On Tuesday at UMMA’s Helmut Stern Auditorium, Dr. Ananda Shankar Jayant performed three pieces of Indian classical dance. The first piece, performed in the bharatanatyam style of dance, was an interpretation of a segment of the life of Rama, an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. The second piece, performed in the kuchipudi style of dance, was a scene from the life of Krishna, another incarnation of Vishnu. The third piece, a bharatanatyam performance with influences from other classical dance styles, was a portrayal of nine different emotions: anger, fear, wonder, disgust, fear, compassion, valor, love, and peace. All three dances were set to music incorporating traditional Indian elements, including flute, violin, drums, cymbals, and vocals (in the first two dances, the vocals were prayers or stories corresponding to the dance, and in the third it was simply syllables, analogous to the Western do-re-mi).
Her performance was the first professional Indian classical dance performance I have seen before, and it was simply spectacular. There were two elements in particular that mesmerized me most: her impeccably timed choreography, and her beautiful facial expressions and body language. Her movements coincided precisely with the music: for example, at one point she portrayed a bow being strung and subsequently breaking. To convey this, she stamped her feet four times, corresponding with four percussive beats in the music, perfectly evoking the sound of snapping wood. I have never noticed that kind of parallelism in the bharatanatyam performances I have seen before, and experiencing that connection between the dance and the music brought another dimension to the performance.
Her body language and facial expressions were similarly eye-opening. Bharatanatyam is a very abstract dance and uses hand gestures to symbolize nouns. Though Dr. Jayant explained the story of each piece and demonstrated some of the key hand gestures before she began, her facial expressions were instrumental in my ability to follow the storyline. For example, the first piece involved a scene in which Rama’s father was forced to send Rama and his brother to fight demons—her brokenhearted face was more touching than any other sorrowful scene I’ve ever seen enacted, and made me want to cry. Similarly, the first piece also included a marriage scene, during which she was portraying two characters at once: Rama and his wife Sita. She gracefully shifted from one persona to another, giving Sita demureness and rapture by keeping her eyes lowered and her head turned to one side, while giving Rama confidence and boldness by keeping her back erect and stance tall.
I could not believe how expressive the performance was. During the brief Q&A session after her performance, during which she talked about everything from the amount of time she spends practicing to her opinion on the role of politics in art, I asked her if she had choreographed all three pieces herself, and she told me she had. This explained the perfect alignment of the music and the choreography as well as the accessibility of her body language, and it only made me more awestruck at her thoughtfulness and thorough attention to detail. It was a fantastic performance, and I was simply bedazzled throughout.
