Celebrated dancer honours her sister
Kalanidhi International Festival of Indian Dance (out of 4) Until April 2 at Fleck Dance Theatre, 207 Queens Quay W. Kalanidhifinearts.org or 416-973-400
There was a multiply poignant moment during Tuesday night’s opening of the latest Kalanidhi International Festival of Indian Dance.
Menaka Thakkar, celebrated across Canada as an exponent of both traditional and more contemporary expressions of Indian classical dance, reprised a solo based on a climactic scene from that ancient Hindu epic the Mahabharata.
As interpreted by Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, on the night before a pivotal battle between the rival Pandavas and Kauravas, Kunti the Pandava queen reveals her identity to the Kauravas warrior Karna, the bastard son Kunti had abandoned at birth. Kunti pleads unsuccessfully for Karna to join his Pandava kin.
This dramatic incident is in itself deeply touching, even more so as told through mimed gesture by the 75year-old Thakkar. She is no longer the spry dancer who dazzled audiences with her physical virtuosity through the 1970s and ’80s, but what Thakkar can convey by a tilt of the head, the flash of the eye or an expansive sweep of the hand is spellbinding.
And then there was the disembodied voice of Thakkar’s sister, Sudha Khandwani, eloquently narrating the words given to Kunti by Tagore; except Khandwani died of heart failure last November in Mumbai at age 83
Her benevolent presence hovered over the proceedings in more than voice alone. Kalanidhi and its festivals were Khandwani’s cherished cultural child and this year’s six-day event, the 16th since the festival launched in 1993, directed by Thak- kar, is very much a memorial and tribute to Khandwani’s achievements and legacy.
Sudha Thakkar was already a multidisciplinary artistic trailblazer in India before settling in Toronto in 1971 with her partner and husband-to-be, visual artist Abdullah Khandwani. She sought through her Kalanidhi Fine Arts organization to foster a broad awareness of Indian dance in its varied classical forms while fiercely championing its contemporary, even experimental evolution.
The festivals have offered Toronto audiences a chance to see many of Indian dance’s most celebrated exponents along with emerging artists. More recently, Kalanidhi has embraced the possibilities of new technology to disseminate its performances online, including the current festival, and to public locations through live streaming.
Sadly, Tuesday’s poorly attended, more than three-hour opening performance was not the most auspicious. A rambling half-hour speech by Rasesh Thakkar is hardly the most enticing way to begin an evening. The performances, though, were illuminated by some incandescent dancing, especially that of India’s Sujata Mohapatra, a vivid exponent of the Odissi genre of Indian classical dance.
The lion’s share and closing piece of the evening, advertised as “live streamed from New Delhi in real time,” was in. fact a video recording of a stage performance of Game of Dice, a condensed rendering, complete with integrated video effects, of the Mahabharata by Indian choreographer Santosh Nair’s company, Sadhya.
Nair, who in 2010 made a work for Lata Pada’s Mississauga-based Sampradaya Dance Creations, is in the vanguard of contemporary Indian dance, giving a contemporary spin to a mixture of his own traditional Kathakali heritage and the explosive, martial arts athleticism of the folk/ tribal-based form Mayurbhanj Chhau.
Given the story, Game of Dice is all terribly macho and the shaming of Draupadi, one of the Mahabharata’s central female characters, is unsettlingly, almost gleefully depicted. It might explain why people started sneaking out of the theatre before the end.
Still, there’s lots more to come with a staggering range of artists and styles before the festival closes on Sunday; enough to confirm Sudha Khandwani’s conviction that Indian dance has a hallowed past and dynamic future.