Dances From Temple Walls
The Bible of Hindu Dance
We try to see all the worthwhile live dance that comes to town, but we took special notice when we heard that Nrityagram would again be part of Cleveland Museum of Art’s VIVA! & Gala Performing Arts Series. We saw Nrityagram’s last performance at CMA and felt that they deserved all the critical and popular notice they’ve received. We arranged a phone interview with Surupa Sen, Artistic Director of Nrityagram.
CoolCleveland: Thanks for taking time to talk with us. Please tell us how Nrityagram came into being?
Surupa Sen: Nrityagram was started 20 years ago by a famous dancer, Protima Gauri Bedi, who, at the end of a fulfilling career, decided she wanted to give something back to the arts, especially to her own field of dance, Odissi.
She felt she needed to build a place where young people could come and not worry about how they would earn their living, or how they would pay their dues to the teachers, but simply live the life of an artist, live with their gurus, and imbibe not just technique but the very spirit of the teacher, because Indian classical dance is about imbibing an entire philosophy.
So she built Nrityagram, the dance village, a home of learning, and she invited her own guru, Kelucharan Mohapatra, the most famous guru of Odissi dance in India, recipient of the nation’s highest honors. I came as part of the first batch of students and we dedicated ourselves to perfecting the tradition. That was 20 years ago, and it has transformed my life as I suppose it has transformed the lives of my classmates.
Tell us more about Nrityagram, the dance village, as it exists today.
In the village of Nrityagram, we have naught to do but learn, live, imbibe, and understand the relationship between our dance and the environment around us. To that end we grow our own food, we learn what it means to be living in a space with people from other communities, other languages, other traditions, sharing our lives, sharing our art.
We understand that Nrityagram also teaches dance for members of the community.
We train about 300 children from the villages around us and all classes are offered free. The idea was to bring the classical traditions back to the roots where it’s mostly disappeared and where little children could experience the art, have fun with their own traditions, enjoy learning something which has depth and meaning as well as striving for some form of excellence.
One of the dancers you will see in the concert at Gartner Auditorium, Pavithra Reddy, has been taken from that program. She has chosen to become a professional dancer.
We have found over the last 20 years that this community program has made the most astounding transformational changes in these children’s lives. Somehow dance seems to be giving them a confidence, a sense of togetherness, a sense of identity. Not necessarily do they become dancers, but it has had an impact upon everything they do in life. Even in the village, making a better marriage, because you know who you want, what you want.
We gather that Nrityagram looks back at tradition but also looks forward to contemporary artists and contemporary ideas.
Yes, I believe that one has to have a very strong foundation, and that foundation lies in our tradition because it defines who we are. But because I am a product of this modern society, I have to be able to take the language that has been offered to me by my ancestors or my guru and tell my own story, because otherwise I can never make it my own. The attempt is to make a balance between my tradition and who I am now.
We understand that there are seven classical dance traditions in India. Which of them does Nrityagram study and perform?
We teach only Odissi. We started off trying to do all 7 classical styles, but we found that the teachers were not prepared to give us the kind of time that we wanted from them. They all had schools of their own everywhere else. So we decided to just make it Odissi, and I’ve committed myself to that for the past 18 years, creating another generation of dancers and fulfilling the vision of my guru.
Tell us about Odissi dance.
Odissi is a temple dance tradition about 2000 years old. But it has been revived barely 80 years ago.
So Odissi is not a continuous transmission. What materials do contemporary Indian classical dancers have to draw on in recreating the Odissi style?
Odissi has an astounding amount of material. For one thing, in India we are all based in the tradition of the Natya Shastra, the bible for Indian classical dancers, a text on stagecraft that everybody follows. There’s so much information in it that I think it would take more than a lifetime for each of us to do justice to what is available.
Besides that, in the state of Orissa, especially in its capital city, there are 3000 temples, and each of those temples have walls that are replete with astounding sculptural movements of dance. A lot of Orissi has been recreated from the temple walls, which are like dictionaries of dance, though ‘dictionaries’ doesn’t even touch the tip of the iceberg.
So the gurus have threaded together the written materials, two existing dance traditions, traditional music materials, and the sculptures on temple walls, and are recreating this astounding dance form. Because it is so old, Odissi dance has a lot of material, but because it is so new in the way that it has been rediscovered, it has fantastic possibilities. It is the most perfect dance tradition to be in at the moment because it gives me so much to be able to do with it. I think Odissi is the most powerful dance tradition we have in India today.
We gather that Odissi dance has always been performed almost exclusively by women.
Actually, that’s not true. Most of the gurus are men and a tremendous number of the dancers in Odissi today are male. We have male dancers in Nrityagram who are training; they’re not ready right now but they’re training. It’s harder for men to be performers in India, because they’re the main bread-earners and dance is not a very profitable profession anywhere in the world.
Odissi dance is very, very sensuous but I believe it is not gender-specific at all. Inherently, in the Indian dance tradition, we have to be able to mold both our male and female energies. Men can dance as well as women and there are a lot of male dancers in Odissi. The only distinction is between good dancers and bad.
How many dancers are in your Cleveland performance?
In this production we are three dancers. Originally we were five but one girl had an injury and the second girl had gotten married. In any case, the production was originally designed for three people. The three who have come are all soloists and have been working together for 18 years, now.
Will the music in your Cleveland performance be live or recorded?
Ours is live. We have one singer, one violinist, one flautist, and one percussionist.
We’re looking forward to your concert. Thank you.
Thank you. Have a good day.
Cleveland Museum of Art’s VIVA! & Gala performing arts series presents Nrityagram Dance Ensemble on Fri 3/11 at 7:30 p.m. in the museum’s Gartner Auditorium. Tickets $39, $35; CMA members $38, $34. Group and student rates are available. Pending availability, students can purchase “Pay What You Can” tickets at the door for any VIVA! & Gala performance. Tickets are available through the museum’s online box office at http://ClevelandArt.org or phone at 216-421-7350 or 888-CMA-0033.
[Top photo by S. Motta]
From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas. Elsa and Vic are both longtime Clevelanders. Elsa is a landscape designer. She studied ballet as an avocation for 2 decades. Vic has been a dancer and dance teacher for most of his working life, performing in a number of dance companies in NYC and Cleveland. They write about dance as a way to learn more and keep in touch with the dance community. E-mail them at vicnelsaATearthlink.net.
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