‘We love our art! It gives us so much joy. That’s what we love the most. That’s what we want to share.”
Rachna Nivas and Rina Mehta are on the line from San Francisco, taking questions about “Speak,” the Leela Dance Collective’s one-of-a-kind tour de force coming this week to the Castle Theater at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center. Both Indian Americans, they practice the ancient, endangered and thoroughly mesmerizing Indian dance form known as Kathak. Good luck telling their voices apart.
Video of the 15-minute finale or even the two-minute trailer posted on the MACC website offers ample promise the 90-minute show will deliver in spades. The “collective” label suggests more bodies than the four we see, but those four dance up a storm, each a star in her own right. Complementing Mehta and Nivas will be Josette Wiggan-Freund, filling in for Michelle Dorrance, and Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, divas from the faraway realm of American tap.
Classy as well as gorgeous, the gold-trimmed white costumes, no two alike, help the eye appreciate the natures of two distinct dance worlds. The Kathakas, in fitted bodices and flaring ankle-length skirts over leggings, capture a viewer’s eye with the majestic, sculpted movement of their arms and upper bodies, with their swirling turns and arrow-sharp stop-action poses. The hoofers, in leggings plus tunics cut to midthigh, fling their limbs with a zinging abandon.
“Barefoot, we can’t do the light things they do with their shoes,” says Mehta. “We’re lifted in the upper body, but at the same time we’re very deep into the earth, very grounded.” The stylistic contrast between the disciplines of tap and Kathak is as radical as the contrast between women’s steps and men’s in a spicy Magyar folk dance like the czardas — yet also as compatible.
“We don’t call this show ‘fusion,’” says Nivas. “When we’re on tour, Rina and I take Michelle and Dormeshia’s master classes, and they take ours. But in performance we don’t put on tap shoes, and Michelle and Dormeshia don’t put on ankle bells. We’re all on the purist side, but we embrace our differences and similarities.”
Which brings us, none too soon, to the element of sound. “Speak” involves live music from a classical Indian trio of sitar, vocals and tabla as well as a modern-jazz combo consisting of piano, drums and bass. But the defining acoustic element is the magic carpet of sound the dancers roll out for themselves in layers every step of the way.
Like flamenco, both Kathak and tap fall under the heading of “percussive dancing,” inseparable from the nonstop staccato or rolling thunder of footwork that is often too quick for the eye yet never for the ear. For a hoofer, tap shoes are musical instruments. So are the bare feet in Kathak, along with their “ghungroo,” or cuffs of jangling ankle bells.
“Oh, yes,” says Mehta. “Our bells are very special to us. We actually string our own. We use them and think of them the way a sitar player will treat the sitar.”
At its origins, Kathak was a medium for enacting epics of gods and heroes, with an emphasis on dramatic gesture and facial expression. “In fact, ‘katha’ means story,” says Nivas. “In the first version of ‘Speak,’ we included a dance that told a story, but in the end we decided not to touch it. The classic aspect we focus on is rhythm. Our approach to rhythm is very different from the approach in tap. Western rhythm is linear. For us, rhythm is cyclical. Sometimes we’ll work with a 16-beat cycle. Sometimes, for extra fun, we’ll work with a 9-1/2-beat cycle.”
After a while, a linear Western ear starts hearing the patterns of wave upon wave.
Formal considerations aside, “Speak” is informed by ongoing historical reflection. Before “Speak” there was “Upaj” (documented on a video of the same name), which spun off from the serendipitous encounter of Nivas and Mehta’s Kathak guru Pandit Chitresh Das and the electrifying tap star Jason Samuels Smith, nearly four decades his junior. Having met more or less by chance at a dance festival, these unlikely collaborators spent years exploring potential common ground.
Nivas and Mehta think of “Speak” as the next step in the dialogue, this one initiated “by the ladies,” addressing a new set of questions.
“Dormeshia and Jason have educated us so much about the origins of tap — how it was born out of slavery, how it went through marginalization and deprivation. Everyone knows who Fred Astaire is, but what about all the underground masters?
“Kathak, too, has gone through an incredible struggle. Under British rule it went underground for 150 years. Many lineages disappeared. Property was confiscated, public performances were banned. Underground lineages kept it alive. But even now the Indian masses are completely disconnected from the art. Like tap, Kathak has been eclipsed by more recent pop forms.”
Think Bollywood. “Today both Kathak and tap are very much struggling.”
Advocacy is the work of the angels, but in the end the crusade can only be as powerful as the love it kindles. Isn’t that always the way? In the blaze of performance, the spirit of the moment incinerates the agenda. What’s that the dancers said 16 or 9-1/2 beats ago?
“We love our art! It gives us so much joy. That’s what we love the most. That’s what we want to share.”
And they do.
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‘SPEAK: A KATHAK AND TAP COLLABORATION’
Leela Dance Collective
>> Where: Castle Theater, Maui Arts & Cultural Center
>> When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday
>> Cost: $35-$65
>> Info: 242-SHOW (7469) or mauiarts.org
>> Note: A special dance workshop 5-6:30 p.m. Tuesday in Omori Studio B is open to all levels of dancers age 15+; advance registration required via MACC box office.
>> Cost: $10.
Matthew Gurewitsch comes to Hawaii from three decades in New York as a cultural commentator for The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and other media. Browse his archive at beyondcriticism.com.
