VARNAJAA | Sculpted with calligraphy and verse
Parwati Dutta uses poetry and script to choreograph an evening that showcases young and established dancers from Aurangabad’s Mahagami Gurukul
For Vividha, Dutta also worked with calligrams, where the arrangement of the word or the text offers a pictorial sense of its meaning. For the purpose of the work, she chose four calligrams, studying the similarities in form across the visual and performative dimension. She compared them to bandishes (compositions) in classical music, by tracing the idea of a line as abstract utterance and then translating these observations into dance.
In a nod to the literature of Maharashtra, Dutta concludes with Shabda-Dhyan, taking off from an abhanga (poem) by Tukaram that equates words to jewels. Dutta interprets Tukaram’s verse as a paean to spiritual surrender through the act of writing.
Vividha will be performed at the CIDCO Exhibition Complex Auditorium, Vashi, on July 8 at 6.30 p.m., entry free; more details at 9372093189
Parwati Dutta uses poetry and script to choreograph an evening that showcases young and established dancers from Aurangabad’s Mahagami Gurukul
JULY 07, 2017
THE HINDU
When Odissi and Kathak dancer Parwati Dutta moved to Aurangabad in the mid-90s, she did so with a sense of adventure. Accustomed to the hustle and bustle of New Delhi, a teaching stint in a mofussil dance school in Maharashtra seemed like an exciting interlude.
Twenty years later, Dutta is still in Aurangabad, where she heads the Mahagami Gurukul, an institution that propagates research and performance in the classical arts. Dutta and the students of Mahagami distil this trajectory of work into an evening of performance through the programme, Vividha this weekend.
Vividha will bring a third generation of Mahagami dancers to the stage, showcasing students in short pieces from Kathak and Odissi. By turning the spotlight on its youngest generation of learners, Vividha underlines Mahagami’s focus on the early integration of arts and mainstream education. In 2016, Dutta published Nritya Gatha, a picture-book on classical dances, simplifying the history and vocabulary of dance forms for young readers. Earlier this year, she also set up a gurukul-style primary school in Aurangabad’s Gandheli village, where the curriculum is geared towards dance and other forms of arts-based learning.
Creative integration
For Vividha, Dutta pays equal attention to the technical and expressive aspects of learning. She has sourced simple Sanskrit poetry that young learners can appreciate and interpret. One such poem, ‘Jalabindu’, sees the dancers addressing a drop of water, praising its omnipotence and asking for its protection. In the second half of Vividha, Dutta presents ‘Varnajaa’, a Kathak work inspired by calligraphy. Intrigued by the spontaneity and rhythm she sensed in the act of writing, Dutta began looking at practices of calligraphic writing across cultures. She started thinking about translating her observations into dance, most crucially Dutta wondered how the act of writing itself could function as an embodied experience.
Dutta started working on different dimensions of calligraphy, studying how the introduction of script recalibrated the ways in which knowledge was preserved through oral or spoken cultures. For Vividha, Dutta will use a legend from the Padmapurana, where Shiva, as he is dancing, turns utterances into script at the behest of sage Kanaka. As he dances, these utterances are captured in notation by Panini, creating the Shiva Sutras, a set of 14 verses that group the phonemes of Sanskrit.
This also served as a starting point for Dutta’s work for the parallels it drew between the acts of dance and writing. “Every akshara (letter) is a divine expression – Akaradevi, Ukaradevi and Makaradevi, coalescing as ‘aum’. That becomes an invocation. In the pure dance piece, I work with the ideas of bindu(dot), rekha (line), aakar (form) and kalpana (idea) as coordinates. These ideas remain the basis for any artistic, aesthetic or intellectual creation,” she says. Starting from these four ideas, Dutta then gradually linked them to each other, she adds, “I also look at utterances and their role in elaborating on the form. For instance, if the beat ‘dha’ represents a bindu, then ‘ta-dha’ is made up of two such dots. Thus, even across a temporal notion of space, the artist is creating calligraphic forms.”
Syncretic traditions
Inspired by calligraphic artist Achyut Palav’s series of Om and Allah paintings, which combine syllables of the two words, Dutta added a dhrupad by Tansen to ‘Varnajaa’. She was taken by the idea of blending syllables, and thus blending forms. This idea also finds resonance in Kathak’s syncretism, where the repertoire and the tradition are a blend of Hindu and Islamic traditions.
