Wednesday, February 17, 2010

For Pina... in Hyderabad Photos by Mohammed Yousuf (The Hindu)





For Pina... Review in The Hindu



Site and insight

LEELA VENKATARAMAN

Jayachandran Palazhy's ‘For Pina' provided great visual aesthetics.

When Pina Bausch passed away on June 30 last year, the world of Modern Dance lost one of its leading influences which changed the face of how one looked at dance. Entering, in 1955, the Folkwangschule in Essen then directed by Kurt Jooss, one of the founders of German Expressionist Dance, Pina Bausch became the artistic director of the then Wuppertal Opera Ballet which was later renamed Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. Her intense productions were mainly built round human relationships and male-female interaction — a running theme through her work. Between 1979 and 2008, Pina toured India three times.

In memory of this Modern Dance icon, a site-specific promenade performance at Goethe Institute Max Mueller Bhavan, along with a film installation and live music conceived by Jayachandran Palazhy, artistic director of Attakalari Centre for Movement Arts, Bangalore, attracted a number of theatre and dance enthusiasts. Called “For Pina”, Jayachandran's work, which moved from site to site in the Max Mueller Bhavan compound, brought alive the architecture of the site as nothing has ever done before. With dancing on top of and in between short pillars raised side by side, with light and shade effects providing an added dimension, the work had a breathtakingly unique start before moving on to the roof top. Using the fence wall and the cat walk, dancers, alone and in groups, created striking freezes — the dark green of the tall palms reaching up to the roof contrasting with the stark red costumes of the dancers and the lights, all providing visual aesthetics of a high order.

Poised and excellent movers, the dancers never faltered for balance. Action then came to the ground level with the long veranda with large white columns, the portico and the cemented driveway being used as the performance site. Dancers used the full space, their movements at times full of joyous freedom and at others frenetic with excitement as they went up and down the columns. Here and in the next site along the driveway, movement was accompanied by rhythm on the mizhavu — the copper drum — played by V.K. Hariharan of Kalamandalam. The husky sound of the drum beats and the dance in the special sonic environment with cutting edge music by Lorenzo Brusci and Luca Canciello made for an unusual music/dance blend, the language of body movement of the dancers influenced by physical and performing art traditions of India.

Moving scene

The best bit was when Jayachandran danced alone with the “Yoyo”, the sonic module, and then merged into the video patterns on the screen at the back and slowly laid himself down and faded out, disappearing along with the installations — everything there one minute and vanishing into nothingness the next. There was something very moving about this scene without there being any narrative and that the entire audience felt the same was seen in the impromptu applause greeting the end of the scene.

The last bit on the back veranda of the building saw dancers in pairs, and here the male/female duets just through movement evoked feelings of easy friendliness, affection, tenderness, attraction, rejection, violence and what have you. When the female dancers had made an exit into the hall with the closed doors in the rear, with only male dancers on the stage, the final scene with the women framed against the doors that they had opened, was very dramatic. Perhaps this scene more than any other showed the direct influence of Pina Bausch.

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Date:12/02/2010 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/fr/2010/02/12/stories/2010021250430200.htm

For Pina... Review in Hindu

Dancing the contemporary beat

The dance tribute to Pina Bausch drew stuff from diverse dictionaries

Five men pressed flat against the walls of a distant tomb, unplastering themselves in a wash of pale red light to draw fleeting shapes with their limbs on its facets, before melting into the darkness. The lights then found six women in red, swaying gently, slowly, onto the stone platform of Muhammed Quli Qutub Shah's mausoleum.

So began For Pina, a site-specific promenade performance at the Qutb Shahi tombs, co-produced by the Attakkalari Center, Bangalore and the Goethe Institute in homage to the late German choreographer, Pina Bausch.

The choreography evoked, drew from and then took off from Bausch, to explore a dynamic all its own – making this a far more interesting tribute to the legend. So there were no fields of carnations, no pools of water, and no wooden chairs. Instead, the domed mausoleum of a long-dead Sultan rose from the ground in the dusk, as much a performer as any dancer was, softly lit, darkly shadowed and magnificently regal.

The performance led the audience all around the tomb, its segments set against different walls and terraces. In one of them, the women emerged on a ledge like a row of mermaids on a rock, arching sensually against and away from each other. On another elevated terrace, translucent black sheets billowing in the wind were splashed with bluish-white streaks of light as a dancer moved behind them… and then the spectre of a white-robed Pina glided across it all, her arms stretched up into the air, ephemeral. The space defined the dancer, the dancer defined the space.

The haunting soundscape swelled and withdrew under the night sky from speakers that wouldn't look out of place in a modern art exhibition. That every one of the twelve dancers had contributed to the choreography was evident in their individual expression. There were phrases unique to each, which then formed new strings of movement when two or more dancers came together. It was an expression of the self and an exploration of the other -- joyful, contemplative, intense and personal.

Each of these dancers has had training in Indian classical forms, martial arts and various other international dance styles. The choreography rose from this foundation and drew from it while speaking in a modern tongue. To call it ‘Indo-Western fusion' would be to reduce it to a random coupling of idioms, when in fact it is the emergence of something different and more than the parts. The vocabulary may have been drawn from diverse dictionaries, but the phrasing was unique to the contemporary dancer in India today. Jayachandran Palazhy and his dancers speak this language beautifully.

It seems rather unfair that less that 300 people could be accommodated at the Qutub Shahi Tombs last Tuesday evening. For Pina brought to the city a confident exhibition of modern dance and environmental sound design, while reintroducing us to the majesty of the Seven Tombs.

If ever there was an argument for productions to have longer runs in every city, this would be it!

Printable version | Feb 18, 2010 10:24:22 AM | http://beta.thehindu.com/arts/dance/article101272.ece

Attakkalari's Chronotopia in Sweden

Attakkalari’s Chronotopia in Germany and Sweden – March 2010

Sunday – March 14th 2010 – 8:00 PM - Kassel, Germany: International Dance Festival, at Staasts Theater, Schauspielhaus

Wednesday - March 17th 2010 – 7:30 PM - Vara, Sweden: Varakonserthus

Fri – Sat – Sun – March 26th – 28th 2010 – 8:00 PM - Frankfurt, Germany - Künstlerhaus Mousonturm