Divinity in dance
By: Shanta Gokhale
There are times in the shooting of a film or the staging of a play, when happy accidents happen, endowing the work with a magical dimension.
The opening scene of Sumantro Ghosal’s film, The Unseen Sequence - Exploring Bharatanatyam through the art of Malavika Sarukkai, screened at the NCPA on Thursday, is host to one such accident.
environment in celebration.
Ghosal’s camera watches unobtrusively and then moves on. It records her performances, observes her rehearsals, reveals her teaching methods, traces the history of the dance through interviews, photographs and archival footage. Intermittently, it pauses, letting Ghosal probe the dancer’s mind. What does dance mean to her? How does she resolve the choreographic problems she poses to herself? How does she answer the inner compulsion that urges her to connect the material world to the metaphysical world through her dance? “In a moment, we want to suggest the infinite,” she says. “It is not just the beat with a beginning and an ending. It is part of a much longer sequence, the unseen sequence perhaps.”
The eternal flow of a river is a symbol that allows all that she has apprehended of the cosmic world to enter into and shape her dance. The movement she devises for this is mesmerising in its simplicity. It combines an unbroken wave of undulating arms with a gliding motion round a wide arc executed in a soft fourbeat walk. As always, her mother Saroja Kamakshi sits on the side watching keenly.
Sarukkai is fortunate to have had such a mother - a guide, mentor and manager all rolled into one.
Sarukkai’s cogitations before the camera are carefully considered, deep and yet unpretentious, with none of that practised felicity that artists who have said the same things to many people on many occasions over the years, display. Faced with Ghosal’s searching questions, his great desire to know and understand her art as fully as he can, Sarukkai’s answers acquire an immediacy that catches and holds our attention.
Our attention is caught and held just as strongly by her total involvement in teaching. At one point she explains to a student what it means to enact a snake. “Don’t describe. Be,” she urges, demonstrating her meaning again and again till the student gets it. Sarrukai is passing on to the student the principle from which her own expressional dance springs — not to illustrate but to inhabit a character. She tells a charming story of the time she was choreographing a piece on Hanuman.
She had curved her hands into a semblance ofmonkey paws and devised monkey-like leaps and bounds. But she felt herself become Hanuman only when she swept his tail forward with one arm and draped it proudly over the other.
Sarukkai’s approach to dance is spiritual and intellectual. The rigour of her thinking translates into a bodily expression that is at once strictly grammatical, and freely explorative. In fact, she says at one point that the discipline of dance itself gives her the freedom she seeks to push boundaries. She has honed the grammar and technique of the dance to perfection in the early years of her practice. They are now hers, ready to give effortless form to her choreographic ideas.
Sarrukai’s freedom also lies in being able to choose what she does or doesn’t dance. The great Kalanidhi Narayanan with whom she studied abhinaya, complains to the camera that Sarukkai never dances the most consummate form of expressional dance in the Bharatanatyam repertoire, the padam. Sarukkai demurs mildly, “Not never”. Asproof , the film records her performance of Krishna ni begane baro, a padam that was given its most sublime interpretation by the legendary Balasaraswati. Sarukkai dances it and makes it her own.
Malavika Sarukkai’s dance is shaped by what she calls the “intelligence of understanding”. Thought and emotionfilter into her body as one stream, and the body becomes dance.
There are times in the shooting of a film or the staging of a play, when happy accidents happen, endowing the work with a magical dimension.
The opening scene of Sumantro Ghosal’s film, The Unseen Sequence - Exploring Bharatanatyam through the art of Malavika Sarukkai, screened at the NCPA on Thursday, is host to one such accident.
The dancer is at the Nataraja temple in Chidambaram. She has completed 40 years of dancing for the world, and she is marking the occasion by offering up her dance to the Cosmic Dancer Himself. It is a deeply spiritual moment in the life of Malavika Sarukkai (in picture), a dancer who has carved a unique place for herself within the rigorous discipline of the centuries-old tradition of Bharatanatyam. Devotees pass by hardly noticing her. Some stand and watch. The dancer herself sees nothing besides the sacred image before her. Then suddenly, as though in response to her dance, the temple bells ring out, drenching the
Ghosal’s camera watches unobtrusively and then moves on. It records her performances, observes her rehearsals, reveals her teaching methods, traces the history of the dance through interviews, photographs and archival footage. Intermittently, it pauses, letting Ghosal probe the dancer’s mind. What does dance mean to her? How does she resolve the choreographic problems she poses to herself? How does she answer the inner compulsion that urges her to connect the material world to the metaphysical world through her dance? “In a moment, we want to suggest the infinite,” she says. “It is not just the beat with a beginning and an ending. It is part of a much longer sequence, the unseen sequence perhaps.”
The eternal flow of a river is a symbol that allows all that she has apprehended of the cosmic world to enter into and shape her dance. The movement she devises for this is mesmerising in its simplicity. It combines an unbroken wave of undulating arms with a gliding motion round a wide arc executed in a soft fourbeat walk. As always, her mother Saroja Kamakshi sits on the side watching keenly.
Sarukkai is fortunate to have had such a mother - a guide, mentor and manager all rolled into one.
Sarukkai’s cogitations before the camera are carefully considered, deep and yet unpretentious, with none of that practised felicity that artists who have said the same things to many people on many occasions over the years, display. Faced with Ghosal’s searching questions, his great desire to know and understand her art as fully as he can, Sarukkai’s answers acquire an immediacy that catches and holds our attention.
Our attention is caught and held just as strongly by her total involvement in teaching. At one point she explains to a student what it means to enact a snake. “Don’t describe. Be,” she urges, demonstrating her meaning again and again till the student gets it. Sarrukai is passing on to the student the principle from which her own expressional dance springs — not to illustrate but to inhabit a character. She tells a charming story of the time she was choreographing a piece on Hanuman.
She had curved her hands into a semblance of
Sarukkai’s approach to dance is spiritual and intellectual. The rigour of her thinking translates into a bodily expression that is at once strictly grammatical, and freely explorative. In fact, she says at one point that the discipline of dance itself gives her the freedom she seeks to push boundaries. She has honed the grammar and technique of the dance to perfection in the early years of her practice. They are now hers, ready to give effortless form to her choreographic ideas.
Sarrukai’s freedom also lies in being able to choose what she does or doesn’t dance. The great Kalanidhi Narayanan with whom she studied abhinaya, complains to the camera that Sarukkai never dances the most consummate form of expressional dance in the Bharatanatyam repertoire, the padam. Sarukkai demurs mildly, “Not never”. As
Malavika Sarukkai’s dance is shaped by what she calls the “intelligence of understanding”. Thought and emotion
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