THE HINDU
When Odissi and Kathak dancer Parwati Dutta moved to Aurangabad in the mid-90s, she did so with a sense of adventure. Accustomed to the hustle and bustle of New Delhi, a teaching stint in a mofussil dance school in Maharashtra seemed like an exciting interlude.
Twenty years later, Dutta is still in Aurangabad, where she heads the Mahagami Gurukul, an institution that propagates research and performance in the classical arts. Dutta and the students of Mahagami distil this trajectory of work into an evening of performance through the programme, Vividha this weekend.
Vividha will bring a third generation of Mahagami dancers to the stage, showcasing students in short pieces from Kathak and Odissi. By turning the spotlight on its youngest generation of learners, Vividha underlines Mahagami’s focus on the early integration of arts and mainstream education. In 2016, Dutta published Nritya Gatha, a picture-book on classical dances, simplifying the history and vocabulary of dance forms for young readers. Earlier this year, she also set up a gurukul-style primary school in Aurangabad’s Gandheli village, where the curriculum is geared towards dance and other forms of arts-based learning.
Creative integration
For Vividha, Dutta pays equal attention to the technical and expressive aspects of learning. She has sourced simple Sanskrit poetry that young learners can appreciate and interpret. One such poem, ‘Jalabindu’, sees the dancers addressing a drop of water, praising its omnipotence and asking for its protection. In the second half of Vividha, Dutta presents ‘Varnajaa’, a Kathak work inspired by calligraphy. Intrigued by the spontaneity and rhythm she sensed in the act of writing, Dutta began looking at practices of calligraphic writing across cultures. She started thinking about translating her observations into dance, most crucially Dutta wondered how the act of writing itself could function as an embodied experience.
Dutta started working on different dimensions of calligraphy, studying how the introduction of script recalibrated the ways in which knowledge was preserved through oral or spoken cultures. For Vividha, Dutta will use a legend from the Padmapurana, where Shiva, as he is dancing, turns utterances into script at the behest of sage Kanaka. As he dances, these utterances are captured in notation by Panini, creating the Shiva Sutras, a set of 14 verses that group the phonemes of Sanskrit.
This also served as a starting point for Dutta’s work for the parallels it drew between the acts of dance and writing. “Every akshara (letter) is a divine expression – Akaradevi, Ukaradevi and Makaradevi, coalescing as ‘aum’. That becomes an invocation. In the pure dance piece, I work with the ideas of bindu(dot), rekha (line), aakar (form) and kalpana (idea) as coordinates. These ideas remain the basis for any artistic, aesthetic or intellectual creation,” she says. Starting from these four ideas, Dutta then gradually linked them to each other, she adds, “I also look at utterances and their role in elaborating on the form. For instance, if the beat ‘dha’ represents a bindu, then ‘ta-dha’ is made up of two such dots. Thus, even across a temporal notion of space, the artist is creating calligraphic forms.”
Syncretic traditions
Inspired by calligraphic artist Achyut Palav’s series of Om and Allah paintings, which combine syllables of the two words, Dutta added a dhrupad by Tansen to ‘Varnajaa’. She was taken by the idea of blending syllables, and thus blending forms. This idea also finds resonance in Kathak’s syncretism, where the repertoire and the tradition are a blend of Hindu and Islamic traditions.
For Vividha, Dutta also worked with calligrams, where the arrangement of the word or the text offers a pictorial sense of its meaning. For the purpose of the work, she chose four calligrams, studying the similarities in form across the visual and performative dimension. She compared them to bandishes (compositions) in classical music, by tracing the idea of a line as abstract utterance and then translating these observations into dance.
In a nod to the literature of Maharashtra, Dutta concludes with Shabda-Dhyan, taking off from an abhanga (poem) by Tukaram that equates words to jewels. Dutta interprets Tukaram’s verse as a paean to spiritual surrender through the act of writing.
Vividha will be performed at the CIDCO Exhibition Complex Auditorium, Vashi, on July 8 at 6.30 p.m., entry free; more details at 9372093189
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