NCPA Nakshatra Dance Festival

Ghana Baari Barikhata: Reflections in a Raindrop
Manipuri by Bimbavati Devi & Manipuri Nartanalaya

Shunya Se
Neo-Classical Dance by Vikram Iyengar & Ranan

Ghana Baari Barikhata is a traditional song sung in natasankirtanas in Manipur that describes the pangs of a nayika whose tears flow like rainwater, when she sees her nayaka. Monsoon has been the welcome season of fertility and of love. The monsoon songs eulogised their intermittent separations of the lovers as well as their eternal love as they swing together during Jhulan Yatra, and a bhakta’s love for god and his love for his devotees when his chariot is pulled with the cords of love during Rathayatra. The choreography is based on the traditional and ritualistic dance and music of Manipur that are performed during the festivals that are celebrated during the monsoon season.

From the abstract and intangible to the concrete and tangible, all existing together, distinct, yet closely connected: Shunya Se creates a reflection of this specificity, multiplicity and abstraction with and within the Kathak dance form and the Kathak-informed body. Journeying through Kathak grammar and principles of movement, Shunya Se simultaneously maintains, extends and challenges the assumptions Kathak is based on, and an all-pervading pulse, a secret, sometimes silent rhythm binds all this together – the elements of Kathak and the elemental universe – in a growing, morphing, evolving conversation created and spoken through this dancing body.

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