REVIEW: Gods in Love
Cleveland Thyagaraja Festival
Reviewed by Elsa Johnson & Victor Lucas
We can’t claim to know much about Indian music and dance, but some of the first recorded music we purchased — way back in the ’60s — was by Ravi Shankar and we’ve always enjoyed the Indian dance that has come to Cleveland.
So it should come as no surprise that we jumped at a recent opportunity to attend Cleveland Thyagaraja Festival. The dance-drama that we watched featured 11 Bharathanatyam dancers and five musicians. The story was a 17th century text sung in Tamil but contemporary music and choreography and an English-language prologue made the action abundantly clear.
The story followed familiar lines. The god Murugan wished to marry the goddess Valli but she rejected his advances. Like many a god the world over, the persistent Murugan then transformed himself into a hunter, a tree, and an old man in an effort to win Valli, who after long hesitation reluctantly agreed to marriage. Like ever so many story ballets, things ended with a wedding celebration and like story ballets, it wasn’t the story so much as how the story was told.
Jewel-toned costumes indicated by their color which god each dancer was representing, rendering instantly clear what might otherwise have been a welter of incarnations and avatars, transformations and trouser roles. The dancers were highly skilled whether engaged in their precise, formal steps or mimed dialogues. Thus we see Valli and her girlfriends dancing in unison and then engaged in girlish games. Is that blind man’s bluff? Do they build sand castles and giggle over phallic towers?
Our favorite transformation was the old man, a hilarious old lecher. All was clear from the mime. “Oh kind young goddess, help me to the water; fan me; massage my aching shoulders.” Finally Valli had enough. “Buzz off, old man,” was totally clear without super titles.
Cleveland State University’s Waetjen Auditorium is notorious for its lack of stage dressing and proper wings and, although CTF seemed to have brought in some additional lighting instruments, we’d have to describe the performance we saw as over-reliant on general, non-theatrical lighting. Nevertheless, those gods and goddesses had a way of making an entrance, bringing their own light it seemed.
Cleveland Thyagaraja Festival, 12 days long this year, comes every year around Easter time. Their website provides schedule and ticket information and in 2013 we hope to help you sort it all out with a preview article.
We watched Valli Bharatham, a dance-drama, at Waetjen Auditorium on Sat 4/14/12.
From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas. Elsa and Vic are both longtime Clevelanders. Elsa is a landscape designer. She studied ballet as an avocation for 2 decades. Vic has been a dancer and dance teacher for most of his working life, performing in a number of dance companies in NYC and Cleveland. They write about dance as a way to learn more and keep in touch with the dance community. E-mail them at vicnelsaATearthlink.net.