An Indian Master Demonstrates His Craft
Pandit Birju Maharaj is a patriarch of Indian dance, and last Friday, he gave New Yorkers a lesson in keeping up appearances. The 69-year-old used the particular intricacies of North Indian Kathak dance to convey an impression of undiminished vitality in the opening program of the World Music Institute's "Festival of India" at Symphony Space.
So much of the movement in Asian dance involves nuances and incremental gradations of a body that is rooted in space, while American dance training tends to place emphasis on space-conquering amplitude. Although the Kathak dance language contains jumps and spins, the most strenuous exertions Friday evening were reserved for two female colleagues and students of Mr. Maharaj: Saswati Sen and Mahua Shankar.
Mr. Maharaj instead impressed us with the sinuosity of fingers and wrists as they threaded the air, and with his ever-mobile feet, drumming, skittering, shuffling, and sliding on the ground, accentuated by the cuffs of bells he and his colleagues wore on their ankles. Kathak dance trains every extremity, even each part of the muscular structure, to be maximally articulate, and Mr. Maharaj's roguish eyebrows and his toes that flexed even after his foot had come to rest demonstrated those meticulously honed nuances.
Rhythm, as both the overriding subject and the dance text, received primary attention Friday night. The dancers informed the audience that their kinetic cadences aimed to transmit and incarnate universal and biological patterns; they sang a rhythmic phrase, then kinetically interpreted that rhythm. Mr. Maharaj described the manifestation of rhythm even in silence, and indeed we were reminded by Friday night's performance of the way stillness becomes dynamic, conveying the continuing potency and potential of the body at rest.
Just as Mr. Maharaj articulated different parts of his body and gave a vital impression of kineticism even while standing mostly still, he and his two colleagues explicated in voice and movement the infinite variety possible within fixed time structures. They demonstrated how the same canonical phrase duration might be employed to encompass many different rhythmic patterns.
Repeatedly, Friday night's program alternated between studies in pure dance and pieces that told a story through dance and gesture. The performance began with an invocation to the Indian god Krishna performed by Mr. Maharaj, and tales of exploits of this divinity served as plotlines for a number of the subsequent narrative pieces. Like Zeus and Jupiter in Greek and Roman mythology, Krishna is protean, a shape-changer who can assume any identity or dimension, and is continually in flux. In the narratives the dancers imparted, each individual performer alternately represented man and woman, playing two partners in a dialogue.
While the individual meanings of certain gestures were often foreign to the untrained eye, the fascinating passages of mimetic pantomime rendered prior knowledge unnecessary. In "Udhave Samvad," Mr. Maharaj described Krishna, nostalgically recalling scenes of his youth. In "Ahalya Uddhar," an excerpt from the holy scripture Ramayana, Ms. Sen described in movement a vignette similar to the Amphitryon fable in ancient mythology: Here a wife is seduced by the divine Lord Indra, who has disguised himself as her husband.
The flavor of Friday night's performance was part village gathering, part theatrical event, and part tutorial. The three dancers spoke directly to the audience, explaining their movements, announcing each section, and subtly educating audience members in the principles of their art form. The musicians onstage — Utpal Ghosal, Jayanta Banerjee, and Debashis Sarkar — displayed rapt attention and appeared as enthralled with the performers' work as the audience, which sat throughout Friday night's nearly-three-hour program with unflagging focus.
