.::Song Of The Little Road::.

The Avant-Garde movie screenings at Gallery Beyond ended twenty minutes early in spite of the organizers thankfully repeating the first two movies by Man Ray which I’d missed on account of being late. I rushed to Eros to catch Bow Barracks Forever; expectedly I was told that the Preview Theatre was filled to capacity. I took a ride back to Kala Ghoda thinking I might have missed the Kathak performance, but might as well drink in on the later performances.

I arrived halfway through the Odissi performance by Ms. Sujata Mohapatra. It was the first classical performance I saw being held in an open-air theatre, so I had my reservations. But Mohapatra’s excellent performance soon dispelled all of them.

Wearing the white raiment and adornments of an Odissi dancer, she might as well have personified the quality of purity. Her dance was one energetic, controlled expression of sublime artistry; her countenance and hands in perfect tandem with the moods of the song being sung.

The music too was splendid, especially the mellifluous vocals (I think it was Bengali/Oriya folk though I’m not quite sure) and the mesmerizing violin and flute whose flourishes were as brilliant as the lithe movements of the dancer’s hands.

There was some clapping in the middle of the performance, but I think it was because the people thought the performance had ended when it was only the music and the dance getting grave and poignant, rather than due to any distaste or boredom. The performance was on the whole a very pleasant affair.

And now for something off the stage. I was standing on the farthest steps of the Amphitheatre, where all the equipment for coordinating sound and lights is arranged. There were two guys handling the stuff - one guy was working on the sounds (let’s call him the sound man) and the other on the lights (let’s call him the light guy). Apparently the light guy wasn’t quite upto it, so every time the lights on the stage had to be changed or the spotlight turned on, the sound man would shout instructions to the light guy, the light guy would fumble with the lights unsuccessfully, then the sound man would get to the lights in a jiffy and do the needful. This hilarious thing happened quite often.

The delay in changing the lights caused funny situations. Once during the performance, when the rains and the storm were supposed to have caused havoc (that’s what the song was about), the music had already turned clarion, the dancer’s face was filled with a show of fear, but the the lights remained as calm as ever while the light guy tried his best to change them. Finally, the sound man got exasperated, got out of his comfortable seat, and changed the lights, bringing the sense of storm on stage.

But Mohapatra was hardly bothered by it, indeed she must’ve not even noticed it so absorbing was her performance both to herself and the viewers. And for that she and the musicians got a huge round of applause in the end.