East Meets West - Celebtalk

The Week By R. Prasannan

Song of Songs (Music and dance performance)
Composer Rokus de Groot
Choreographer Kalpana Raguraman
Conductor Taco Kooistra
Music Marieke Koster, Rene Eckhardt, Eduard van Regteren Altena

A Bharatnatyam dancer in skirt and blouse, western tunes, Dutch performers, song theme from the Bible, performance theme Mirabai. Sure kitchdi recipe. But no. The Dutch team made it a musical mosaic of mystic best. The musical performance with Bharatnatyam dance related the Biblical Solomon’s songs as Mirabai’s love-longing for Krishna. If you could close your ears to the music (try it), you would see only Kalpana Raguraman (Mira) playing Holi with Krishna or at other times longing for him or fantasising herself as Krishna’s bride. But remove the ear plugs and you hear Marieke Koster singing Franco-Russian painter Marc Chagall’s songs.

As Rokus de Groot claims, the performance connects the south Indian devadasi tradition with western music and dance. The message is that India’s Bhakti tradition has the same spiritual message as the devotion of Christian saints like Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross. The word ‘God’ does not figure in the Biblical songs, yet the human yearning for divine love can be seen in them as in Mira’s songs. Both are highly sensuous and even sensual. Teresa’s bridal mysticism is no different.

Where the performance succeeds over other such synthetic experiments is in trying not to overstate. There is a restrained elegance, which is unusual in cultural synthetic adventures which attempt at interpreting one culture in terms of the other. There is no such attempt here.