Back with much more excitement for the 7th year in a row, NCPA’s Contemporary Dance Season is eagerly awaited by dance aficionados. The highlight of the festival is the specially curated performances that combine ingenuity, style and unconventional choreography from some of the most prominent dancers India.
The season premieres with an evening of the acclaimed dance performance, ‘Padme’, produced by dancer, actor and arts administrator Anita Ratnam and choreographed by Netherlands-based choreographer Kalpana Raghuraman. This group performance attempts to explore the hidden and the unhidden; the flowering and the unflowering. In this work, traditional Indian dance motifs coalesce modern sensibilities - they intersect to mirror the dancers own specific experiences with the body, faith, and individual journeys. This will be followed by Anita Ratnam’s solo pieces Prism – a dance based on Buddhist Mandalas that delves into the mythology of the ever-powerful devis through dance.
Explore life within the forest through its inhabitants with a dance performance The Mystical Forest by Santosh Nair. Trained as a traditional and contemporary dancer, Santosh Nair and his troupe Sadhya will present varied experiences, activities, emotions, rituals, and relationships of the inhabitants through varied expressions. The performance attempts to draw from the dance vocabulary of Mayurbhanj Chhau with strong, grounded movements & contemporary interpretation.
According to Swapnokalpa Dasgupta, Head of Dance Programming NCPA, “Our constant endeavor for the Contemporary Dance Season is to curate a unique experience for our audiences. We look for artists who are recognized as well as those who are showing great potential. The performances we have chosen this year will create a reminiscent, emotional and truly breathe taking experience. The main flavor of the festival is that performances this time are challenging the basic concept and are not sticking to the stereotypical definition of contemporary dance. The pieces have been derived from Purulia to Mayurbhanj Chhau, to Bharatanatyam based on the strict principles, aerial acts, and a 55-minute piece without any audible music. Along with these, In order to encourage young and aspiring dancers, a social media based dance contest was held and the winners will be featured during the festival.”
Dance practitioner Avantika Bahl along with Vishal Sarvaiya, goes beyond his hearing impairment to create magic a certified sign language teacher will present Say, What? which focusses on the interaction between two people who slide between using and abandoning codified language. As the audience encounters various conversations in this 55 minutes of silent production where Vishal goes beyond his hearing impairment to create this unique piece along with Avatika, that are set in space using sign language as a point of entry, the role of gesture is re-interpreted and de-mystified within the realm of communication.
This season also gives a stage to the winners of the Contemporary Dance contest held earlier during this year through social media –The winners Harshal Vyas (Outline) and Uddipana Das (Search of you) would be performing. Harshal Vyas is a performer and teacher of kalaripayattu and contemporary dance with various dance companies, schools, and colleges. His performance 'Outline - a journey of movements,' a pure abstract piece, is all about body movements and body language which is adapted from Indian contemporary, kalaripayattu and modern contemporary.
Uddipana Das, a student of Sumeet Nagdev Dance Arts, is a trained contemporary and Sattriya dancer. Her piece 'Search of you' relates to that longing and desperation of an individual in search of true self. The inability to fathom inner potential often lures people to shadow others and follow someone else's desire. But as time flies, it only results in surmounting confusion. However, the impulsive craving to follow the mass results in failure to find individuality and will.
Contemporary dance lovers are familiar with Terence Lewis who will stage ‘The Kamshet Project. Conceived at a farmhouse, in the small town of Kamshet; The Kamshet Project experiments with transitioning realities. Nine highly skilled dancers were put under house arrest and cut off from all social and familial ties. It was an experiment to go beyond the physical text of dance and explore the reality of who each one really was, the result is shown in this dance. For 18 years and above.
For a surreal and slightly futuristic evening of dance, there is the spellbinding performance ‘Ekonama’ by Sudarshan Chakravorty’s Sapphire Creations Dance Company, which touches the ongoing environmental issues. A futuristic but not-impossible vision of the end of days, Ekonama is a critique of the rapid depletion of natural resources and the impending loom of an end to our beautiful world, the piece traces the story of communities uniting to create a movement to bring change with still a hope for the future.
The finale for this year is the story of Jalika, by Omaggio Performing Company, told through dance Mime Theatre with glimpses of aerial arts fused within a contemporary movement. How fast do we want to go? Somehow we are all in this speed force of technology in communication. With a million reasons to think that everything is good as well as another million reasons to think otherwise. The end of this tale only time will tell. Jalika is a journey of discovering oneself while struggling between identity and image in today’s modern era.
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