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THE ARTS: BHUKHAMB
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| Celebration of the body and the
incredible use of space: (below right) Daksha on the malkhamb with
Rajesh and Esha; (above left) the sinuous sensuality of Anil and Esha
in a sequence; and (above) coiled around a rope, Esha hangs upside
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The Dance Of Earth, Body & Sky
The supple sensuality of Esha Sharvani announces
her as the future face of contemporary Indian dance.
By S. Kalidas
Sinuous, supple
and all of sixteen, She leaps, she bends, she contorts, she slithers,
she flies. A sizzling bundle of molten flesh, she spans the ground and
the skies in a breathtaking sweep. As Esha Sharvani storms the Indian
dance scene with an unconscious electric sensuality, she leaves her audiences
gasping. Here is a vital versatility that can only be found in youth.
She raises gymnastics to sheer art. At last, a new star is born on the
Indo-Australian dance firmament who-given a fair chance-may well mature
to become an international sensation.
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The tactile magic of body, form
and face: Daksha with Anil and Rajesh (left); Esha frames her face
with her limbs
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So what if the fuddy-duddies grate their gums
and cry foul? Dance lovers first got a taste of Esha last year when she
appeared in her dancer-choreographer mother Daksha Sheth's work, Sarpagati.
If hardened dance buffs reserved their applause then, last week they were
shamed into irrelevance when the Natya Ballet Centre presented her in
Bhukhamb-the Circus of Earth and Sky over two consecutive evenings in
Delhi.
Comfortably cocooned in staid inertia, the dance
caucus had first gone into shocked denial. Now, the second time round,
they can only carp: "It may be amazing acrobatics, but where is the
dance?" But the Sheth-Devisarro family (Esha's Australian father
Devisarro is a musician-light director) is unperturbed. "We want
to expand not only the confines of dance but also the public appeal of
artistic performance," says Devisarro. At a volatile Indo-German
dance interface in Mumbai last month, young Esha silenced her sexagenarian
critics with a terse remark, "My performance is the future of dance,
not its late lamented past."
Out of the mouth of babes? Maybe. But all future
has a present and all present a past. The present is the Daksha Sheth
Dance Company situated on the banks of Vellayani lake, some 10 km from
Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. The home-studio-school, set amidst 100 coconut,
mango and mahogany trees, was till recently an island of idyll, devoid
of rudimentary civilisational amenities. "After five years,"
Daksha informs, "we just got electricity last week."
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Family as a unit: Devisarro and
Daksha make unconventional parents by including Esha and son Tao
in all their activities
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The past too has been eventful, if not quite
as flamboyant. Daksha was trained by eminent gurus, including the brilliantly
innovative Kathak dancer Kumudini Lakhya and the classicist doyen Birju
Maharaj. In the early 1980s she met Krishnachandra Naik, the low-profile
genius of Mayurbhanj Chhau, in Delhi and decided to learn that folk form
as well. "I was immediately cast as a traitor to Kathak," she
recalls. If she lost out on the camaraderie of the classical coterie,
she gained an unconventional friend in Devisarro, who was studying Dhrupad
and playing the flute in the backlanes of Bengali Market. The two paired
up and moved to Vrindavan to research temple music and the dance traditions
of haveli sangeet and raas. Later, at Protima Bedi's Nrityagram, Daksha
interfaced with the martial art tradition of kalaripayettu.
It has taken Daksha and Devisarro two decades
of eclecticism to evolve a vocabulary which attempts to address contemporaneity
in the "de-culturalised" language of mind-body-movement. It
is not a pretty or ethnic embrace of self-conscious modernity as done
by the preceding generation. In fact it might well be rejected by the
mandarins of the western festival circuit too as they would not find it
"Indian" enough.
But then only those who dare to challenge the
status quo can dream of charting unknown paths. Esha is the child of those
dreams.
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