Pandit Chitresh Das: Story Cycle
In the beginning there was the story—or perhaps the storyteller. Millennia ago, in Northern India, persons known as kathakas traveled between villages and temples performing religious and historic tales. They were their own accompanists, using an array of gestures and facial expressions plus all the vocal drama that tone and cadence can supply. Their job at its simplest was to summon an audience and lead it through each twist and nuance of the uplifting narrative. Yet the gestures—some in time codified as mutha, the Indian dance language of hand movements—and the vivid facial expressions, assumed and replaced almost like masks, were important as a barrier as well as an invitation. They signaled that the audience was entering a realm sometimes called sacred, where unexpected transformations occur. Men might speak as women; women might speak as gods. In this world, the teller is indistinguishable from the telling. Kathak—the single word—refers to both.
When choreographer-performer-teacher Pandit Chitresh Das brings his San Francisco -based company to Montalvo for an open rehearsal on August 30 and an evening of dance and discussion on September 29, they will be performing excerpts from a new work, Sita Haren, which draws on one of the oldest sources of Kathak storytelling: the Ramayana. One of the two great Sanskrit epics that have molded Indian culture, the Ramayana existed (much like Homer’s Odyssey) as a scattering of traditional tales before the Hindu poet Valmiki gave it cohesive shape in the 4th century BC. It is both a romance in which a popular prince, Rama, and his wife Sita, are forced into a lengthy exile by a scheming relative, and an allegory in which Rama and Sita, as incarnations of the gods Vishnu and Lakshmi, serve as models of right conduct despite a harrowing series of trials and deceptions.
Although the story is age-old, Das’s treatment will not be. His previous works have incorporated the tap dancing of American master, Jason Samuels Smith, and the devotional chanting of yoga. Like any other language, Kathak has survived its ability to adapt to change. The stories of Sita Haren are part of Hindu scripture, but the costumes the dancers wear and the spinning turns they execute derive from the Muslim influences entering India in the middle ages. Forbidden by the Koran from viewing images of gods and religious personages, Muslim rulers favored dances that were more technically oriented—a focus preserved today in the regional style centering around Jaipur. What’s meant by “technical” becomes vivid watching Das’s company dance with pounds of bells attached to cloths wrapped around each leg. The percussive jingle, accentuated by the slap of his fast-moving bare feet, create shifting—and mesmerizing—polyrhythms.
Another unexpected transformation came with the British. By the 19th century Kathak had become one of several classical disciplines performed by a geisha-like class of highly trained women. The line between artist and courtesan was not always clear, and the colonial governors—spurred by missionaries —loudly condemned both the dancers and the dance. It therefore fell to men, including Shambhu Maharaj, father of Das’s teacher and a famous exponent of Kathak’s most expressive, improvisational story-telling style, to preserve the tradition for subsequent generations.
Das has said that his aim in Kathak is “to bring together a diversity of generations,...styles, and genders, and to demonstrate that perhaps there is room for all.” That hesitant “perhaps” is more understandable after reading Maharaj’s fulminations against technical dance and choreography. But as the Ramayana makes clear, arguments between tradition and innovation, or male and female outlooks, have been with Kathak—and human society—from the beginning. Balance, as Das’s whirling dancers know, doesn’t just happen. One step leads to another.
