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