Dance

United Colors of Holy Epiphany

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A few favorites from Vera and Alexander's Russian Orthodox Wedding at the Church of Holy Epiphany in Roslindale, Boston (with a sprinkling of 'getting ready' and reception pictures). Photographing my first orthodox wedding ceremony within the traditional church was true joy - a unique photographic experience in an intimate space embellished by colorful murals and ornamental finery, illuminated by the the mid-afternoon sunlight streaming through the tall clerestory windows,while the soulful music from the Choir in the mezzanine celebrated the union of the gorgeous couple and their families!

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Madhavi Mudgal in Boston

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A few selections from Smt. Madhavi Mudgal's Odissi workshop in Boston in late September when she was demonstrating  "Yahi Madhava", an exerpt from Geetha Govinda, composed by the 12th century poet Jayadeva - a scandalous string of accusations by Radha when Krishna gets back after wild night of partying. A comparable twenty first century exchange might probably go something this like  "Get out of my apartment you jerk", but Jayadeva spins it differently

A sleepless night of passion, your bloodshot eyes express the mood of awakened love. Go away Madhava , oh! Go away Krishna, don’t you lie to me. Go to her Krishna, she will ease your despair; she will cool your burning passion- why come to me? Your bright lips darkened by kissing her kohl-blacked eyes-Oh! Krishna, at dawn they match the colour of your body. The scratches on your body tell of the battle of love, they tell of the triumph of passion like gold writing on sapphire. Oh Krishna, your heart must be blacker than your skin, how can you deceive me, so faithful in our love? Look at the bed of love-the flowers are no more fresh, the sandalwood paste has dried, the oil in the lamp has dried. Oh Krishna oh Madhav, go away, leave me-don’t lie to me.  ( translation: www.srjan.com, Guru Keluchanran Mohapatra Odissi Nrityabasa)

Its the same piece that inspired me to start the documentary project on Dance Gurus when I photographed Sri. C.V. Chandrasekhar in early 2011.  Juxtaposing two veteran artists expressing the same poetry in two different stylistic languages is perhaps something I should explore in a future post.

With thanks to Vanita Shastri from Meru Educational Foundation for organizing the event and for arranging the permissions. 

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Getting ready for the Arangetram

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A short selection of 'getting ready" frames from Tanmayi Vashist's Arangetram in Orange County last month. My favorite picture is that of the dancer in full costume sitting stark still in one corner of the room. As the veteran teacher in the foreground gets her make-up done with casual ease, barely half hour before the show, the student who will be formally ascending the stage for her first exclusive performance tries to remain calm and focused, her beautiful eyes giving away those tense moments with their blank stare at nothingness. Reminds me of athletes before the start of a decisive race. Except, in this case, the dancer is competing with no one except with one's own  artistic expectations.

 

 

Mariah Steele/ Quicksilver Dance

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 An amazing photographic experience in an auditorium with bizarre dimensions where the depth of the stage was probably three times its width. Just as I was capturing these awesome dancers during their dress rehearsal late at night at the Simmons Hall auditorium at MIT,  a 23 year old police officer would lose his life in the hands of Boston bombers, barely blocks away in the same campus around the same time and the whole city would come to halt the following day. If grace and gruesomeness can exist right next to each other,  this certainly was one of those nights. 

 

Photographing Alarmel Valli

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There is not much of a garden left in Kilpauk Garden Road these days with its relentless traffic and a rapidly shrinking pedestrian realm. The graceful tree canopies that once lined most of these roads are disappearing fast making way for wider roads. The occasional stretches of sidewalk which sometimes seems more of relic raised on a foot and a half high pedestal is perhaps a collection of unmarked gravestones for those hundreds street trees sacrificed on the altar of urbanization.

The low point of my 6 month stay in India during the beginning of this year was going through a 2 month drill of applying for a replacement passport and missing my scheduled return flight to US with rest of my family. Perhaps the only upside to this expensive delay was that I finally had the opportunity to photograph the dancer-extraordinaire Ms. Alarmel Valli at her beautiful residence and studio in Kilpauk.

A few hundred feet from the busy main road, Ms.Valli’s residence and dance studio remains a welcome anomaly. A two story, single family residence and a classic example of mid twentieth century art deco influences in the city, its an oasis of serenity not too far from the madding crowd. Pavilions with stunningly beautiful life size bronze sculptures of Meenakshi and Sundareshwar with fragrant garlands of marigolds, tulsi and rose graces the front driveway and the path to the studio. As I make my way to the back porch, the sound of fast moving feet on polished terrazzo floor get louder as the new generation of dancers get trained by one of the very best. As human form momentarily transforms into fluttering butterflies, skipping antelopes and graceful birds, perhaps some part of the Kilpauk Garden are more alive today than ever!

 

 

 

Sujata Mohapatra at work

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A sweaty 11'x16' room with  low ceilings and  florescent lighting packed with two dozen dancers with varying levels of expertise, accompanied with an equal number of handbags and water bottles dumped in one corner. Sounds like a perfect recipe for a forgettable photo shoot – unless otherwise the subject of the images is someone as extraordinary  as Sujata Mohapatra. A few selections from the Odissi workshop in Bangalore early June with generous thanks to Ms.Mohapatra for letting me photograph her at work.

