Fluid Grace at the first ever NCPA Contemporary Dance Festival...
November 11, 2011 12:00:00 AM IST MTG editorial
"It takes an athlete to dance, but an artiste to be a dancer." - Shanna LaFleur. The National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), is all set to present some of India's finest contemporary dancers at NCPA's first "NCPA Contemporary Dance Festival" on November 15th, 16th, 29th and 30th, 2011 only at the NCPA.
The NCPA Contemporary Dance Festival will showcase premiere performances comprising innovative and cutting edge choreography from some of the most prominent dancers of this genre from India and abroad - Mandeep Raikhy, Anusha Lall, Astad Deboo, Navtej Singh Johar and Hiroshi Miyamoto.
After creating landmark festivals in Indian classical dance in Mumbai, like the Mudra Dance Week and Nakshatra Dance Festival, NCPA's maiden contemporary dance festival promises to keep audiences riveted with an exclusive melange of dynamism and poise Going beyond the basic presentation of merely having performances, the Festival will also see a special connect and engagement programme for children from 'Teach For India' on 28th November 2011.
The festival commences on November 15th, 2011 with "Inhabited Geometry" by Mandeep Raikhy and dancers. Inspired by the notion of lived experience of architecture in Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space, Mandeep Raikhy's Inhabited Geometry aims to define, architecturally and imaginatively, the idea of home. Bachelard looks at the lived-in and human experience of architecture affect and shapes its development. As an investigation of the idea of 'site', cultural as well as architectural, and an attempt to create a new vocabulary emerging out of experiments with Bharatanatyam, this piece is essentially an exploration undertaken with six dancers to paint a picture of an imaginary home. Inhabited Geometry engages with the idea of home simultaneously as a tangible place and a place of dreams.
After this stirring dance experience, pave way for an imaginative journey with "Tilt" by Anusha Lall and dancers on November 16th, 2011. Tilt is a creative exploration of movement principles employed in Bharatanatyam, re-examining their usage, at times emphasizing, even exaggerating their technique, and at times, nudging them out of place, or deliberately turning them on their heads. The result is a work that negotiates the boundaries between what is Bharatanatyam and what is not. It interrogates the components of our collective imagination of the form. And while it challenges our notion of the technique and its limitations, it inevitably carries an imprint of the same
On November 29th, 2011, catch the world premiere of'Interpreting Tagore' by Astad Deboo and dancers. Two years after he last presented Breaking Boundaries in Mumbai, his experiment in "exploring space and body," as part of his mentoring of street children, Astad Deboo returns with a brand new work. Created in commemoration of the 150th birth anniversary of poet and Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore, entitled Interpreting Tagore, Deboo works once again with many of the same street children. But where his earlier work introduced the dancers to basics of focus, balance and the capabilities of the body, this one lifts them to new levels of achievement. Interpreting Tagore uses world music, movement and alternative theatre forms, like puppets and masks, as well as poetry recitation, to create the quintessential Astad Deboo experience at its multi-faceted best.
The festival draws to an end with Mango Cherry Mix by Navtej Johar and Hiroshi Miyamoto on November 30th, 2011. Mango Cherry Mix is a collaborative dance work choreographed and performed by Navtej Johar (India/USA) and Hiroshi Miyamoto (Japan/Canada). It is an interracial duet between two Asian men, who seek to explore their cultural selves - their differences and similarities - in the presence of a "familiar" other. Eliciting a sympathetic examination of the self by the other, the work seeks to gradually eliminate or diminish the power of an objectifying eye of the other. Traditionally, both cultures are rigidly structured around the philosophical and spiritual possibility of an ambiguous "emptiness," a shunya or Zen as a core experience; yet both employ different, if not diametrically opposed methods to evoke and protect this experience. Mango Cherry Mix tries to locate these cultural experiences within the modern context. Both dancers have lived in the East, as well as the West. Both still gravitate towards their respective "essential" cultural experiences, yet seek an autonomous balance as perpetual outsiders both home and abroad.
