Home & + | Search
Featured Categories: Special Focus | Performance Reviews | Previews | DanceSpots | Arts and Education | Press Releases
Join ExploreDance.com's email list | Mission Statement | Copyright notice | The Store | Calendar | User survey | Advertise
Click here to take the ExploreDance.com user survey.
Your anonymous feedback will help us continue to bring you coverage of more dance.
SPOTLIGHT:
SPECIAL FOCUS
ExploreDance.com (Magazine)
Web
Other Search Options
Paul Ben-Itzak
Performance Reviews
Previews
Special Focus
Indian
Jacob's Pillow
United States
Massachusetts
Beckett, MA

Shantala Shivalingappa

by Paul Ben-Itzak
May 6, 2010
Jacob's Pillow
358 George Carter Road
Beckett, MA 01223
413 243 0745
Slave to the Rhythm
I first caught Shantala Shivalingappa in her solo "Shiva Ganga," receiving its U.S. premiere 7 - 11 July 2010 at Jacob's Pillow, on a fall evening in Paris that started with a Belgian man from Gent singing from the piano in his van and ended with a man from who know's where chasing me down a darkened street in Montmartre not far from the Moulin Rouge. In between there was Shivalingappa at the Theatre de la Ville aux Abbesses, an Indian dancer in the Kuchipudi mode, offering intricate, precise movement, intent on giving thanks for the simple blessings still ours for the asking even as the world hovers on the precipice.

At that point in my critic's life — 2004 — I was avoiding concerts in the traditional Indian mode, not because they weren't my cup of tea (especially if it's chai tea!) but because I didn't feel my training as a critic matched these artists' training in the various forms that come from that country. I made an exception in the case of Shivalingappa simply because she had knocked my socks off in Pina Bausch's "Nefes" ("Breath"). In addition to the precision and articulation in her fingers, which we know from other Indian forms, Shivalingappa added — in her Tanztheater Wuppertal appearance — flight.

This also turned out to be the case in the Paris premiere of "Shiva Ganga," an evening of choreography in the Kuchipudi school or style, accompanied by live music. (Most of the choreography was by Shivalingappa, except for the opening sun worship, by Master Vempati Chinna Satyam, and a dance inspired by the god Ganesha by Kishore Mosalikanti.) Landing on plié — ouch! — or ending the evening simply spinning lyrically, back and head hunched, in a small circle — she was feather light.

But what stood out in "Shiva Ganga" was the mutual respect and relationship between music and dance. Much as in a flamenco concert, the most intriguing dynamic going on here was not necessarily the one confined to the dancer-choreographer's body, but the one circulating between her and the ensemble of five musicians, including two soloist singers, a flautist, a percussionist and someone (like his instrument, unidentified in the program as far as I could see) on a string-like instrument that produced the underlying drone.

But by far the heart of the evening, rhythmically, musically, and choreographically arrived with the extended play "Talamelam." If you've listened to UK- based Indian fusion artist and pop star Sheila Chandra — specifically, "Speaking in Tongues I" and "Speaking in Tongues II" from "Weaving My Ancestors' Voices" on Real World — or seen Sean Curran's 1999 "Symbolic Logic," set to remixes of the Chandra recordings, you know the type of rhythm excursion we were taken on here. In fact, as Chandra points out in her liner notes, the sound and syllables of the musical composition relate not just to the mrdingam and tabla instruments, but "draw upon the patterns of rhythm used in South Indian dance."

In her program notes for the evening's musical and choreographic riff on this theme, Shivalingappa notes, "If melody is the body of Indian music, rhythm is its heart. In India, one says: 'Melody is the mother, and rhythm is the father' of the music. It's the same for dance. The rhythmic system, tala, is an independent discipline, with a complex and subtle technique, finely developed. In effect, the innate mathematical sense of the Indian spirit endows it with a great rigor."

All forms of classical Indian dance have pursued the tala rhythm, each developing its personal language, Shivalingappa explains. For the form she's schooled in — Kuchipudi — these investigations take the form of rhythmic variations in the voice and on the percussion instruments, a game or conversation in the rhythmic language, and a conversation which finishes with a dialogue between the dancer and the mrdingam player. Or, as she puts it, "The beating of the feet respond to the virtuosity of the fingers." This conversation gives the dancer the opportunity to demonstrate the different positions of the Kuchipudi form.

"Talamelam," the segment in "Shiva Ganga" which featured this conversation, began with a musical section created and directed by Savitry Nair and navigated by the rhythmic creations of B.P. Haribabu. Like the vowels between the consonants that book-ended his emissions, this pure music section was elongated — not just a musical introduction to a dance but a work of virtuosity in its own right. When Shivalingappa entered, the responses in her feet — as elsewhere in the program — demonstrated that for this form, anyway, all muscles and landing surfaces of the feet are called into service. Sometimes she balances on the balls, sometimes on the toes; sometimes her feet are simply flat. At other junctures, she arches both feet while maintaining the balls and toes on the ground, then bending at the waist and looking up mischievously at the musicians. In fact, it's this personal regard — toward her collaborators in this section, and in winking frontal asides to the audience throughout the program — that make dance like this such a tonic in a European environment too-often dominated by disinterested post-modern dance in which the performers seem to try to make like they don't know the audience is there.

Before I saw this dance, I was impressed by the musicality of Curran's effort to the similar Chandra chants, but there's a difference between dancing on the surface of the music and engaging it's soul and burrowing into its sonic meaning, and Shivalingappa and the musicians taught me that.

The only miss, for me, came later, when Shivalingappa squeezed her feet into and balanced on a wobbly disk-shaped basket at center stage; the awkward way in which she shuffled it forward was the one note lacking grace in the entire evening, a 'prop' dance we could have done without.

Besides the Jacob's Pillow gig, Shantala Shivalingappa is also offering a kuchipudi recital through May 8 at the Theatre de la Ville - aux Abbesses, as part of an Indian dance, music, and puppet festival which also includes Akram Khan's new solo Gnosis, May 11 - 15 at the Theatre de la Ville - Sarah Bernhardt .
Shantala Shivalingappa Photo courtesy of Jacob's Pillow

Shantala Shivalingappa
Photo courtesy of Jacob's Pillow

Photo © & courtesy of C.P. Satyajit

Search for articles by
Performance Reviews, Places to Dance, Fashion, Photography, Auditions, Politics, Health