The perfect ode to Gurudev

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You make me endless, such is your pleasure” (Translation from Tagore’s Gitanjali, Poem 1) To pay a painstaking tribute to Gurudev Rabidranath Tagore on his 150th birth anniversary celebration, Chennai-based ace Bharatnatyam danseuse Anita Ratnam choreographs an aesthetically designed offering, woven from the bard’s casket of creative gems. Recently premiered at Kolkata’s well-known G.D.Birla Sabhaghar auditorium, Ratnam’s rendition drew critical acclaim and accolades. Responding to her performance titled Handful of Dust, the internationally renowned dancer shares: “This humble homage on Gurudev is one in a million such compositions, compiled by many other Indian artistes, who too have been deeply touched, inspired and moved by Tagore’s treasure-trove of works at some point of time or the other. As for me, I’ve always admired his multitude of works till the present moment.”
Having grown up in South India, outside the cauldron of Bengal (where Tagore’s glory is still given a deified status and the man himself, revered as a sacrosanct figure), the dancer feels that the Nobel Laureate’s rich magnum opuses and timeless verses still need an expansive amount of translation to make it more accessible to the rest of the country. “Other provinces at large are still left deprived of reading Tagore’s repertoire in parts, let alone in its entirety. Agreed it is not humanly possible to grasp a versatile genius’s depth of creations and understand its underlying essence in a lifetime. But at least we can try to scratch the surface, which becomes inescapably unwieldy in want of extensive interpretations and paraphrased versions of his volumes of literary texts,” she says. “After the lift-up of a rigid copyright act, things however, seem to breathe easy and give way to leniency from the erstwhile straight-jacketed codes and set parameters to be followed. Even my fellow Bengali artiste friends, scholars and connoisseurs hailing from this part of the world have repeatedly rued over the strict possession of the Tagorean legacy, which had noticeably remained confined within a clique of handful few staunch custodians. Now hopefully, the trend is changing to augur well for a better future. And to welcome a rewarding tomorrow, the next-gen posterity has to possibly carry forth the Tagorean heritage amidst contemporary developments, progressive experiments and futuristic evolutions,” she opines with a note of observation. At the formal request of the cultural wing of the Union government, Ratnam gave her consent to dedicate her act in honour of the bard.
While Tagore himself had borrowed ideas from around the world that lent his works with a global appeal and further widened its reach in terms of thoughts, expressions and imageries, which he painted through his chosen diction, Ratnam stresses upon this streak of universality in Tagore to elucidate: “Oh, he was a global citizen, long before the term globalisation or a global village got coined. He was not only a man of letters, but a man of vivid imagination and liberalism as well. He was a poet-philosopher, whose quilled-pen has practically bristled past all kinds of human emotions and nature’s seasons. His songs are famously endowed with lilting Scottish tunes and he could create his own organic style.” Ratnam’s motley stage-act befits the bard’s multi-faceted personality. It is in tune with the different dimensions of art that the poet would indulge in. In her own words, the graceful dancer — whose forte lies in the contemporary genre besides the classical style ofabhinaya (histrionics), mudras (finger-movements) and footwork which she excels in — ascribes her presentation as “an international sojourn with Indian sensibilities” and calls it Avani, which means prithvi or earth in the Sanskrit tongue.
The production also flaunts an effective use of multimedia with a background projection screening smatterings of words here and there, plucked from the “kaviguru’s” eclectic verses. The words keep sprawling over the wall, floor, ceiling, the dancer’s body and elsewhere. The symbolic image of the Goddess Kali as vanquisher of evil force and resurrector of peace, has been metaphorically roped in to show Mother Earth as the redeemer and protector of her children. Incidentally, prithvi or the terra-firma has been shown both as divine and demonic. The Mother Nature is shown both as a healer and destroyer, terrible with its fury in times of ravenous natural disasters — preying upon its own people — and beautiful during the spring, which is marked as a season of colours, new blossoms and immeasurable mirth.
Having mounted up the spectacle on a large canvas, Ratnam’s dance combined with poetic passages only reflects a standard that is faultlessly high-class. But she never forgets to acknowledge names like the reputed Kolkata-based Odissi dancer Sharmila Biswas, who had originally introduced her to a series of select poems from the bard’s immortalised Gitanjali (song offerings) and leading filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh, who had further enlightened her on the Tagorean phenomenon, spending a whole day with his explicit deliberation on the subject. “Thanks to Sharmila for initially planting the idea-seed within my conscience-core, with a tag of suggestion that she could fantasise none but me as the chief architect of this production. I’ve also incorporated vast portions of Carnatic vocals, rendered by Bindu Malini.
Designed by Paromita Bannerjee, a young upcoming talent on the fashionscape, the costumes have been purposely kept simple. “I didn’t wish to create too much of a disorderly clutter on the eyes with dazzling lights, garish, loud make-up and gaudy, flamboyant outfits or any kind of extravagant sets. In a nutshell, the output should be soothing to the senses. Period,” she makes an assessment.
As an Indian classical dancer, Ratnam says that this is one arena where every single facial muscle apart from the body can be employed as a dance movement in context. From eyes, to smile, teeth and jaws, one may contract and expand all his/her bestowed physical faculties. Fact is, dance is produced from within one’s body, where each cell should feel and produce the rhythm of a dance-beat. I’ve also included our age-old baithakitradition, which is a conventional feature, applied in classical dance-forms like Bharatnatyam or Kathak. The dancer is in a seated posture and enhances her dance by making detailed aesthetic hand movements. If positioned on one side of the stage, she at times moves on a rotational motion to address her audience on the end. Boasting of a blend of contemporary with the classical soundscapes and spoken texts, Ratnam’s choreography drafts in a tapestry of diverse vocabularies such as Kathakali, Bharatnatyam, Balinese dance, meditative movements, rehearsed improvisations and theatrical interventions and she surely creates magic.