What I went to see just under a month ago was a dance recital between the Chitrasena Dance Company, and the Nrityagram Dance Ensemble from India. What I saw defies words to describe. To call their latest collaboration, Áhuti, a dance production would be akin to presenting Tarkovsky’s Stalker as just another film, Gaudí’s Sagrada Família as another Church, Bach’s Mass in B Minor as a musical composition, Joyce’s Ulysses as a book or Turner’s ethereal luminosity as just paintings of the sun. Áhuti was, in short, sublime.
The challenge of writing about this production is to risk those who didn’t see it consider a review of it as hyperbole or the hysteria of fandom. But superlatives are inescapable in the consideration of a production that so completely defied convention, and expectation. Even as one knew to expect something very special, Áhuti delivered a production that elevated both the Odissi, and the Kandyan dance forms to heights never before staged in Sri Lanka.
Áhuti finally came to Sri Lanka after touring the world a decade after Samhära, which I also loved. In a compelling review of the production, the feminist activist, researcher, and writer Subha Wijesiriwardena said the various pieces “…dissolve from one to another; the dancing never ends. The lights fade but the movement never stops. The audience holds its breath, captivated, as the slightest shifting of weight or the continuous, slow tilt of a head makes you believe the dancers are never still – even when you can’t see them.” What was true of that production, then, is heightened, sharpened, and perfected in Áhuti. Samhära was the first collaboration between the two dance companies, each rich in their heritage, and history. Over a decade hence, audiences were entreated to an extraordinary partnership that has gone beyond mere co-existence on stage to something dazzlingly syncretic – faithful to tradition, but presenting a hypnotic fusion of movement far more than just the sum of two distinct forms. Áhuti was ravishingly, and refreshingly new.
In an interview with Namali Premawardhana in the Sunday Times, Heshma Wignaraja, the Artistic Director of the Chitrasena Dance School speaks of how her counterpart from Nrityagram, Surupa Sen encouraged her, after the success of Samhära, to “embrace each other” – meaning to more fully explore what was possible by juxtaposing, and entwining the two forms they respectively embodied. Áhuti, which was choreographed by Sen, presented a more mature engagement than that first blush of brilliance over a decade ago. Wignaraja, and Sen are no longer pausing to see, and hear what each other says through dance. They now intuitively know each other’s form, sound, and vision – and connect at what seems an almost subliminal level when witnessing Áhuti’s brilliance. Wignarajah, and Sen create for stage a production that’s almost preternatural. In its movement, music, light, grace, colour, and form – from each turn to leap, eyebrow to finger, sinew to soul – the dancers on stage weren’t really with the audience, even as they occupied the same space, and time. They were someplace else – an almost tantric state, as vessels of something greater, entirely unknowable to us, wherever the selfless devotion to dance as a calling, and as the practice of a faith transported them to. For the more mortal audience, time stopped as one piece flowed into the other. It was something else.
While it’s possible to write about each movement, and piece, I won’t. It would be as absurd as trying to appreciate the Sagrada Família by studying each sculpture, artefact or brick as somehow independent of the whole building’s beauty, and genius. Áhuti’s magic – and it was truly magical – lay in the totality of the production. This isn’t to dismiss how each constituent piece was important. For example, in the Sunday Times article by Premawardhana, Thaji Dias – the lead dancer at the Chitrasena School notes how only after dancing ‘Alap’ for around a dozen years was she truly comfortable with the piece. This devotion to perfection is particularly embodied in Nrityagram’s Surupa Sen – whose entire raison d’être is, quite simply, dance. But what made Áhuti special was how all the dancers, from both sides of the Palk Strait, were extraordinary. In Samhära, there were very clearly lead dancers – and the choreography reflected this. In Áhuti, though Sen, and Thaji clearly shine, it is no longer the case – even in choreography – that they occupy a space, and place entirely or clearly distinct from, or on a pedestal above the rest of the ensemble. Just as the two companies are more mature, and confident in their collaboration, all the dancers are more comfortable in their own skin, form, place, and space. Áhuti is the better for it.
This is something picked up by the New York Times review of the production by Brian Seibert. Referring to a particularly delightful piece in the production called ‘Poornáratí’, Seibert notes “that a mimed game of dice, in which the Nrityagram dancers appear to cheat, might have been a nod to a rigged contest, an imbalance of aesthetic resources and directorial focus. In “Áhuti,” the imbalance is still present, but the weights aren’t the same, because Nrityagram isn’t.” While I agree with him in the main, where I strongly differ is how in one reading of his review, Nrityagram is somehow lesser than what was on stage a decade ago. I just don’t see that. Nrityagram’s Sen, and all her dancers are other-worldly. They embody such a hallowed niche of artistic perfection that to review them as critic would be as futile, and foolish as to review a deity. On stage, and in their avatars as dancers, Sen, and her dancers defy corporeality, and deliver performances that can only be described as transcendental. What’s dramatically changed from Samhära is that the Chitrasena School’s dancers, from Thaji to the rest, now match them. This is no mean feat, and is to our country’s pride – to finally have dancers on par with those from India who occupy a global recognition, critical reception, and hard-won admiration as the world’s best.
To say I enjoyed Áhuti would be an understatement. I feel the production would have run for longer – to more standing ovations, and full houses. The dance, as Sri Lanka’s prima ballerina Vajra always says, is sacred. Áhuti was the best of, and featured the best from two countries. What more can one ask or pray for?
Photo credit: The Hindu
Sanjana Hattotuwa 