmite, charunetre, manohar’. He gets stuck on just her toes when he sees them, on just her face, just her hair. He wants to pounce on her, grab her and fly away, but feels totally helpless because he cannot view the whole of her. Ravana, the chakravarti who has conquered many kingdoms, is lost here and walks away. If each part of her has the power to arrest his gaze and dazzle him, what would the sum of the parts look like? The attitude of Ravana, his gait, his arrogance, in fact, every action, had an essence of Ravana’s character in the abhinaya. Finally, expressing his cringing at the helplessness that he has never known before was depicted with unmatched expressions.
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| Pic: Anoop Arora |
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| Pic: Anoop Arora |
Navagunjara was the final piece, based on an Annamacharya composition popularized by M.S. Subhalakshmi, which said that God appears in the form in which you seek Him — ‘jaaki rahi bhavana jaisi prabhu murat dekhi tin taisi’. This is another form of Anekanta. There is a tale in the Oriya Mahabharata about Arjuna seeing a strange beast in the forest. With a bow and an arrow, he follows it to shoot it. It has a head of a rooster, the neck of a peacock, the hump of a bull, the torso of a lion, a serpent for a tail, and stands on three feet – those of an elephant, tiger and deer. The fourth limb is that of a human and is raised, carrying a lotus. Arjuna is first bewildered and then scared. He runs after it but suddenly realizes that it is an avatar of Lord Vishnu. Overawed, he pays his obeisance to the Lord after realizing that the truth has multiple forms. The costume had a gradation of colour, ranging from blue to green and brown.
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| Pic: Anoop Arora |
Geetaji started the performance by showing that Shiva, Vishnu, Brahma and Shakti are different names of the same force. Vishnu carries the shankha, chakra, gada and padam, and the bansuri as Krishna. She depicted the Pooja of Lord Vishnu. Shiva holds the damru and agni in his hands, and his worshippers wear the vibhuti on themselves. Shakti is worshipped by pouring blood on the havana agni. Geeta depicted the four forces and their worship. Then she went on to depict Arjuna as the hunter in the forests, who is out to collect firewood when he sees the strange animal. Thereon, the depiction of the entire concept is just riveting.
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| Pic: Anoop Arora |
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| Pic: Anoop Arora |
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| Pic: Anoop Arora |
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| Pic: Anoop Arora |
One senior Natya Vriksha dancer depicts each animal in turn. The jathis for each animal, the rhythmic inputs, the choreography and its execution, were not only perfect but also very impressive. The rooster’s jathi, for instance, was kukutak kukutak, depicted by Sneha Chakradhar. The bull was depicted by R Amritha Shruti, with nam-jham-nam-thit. The lion was depicted by Sharanya Chandran. And finally, all of them got together in formation to form the whole creature as Navagunjara, an incarnation of Lord Vishnu, in a hair-raising spectacle.
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| Pic: Anoop Arora |
This piece, even when revisited, gave me goosebumps. Each dancer is perfect to the hilt, and a special mention to Amritha and Sharanya as the bull and the lion. Every bit is overawing, with powerful, expansive movements. The depiction of each animal was immaculate, and the formation, in sequence, falling in line to form the creature, the human arm raising a lotus, was laudable. You actually felt the presence of the Lord in your environs. Plus, it was a very up-close experience, in which every expression, every foot movement, every hand movement and its sensibilities could be captured.
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| Pic: Anoop Arora |
The thillana concluded the performance on the note that God is in multiple realities though he is one, like the Navagunjara. Here, we find the connotations of the story of the blind men, who are together feeling an elephant. For them, the elephant is the part that they feel but actually, the elephant is the sum of all those parts. So the whole truth is always bigger than the sum of the parts. The Almighty is greater than all the paths designed to reach him. Then why all these disputes?
