An Enchanted Evening of Indian Dance Under a Turner Sky

Monday’s event closed with Parul Shah’s display of contemporary Kathak, in which the virtuosically rhythmic turns of the traditional genre alternated with an entirely modern, often expressionist, use of the torso and limbs. Her solo, superbly married to live music by Trina Basu (violin), Jake Charley (cello) and Narendra Budhakar (tabla), became an internal dialogue about tradition and modernity, as well as a statement of the resilience of women.

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Tuesday’s revelations included Dimple Saikia’s exemplification of the Sattriya style. Her demonstration was charmingly communicative (how adorably she enacted the boy-god Krishna’s inability to refrain from stealing cow-milk), and with long, varied phrases she seamlessly joined mime gestures with dance steps. This was ideal advocacy for Sattriya, which derives from the northeastern Indian state of Assam. I’ve never been able to see enough good Sattriya to sense its potential; Ms. Saikia has made me a convert.

Viraja and Shyamjith Kiran, dancing the Bharatanatyam genre of their native Tamil Nadu, in southeastern India, made its rhythms and gestures vivid on both evenings. Facing across the harbor, they opened their arms with sculptural firmness toward the Statue of Liberty: a perfect Independence Day moment for us all.

Also dancing on both evenings was Kalanidhi Dance from Washington D.C. This superb company bases its style in Kuchipudi, the rich genre from Andhra Pradesh (just north of Tamil Nadu); it has constantly beautiful choreography by Anuradha Nehru and Chitra Kalyandurg. The developing harmonies of the all-female septet, “Why We Dance: Community,” with which it concluded Tuesday evening, to traditional music, were ravishing. Quite as marvelous was the company’s dance to music by Félicien David from the French 19th-century “Indian” opera “Lalla Rookh”: this included two picturesque tableaus that swayed, as if in the wind.

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Many other moments stand out. Ashwini Ramaswamy (based in Bharatanatyam) fluttering a fanlike hand in a descending arc; the undulating perfect arcs of Sruthi Mohan’s torso and arms and the eloquent beauty of her changing facial expressions (in the genre of Mohiniyattam, from Kerala); the fantastically vigorous brio of Aakansha Maheshwari and Malini Taneja in Rajasthani folk dance.

It cannot be said too often that all other dancers can learn from watching the Indian forms: the power and subtlety of gesture, the focus of eyes, the complexity of phrase. Indian dance, though often addressing the divine and the formal, is also superlatively human. These were enriching, heartening, generous performances, movingly infused with the modesty that asserts humanity is only one part of the great order of things.

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