"Swayambhu"
Shantala Shivalingappa
Herbst Theatre
San Francisco, CA
November 1, 2011
by Rita Felciano
copyright 2011 by Rita Felciano
The return of Shantala Shivalingappa, a mere year after her San Francisco debut, was easily the fall season's most anticipated event. Few of us had other then a passing acquaintance with Kuchipudi though for a while a local practitioner--whose name, I am afraid I couldn't find in my files -- at least offered an inkling of what this art, closely related to but emotionally worlds apart from Bharata Natyam, has to offer. So expectations were high, and in many ways they were more than fulfilled. Where the concert fell short was in 'Tani-Dvayam', a rhythmic conversation between the two percussionists. While it was playful and skillfully performed, it did not rise to the musical sophistication that the same artists brought to their exchange last year. So this was a disappointment
Perhaps most remarkable in Shivalingappa's performance was the complexity of her dancing. Formal values of placement, constraint, exactitude and adherence to a classical ideal co-existed with sense of freedom and playfulness coming from the art's folk elements. It's an extraordinary combination; I can't think of a Western dance form, with the exception, perhaps of Bournonvile, where "high" art and "low" art, if we are still allowed to use that terminology, are so integrated.
Add to this the fact that these dances are prayers. They are direct addresses to various gods, and Shivalingappa's expressive tools--particularly in the way she uses her face--make you believe that she sees the god in front of her. Sensual closeness and intimacy reign. At the same time, every once in while she seems to step quite consciously into the act of performance as performance in the way she turns her torso and looks straight at the audience or when she pulls a leg close to her body and has the motion ascend upward. None of this looked attention seeking; it just suggested the presence a very 21st century consciousness.
The program was well constructed. Placing 'Tarangam' -- the one in which the dancer in one section grabs a brass plate with her toes --before the music-only 'Tani-Dvayam' proved to be particularly effective. The audience was pulled in from a show-stealer to high abstraction. In the dramatic 'Kirtanam' the dancer remembered and acted out the dream in which Padmavati had a fight with her lord and husband Venkateshawara. The shifts between her different roles were crystalline and clear yet streamed like sun light. In 'Tillana', which usually closes a performance, every part of Shivalingappa's being -- body and soul -- reflected the music. In the West, we don't usually like to see one-to-one relationship between movement and dance, considering "music visualization" a negative attribute. However, as realized by the quartet of musicians and the dancer the totality -- competitive as it was --rose from the same basic energy. The program closed with 'Pasayadan', in which Shivalingappa also sang the prayer to which she danced. She does not project vocally the way she does in dance, giving the work a kind of child-like quality which did not quite convince me, particularly with its overblown theatrical ending. Placing the work earlier in the program might have been more satisfying.