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| Pic: Anoop Arora |
Afterwards, Geetaji spoke to me about revisiting Anekanta in this concise form. The original was a two-day production with many more pieces performed on the massive Kamani stage, which she said is “very different altogether. We have not been able to perform it because it (the production) is so huge and large. Actually, Habitat asked me for a solo, but I thought let’s do this, because we hadn’t repeated it after November. Now we can easily travel with it and it’s a more compact version. I guess Habitat has its own pluses also, because it’s close. But the wings are always a problem at Habitat because there are only two wings at the back and entry and exit are always restricted. But ho gaya, we worked that into the choreography. We have to adapt every kind of production. It (the sensibilities of the production) stayed with us and we worked very hard on it for nearly two and a half months. Obviously, revisiting a piece is more relaxed, and now we were richer by the experience, so it was nice, good fun.” Did she make any changes to it? “Yes yes, lots of changes,” she said. “There are always lots of changes because we never freeze a piece. Ideas come, there are fresher movements, fresh formations, particularly in Grihabheda there were lots of changes, and in Navagunjara. The alarippu had fewer people, it was more intense, and Beat and Silence also we had changed – last time, there were many more dancers. It was visually very tight and compact. Every piece has been worked again.”
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| Pic: Anoop Arora |
“I think how a particular production grows and stays with you and evolves is a process that’s interesting for me,” she continued. “Aisa nahin hai ke usko ek baar kar diya toh badla nahin, and I think the children learn a lot because they understand the richness of the classical even in a group work. Sometimes people have the tendency to say that in a group work, things are frozen and they never change. It’s not true – we’ve always been evolving and changing and seeing what we can add, what we can edit, we keep changing the interpretation. I’m very happy we’ve been able to do that in the group work as well. Navagunjara is always thrilling to work on because of the concept — each time, we have a lump in the throat when Vishnu suddenly emerges in the end, it is truly a moment of great joy even as we dance, every time we do it we’ve always found it... That’s the strength of the mythology, the music, the sense and one’s own sanskara. All that combined gives that high when we do Navagunjara.”
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| Pic: Anoop Arora |
Talking about her Ravana solo, she said, “I think in the first (original) programme, the solo was a different kind of experience. Solo also I’ve repeated many times — I’ve done it in Baroda, I’ve done it in Chennai, in Bhubaneswar, but then group is a problem because there have to be a minimum of ten people — nine dancers plus me in Navagunjara. Ten people with technical plus light sound becomes a bit of an extravagant production. And we don’t compromise on the production, we don’t want to make it tacky. But the point was that it was essential to keep a poetic element also, that’s why I kept that Ravana bit — that one solo comes as a relief also. Otherwise it becomes too rhythm-rhythm and abstract — we needed something for poetic and literary context too."
Special mention is due to the rhythmic inputs by Karaikudi K. Sivakumar and Lalgudi R. Sriganesh, the music composition by Geetaji herself with K. Venkateshwaran and Dr S. Vasudevan, and the costumes by Sandhya Raman, besides the stunning concept and choreography by Geetaji, naturally. Her troupe of excellent dancers consisted of Sneha Chakradhar, Sharanya Chandran, Anjana Seshadri, Amrithasruthi Radhakrishnan, Radhika Kathal, Madhura Bhrushundi, Aakanksha Kumar, Kaveri Mehta and Shruta Gopalan. The research for Anekanta was by scholar Sudhamahi Regunathan. As for the music, vocals were by K. Venkateshwaran, Dr S. Vasudevan and Radhika Kathal, nattuvangam by Karaikudi K. Sivakumar, Lalgudi R. Sriganesh and Geetaji, mridangam by Lalgudi R. Sriganesh and Manohar Balatchandirane, kanjeera by Lalgudi R. Sriganesh, D.V. Prasanna Kumar and Manohar Balatchandirane, multi-percussion pad by D.V. Prasanna Kumar, violin by Raghavendra Prasath, flute by Raghunanda Ramakrishna and Rajat Prasanna, veena by Pushpa Kashinath and morching by D.V. Prasanna Kumar. The sound/recording was by Ankur Kapoor, lights by Sharad Kulshreshtha, makeup by Brij Mohan Gupta, and technical support by Archana Shivan and Manohar Balatchandirane.
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