Choreogata is a new platform from Akademi that aims to support and showcase new work by up-and-coming choreographers. Its first programme featured five solos by four artists. Revanta Sarabhai opened the programme with The Dance in Me, inspired by a verse by pioneering bharatanatyam and kathakali dancer Mrinalini Sarabhai. The poem, which Revanta Sarabhai recites as a prologue and which is also heard as a voiceover during the solo, extols dance as “turbulent discipline”. Sarabhai himself takes that as a cue for a spiralling, bharatanatyam-influenced performance in which precise gestures extend from keeningly tilted leans, and precise poses emerge from tumbling rolls. You certainly sense the counterpull of turbulence and discipline, but Sarabhai’s choreography – like his recitation of the poem and the easy-on-the-ear music he uses – is rather too pleasant to catch the fierce force which both he and the poem seem to be aiming for.
Sarabhai fares better in his second solo, The Search Within, not least because here his base vocabulary is the martial art kalaripayattu, a form which embodies a more fighting spirit. Though he starts in pleasant style again, Sarabhai quickly moves on to a starker mode, enacting a series of ritualistic sequences – low crouches, deep lunges, declamatory kicks – in spoke-like patterns radiating from centre stage. The music too, packs more punch than in his earlier piece.
Anusha Kedhar’s Razor’s Edge is a slow-burn piece. At first, all you see is Kedhar in girlish sweater and patterned skirt, tottering precariously as if on some imaginary tightrope, to the sound of electronic crackles. The sound resolves into a kind of radio pickup, catching snippets different languages and musics in a matrix of static. Kedhar, always teetering, describes a woman who appears to be the perfect wife and mother, but who’s falling apart inside. “I’m fine,” she keeps saying, as she sways and topples, eventually slumping to the floor and hoiking her disobedient limbs into place as she struggles to be upright again. Interestingly, classical dance references – hand gestures, poised stances – are presented ambivalently: are they stabilisers or restraints? Razor’s Edge drags somewhat and its ideas could be more fleshed out, but it does build in intensity – and clearly struck a particular chord with a number of women in the audience.
The Writer, a playful, teasing solo by Ankur Bahl, fair whisks along, and we willingly trot behind with it, maybe nonplussed but never uncurious. A table set with notebook, glass, jug, and keyring, is the anchor for a series of verbal and choreographic riffs that appear to be haphazard takes on a romantic break-up. Bahl reads out a narcissistic letter in a posh English accent, like a Wildean fop; makes a messy, mouthy, juicy punch by gleefully squeezing, sucking and spitting a lot of fruit. In between, he goes for spins round the floor: one tour cobbles together disparate little moves – curlicued fingers, little hops, flung feet – as if shuffling through memories; another is a tense, knotty series of twists; another is a jerky, spasmodic scrabbling timed to choppy spoken French. All this undoubtedly means more to Bahl than it does to us, but that’s not a problem: Bahl is a captivating performer, he’s good at generating a mood from a handful of moves, and I particularly liked his witty, wrong-footing hotchpotch of music.
Kamala Devam is another very strong performer. Her solo Fretless is built around the imagery of a lifebelt, which she keeps throwing out and pulling back in. As she does so, she sings idly, musingly, about daily life, about coffee in the morning – and each time the lifebelt comes back empty. She steps into it, spins inside it, begins to stretch out from it, tipping it over head or kicking it with her foot, her body a tensile alloy of clear bharatanatyam style, up-ended pitches, kinked angles and perilous tilts. The music too becomes more driven, a compound of bluegrass chords and propulsive beats. Towards the end, Devam inverts the opening image, staying in the lifebelt and throwing out the rope; each time, it comes back empty. Devam is a compelling mover, and to watch her performance is almost enough to be gripped by it – but not quite. Like Bahl’s piece, Fretless clearly means more to its creator than it does to the general audience. The piece is in fact dedicated to the memory of Rashpal Singh Bansal, a talented young dancer and choreographer who died in 2009; for those who know something of those circumstances, the imagery of the rope and lifebelt is saturated with resonances. But Fretless doesn’t yet stand on its own as a piece, and those who don’t may find themselves adrift.