A frog transforms into a princess. A god and his consort indulge in love play. The life of a female demon is sucked out through her breast: The classical dance forms of India tell some engrossing stories. But how to clue in audiences who might not be familiar with the tales or the languages, danced and spoken, in which they’re told? Two programs in New York this week met the challenge thrillingly.
At the Joyce Theater, the Nrityagram Dance Ensemble, a beloved troupe that has been both disseminating and developing the South Indian form Odissi for decades, employed its usual two-part method. First, while a story or poem is told in voice-over, a dancer moves through the corresponding gestures. It’s like a living glossary, and a rich performance in itself. Then, accompanied by music instead of words, the dancer dances the story.
On select nights (the program runs through Sunday), the dancer is Surupa Sen, the ensemble’s artistic director and choreographer. The poem she performs is about the god Krishna begging forgiveness from his beloved, Radha. Where some Indian dancers seem to move gesture by gesture, word by discrete word, Sen dances in the freer conversational phrasing of someone actually speaking. The poem is from the 12th century, but she performs as if the words were hers.
Elsewhere on the program, in a new work called “Rasa Rati,” Sen experiments choreographically. The piece starts in glossary mode, with the stellar veteran Pavithra Reddy embodying the poem — the raciest I’ve seen Nrityagram use, with talk of hips and a belt as a secret gateway to Radha’s sacred temple of passion. But in the dance section, Reddy is joined by three other women. They share the Radha role prismatically, in relay or simultaneously, pushing the narrative toward dance abstraction.
Sen is a master of this semiabstract territory. In the opening number “Ni Sa Dha Ni,” another premiere, the connection between the choreography and the music (as always, live and excellent) is dramatized in a stop and start, freeze and melt fashion. The four dancers play games of two-on-two and three-on-one as the rhythmic complexity cranks up. In the closing “Smritiranga,” Sen affectingly stages flashes of memory and loss: a parent’s sense of the time-lapse speed of a child growing up and leaving, a child’s regret after the parent is gone. No translation needed.
At Danspace Project on Thursday, Sreelakshmy Govardhanan imparted her less commonly practiced form, Kuchipudi, in lecture-demonstration mode. Although Kuchipudi has evolved into a solo dance format, Govardhanan said, the form has roots in elaborate ensemble dance dramas. “It’s completely theatrical,” she said.
Is it ever. Govardhanan, while working solo, restored some of the mixed-medium aspects, incorporating spoken dialogue (in Telugu) and song. Accustomed to classicized Indian dance, I found this a little discomfiting at first, less sophisticated, especially since the music was recorded and Govardhanan was sometimes lip-syncing. But Govardhanan’s performance had the broad clarity of the best children’s theater, and in the embodiment of character, she is extraordinary.
She demonstrated this, saying and showing how a basic step is altered for different roles: frilly for a naïve girl, fist swinging for a patriarch. Her specialty is vainglorious men, and her puffed-up chest made it easy to imagine a curled mustache. But she was nearly as amazing as a whole forest of animals — frog, deer, snake, lion, monkey — and as a many-headed demon, her neck retracting so that her chest seemed to swell.
As the demon Putana, sent to assassinate the infant Lord Krishna, Govardhanan was funny, empathetic and terrifying. Disguised as a beautiful woman (an effect conveyed by Govardhanan, not a costume), the demon enjoyed milking a cow, and you could almost see and hear the milk squirting. She became so carried away spinning that her invisible disguise comically slipped. When Putana found the baby god, Govardhanan showed that demons have maternal instincts, too. And her death, as she struggled to detach from her breast the infant suckling out her spirit, was an opera scene in miniature.
The program, presented by the organization FourOneOne, was a gift that should be given again. In a post-show Q&A, Govardhanan revealed a few things we probably wouldn’t have gleaned from her performance alone. It wasn’t much of a surprise that she mainly learned by watching — above all, her guru, Pasumarthy Rattaiah Sarma. But how did she discover the connections between breath and emotion? By studying Julia Roberts in “Notting Hill.”
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