On Wednesday, seasoned dance teacher S Nagabhushan presented his Bharatanatyam students — the sister duo Akhila M Rao and Nikhila M Rao at Ravindra Kalakshetra.The Rao sisters did their guru proud with their deep understanding of the ‘bhava’ and ‘artha’ of Bharatanatyam.Blessed with a captivating face and liquid eyes, Akhila and Nikhila handled the traditional repertoire of their program with joie de vivre. The all pervading smile on their faces and the well co-ordinated activity on the stage fetched impressive results. The opening Pushpanjali ended with a shloka on Lord Ganesha ‘Vakratunda’. And this shloka served as a prelude for the next Ganesha Vandana based on Purandaradasa’s ‘ G a j a v a d a n a ’ (Hamsadhwani). They executed different forms of the lord of obstacles in a vivid manner.T h e ‘ N a t a k u r a n j i jathiswara’ accounted for their hold over nritta. The negotiation of two kaalaas with well matched jathis and aduvus was a delight. The import of the Dharmavathi varna revolving around Lord Shiva, Parvathi and Sakhi was appropriately delineated.Parvathi sends a letter to Shiva through her sakhi and asks her to fetch the beloved Lord. The nritta and nrithya portions of the varna were aptly dealt.Guru Nagabhushan’s imaginative powers were seen to the fullest particularly in the post-interval session featuring the abhinaya items in which each pose seemed to be drawn from temple carvings and rock reliefs. In the depiction of ‘Chandrachuda Manmatha Manthana’ Nikhila as Shiva and Akhila as Manmatha performed well. ‘Govardhana Giridhaari’ was an artistic account of Lord Krishna. After a resonating Brindavani tillana the duo concluded with a Dashavatara mangala.It was a delight to watch them showing each of the ten incarnations in turns. Guru Nagabhushan gave a good account of himself as a singer too besides being an able nattuvangist.Madhusudan(violin), Shankararaman (veena) and Bettavenkatesh (mridanga) acquitted themselves with understanding and empathy.Nritarutya’s vibrant moments Ashish Khokar’s Dance Discourse offered an interesting overview of the underlying undercurrents of Indian myth, modern and contemporary dancing and showcased what is modern in Indian dance today at the Alliance Francaise on Saturday. Chiranjeev Singh gave an enlightening speech and threw light on the tradition, modernity and contemporarisation of dance.Ashish underlined the confusions and conflicts between the very concept of modern and contemporary dance and drew a line between the two. This was followed by a vibrant modern dance performance by the Nritarutya troupe led by artistic director Mayuri Upadhya.Together and in individual suites, the dancers Umesh Naidu, Vishwa Kiran, Sathya B G Rohan Raj and Mayuri excelled in rendering the troupe’s latest works like Ganda Berunda, Mars and 3 Sides Of A Coin along with the videos from their other popular works, Chittara, Kali, Ardhanarishwara and Puppets.Their experiment in dancing was pleasantly watchable in the first and choreographically more thrilling in the second. With well worked out some creative take-offs the different geometrical and artistic patterns and structures in dance tried to find a common meeting ground.The tableaus were arresting freezes that dissolved in aptly divided patterns and interesting formations sometimes with the use of props too.The kind of smooth movements coming together and dissolving was hair-raising.The dancers with their flexible bodies, fluid limb movements, jumped, leaped, floated and stamped their feet with enormous power and showed a professional profile. Though there were bold, aesthetic, artistic and experimental movements in their dance vocabulary they represented one or the other movement (either of lasya or tandava of traditional classical dance) already explicated in the dance treatises.
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