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Odissi dancers plan festival on August 16

BHUBANESWAR: Forgotten in her homeland, the late legendary Odissi danseuse Padma Shri Sanjukta Panigrahi is being fondly remembered in neighbouring West Bengal.

The Odissi Dancers’ Forum of Kolkata has announced to host Sraddhanjali (homage), an Odissi dance festival at Gyan Manch in Kolkata on August 16 as a tribute to the legend who, along with her celebrated Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra, had established Odissi as a major Indian classical dance form globally through regular performances spanning over decades.

“Both Guru Kelucharan and Sanjukta Panigrahi had shared a special bond with the audience of the Kolkata city who always admired and respected them a lot.

Almost all the senior Odissi dancers of the city had the fortune to work under them.

We have already hosted a festival in honour of Guru Kelucharan and this time we decided to host another for Sanjukta,” forum’s founder-member and festival coordinator Rina Jana told The Hindu over telephone from Kolkata.

The festival will feature solo and group performances, says Rina. The forum has invited two well-known Odissi gurus from Orissa -- Bichitrananda Swain and Naba Kishore Mishra -- to perform as soloists in the festival.

Both were trained under Sanjukta, it was learnt. Besides, Debamitra Sengupta and Rina Jana, both senior dancers from Kolkata who also learnt from the doyen, would perform solo.

Budding Odissi dancer Satabdi Mallick, who was the winner of the Parampara Award (for the year 2009) instituted by the forum to encourage young dancers, would also perform as a soloist, the festival coordinator said and added that disciples of Dipanwita Roy, Nilanjana Mukherjee, Arundhati Roy, Giridhari Nayak and Poushali Mukherjee would stage group presentations in the festival.

The forum was founded in 2001 to foster fraternity among the Odissi dancers community of Kolkata and for the past four years it has been regularly hosting two annual dance festivals -- one in January for the young and the other in August for the seniors.

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