Friday Review
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Taking tradition to the young
LEELA VENKATARAMAN
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The just-concluded Virasat-2007 schedule needed more tact to draw better mileage.
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Spic Macay has persevered through a long innings of taking our classical performing arts to the young. Sometimes the sheer length of time can make what should be vitally constructive a dull routine and this is where lies the constant need for Spic Ma
cay to reinvent its strategies to ensure optimum mileage from the painstaking endeavour of artistes and the organiser.
Witnessing two sessions of Virasat 2007, one felt that a closer look was needed while scheduling the events so as to marry the right art event with the right institution. At Modern School, Barakhamba, notwithstanding the ever enthusiastic school authorities, a hall full of restless children well past their lunch hour, fighting against very short attention spans, were predictably unresponsive to the Koodyattam lecture/demonstration of Margi Madhu followed by a recital of Nangyar Kootu.
Crestfallen, Madhu understandably felt unfulfilled. Perhaps the explanation of theory could have been shortened to move on to the performance earlier. This critic could not help feeling that Koodiyattam should be confined to the more senior institutions, for the completely uninitiated child may find the art too heavy unless brought up in a certain ambience, like Margi Madhu’s own less than five-year-old son Srihari, whose understanding of the art form is surprising. It is necessary for Spic Macay workers to carefully interact with the artistes and work out the format. Instead of initiating the youngsters, wrong chemistry can have the opposite effect, putting them completely off the art form.
Spellbound students
Very different was the Bharatanatyam lecture/demonstration at the NIFT, where a brilliantly articulate Malavika Sarukkai held the students spellbound and brought home to the raw students the wonder of Bharatanatyam. How the dancer designs space, how numbers in tala become poetry in the dancer’s rhythmic arrangements, how disciplined body moves create not just decorative movement but also narrate a story and how dance is a journey of interaction between art and the artiste, one inseparable from the other, were all stressed through succinct explanations followed by demonstrations.
Above all was the point driven home that the person watching dance needed to be more than just a passive viewer. Imaginative involvement was called for to understand the dance. While much depends on the concerned artiste, Spic Macay needs a constant re-look and rearranging of sessions to get the utmost out of renowned artistes’ efforts.
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Friday Review
Bangalore
Chennai and Tamil Nadu
Delhi
Hyderabad
Thiruvananthapuram
|