       

     

40 shades of Bragha Bessell

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As a part of my ongoing project documenting senior dance Gurus while they are at work teaching their craft, I had the opportunity to photograph Abhinaya exponent Bragha Bessell  during her workshop in the cosy and colorful basement of Ananya  in Malleswaram.  Typically I would like to limit the number of images in a blog post or a photoessay to ten , but doing so in this case would be a disservice to the seemingly endless emotive vocabulary of Ms. Bessell. Thanks to Nandini Mehta and Murali Mohan of Nadam Institute for organizing the event and for welcoming me to photograph the artist.

 

   

 

 

Photographing Sujata Mohapatra

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Every once in a while, there comes an artist who causes me immense existential crisis as a dance photographer. Without fail, they make me question what am I doing by missing out on an extraordinary performance. Instead of experiencing their performance like rest of the spellbound audience,  there I was, burdening myself with 2 kilograms of camera equipment  hung around my neck with my eyes strained on the viewfinder. Odissi dancer Sujata Mohapatra,  got to be one of them. Even our 3 year old who seldom survives any concert after the first half hour seem to be hooked. While I typically steer away from the iconic "poses" while photographing classical Indian dance and tend to focus more on the kinetic aspect of the performance, I found myself being captivated by the stillness of some of these classic Odissi frames. A stillness only interrupted by the gently heaving torso and by those beads of perspiration that gave away the effortless ease with which Sujata moves across the stage.

As much as artists like Ms.Mohapatra are responsible for my momentary existential crisis, they inspire me to continue my work behind the camera - an imperfect exercise in two dimensional representation, in attempting to capture rare instance of classical perfection.

(Click in the image to pause slideshow)

 

Domestic Dances

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No makeup. No blackouts. No spotlights.  No seamless backdrops.

 

Stack of books on top of dining table by the side of left over orange juice. Titled posters. Random dining table chairs. Annoying glare of compact fluorescent tubes. Daylight from the wrong direction...barely illuminating the dancer in the foreground...Can the dancers rise above these indispensible clutter of our day today interior residential environments for the benefit of the camera? Can the photographer overcome the limitations of tight interior spaces in capturing the energy, grace and the emotive bearings of the dancer?

 

Here is a small collection of  initimate, in-house performance portraits from the last two years most of them shot within the tight residential spaces in urban neighborhoods - Professor C.V.Chandrasekhar's apartment in Besant Nagar, Chennai ; His disciple Malini Srinivasan's apartment in Queens, New York ; Founder and artistic director of Navarasa Dance Theater - Dr.Aparna Sindhoor’s live-work home/dancer co-op in Sommerville, MA. Perhaps the only exception in terms of scale are the house performance shots of Smitha Radhakrishnan at the single family home of Vallari Shah in Whitefields outside of Bangalore.

 

Perhaps those center tables, window mullions, light switches and doorknobs in the background don't diminish the visual impact of these dancers. On the contrary, these photos remind us dance is often produced, practiced and refined within the comfort zones of ones personal space, even as it is marketed and consumed in public.

 

Why are classical Indian dancers almost always pictured formal context - literally elevated on a stage, as they claim the mantle of exclusive ambassadors of a narrow definition of culture. Perhaps we need more photographs like these to divorce the institutionalized relationship between the classical Indian dance as and elite nationalistic representations of culture. Perhaps we need these images to remind us that even classical dance forms at its very core are about the celebration of human body and the joy of personal expression.

 

As for the photographs for the Bharatanatyam, Odissi and Kathak performances during Independence Day celebrations, there should no cause for concern. There will always be plenty of overdone makeup, misdirected spotlights and dissonant backdrops.

Massachusetts Dance Festival - Sneak Peek

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Attention MDF Dancers & Choreographers ! Here is random pick of my personal favorites from the Boston shows last weekend.  Do hang in there till we are done with the Amherst show. The complete set of edited and post-processed images will be available for print sales and online digital downloads once I am am done shooting and editing the Amherst show.  If you email me at purpleganesh(at)gmail, I can let you know directly once the images are up. Thank you !

Jazz Inc. | Choreographer: Stephanie Heroux

 

Chaos Theory Dance Company

 

Choreography |Annie Kloppenberg

Prometheus Dance

 

Navarasa Dance Theater

 

Sokolov Now!

 

Tracing Bharatanatyam via Muybridge

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How can I break the pattern and have a Bharatanatyam  portraiture session not turn into another series of canned poses? Not that there is anything wrong with photographing static frames - there is a whole lot one could do just with the lighting while focusing on sheer portraiture. Yet they still are "poses" - a contrived exaggeration of those fleeting moments in a standard repertoire -  those that are entirely stripped of the energy and intensity that distinguish them in a  good performance.  No beads of perspirations reflecting the colored lights nor  visibly palpitating torsos preparing the body for the next rush of rhythmic movements in space.

 The following series of images were shot at my studio thanks to my muse, partner and artist-in-residence  - Smitha Radhakrishan. This is a truly collaborative work where we started the photoshoot with a series of standard poses, and I began employing extended shutter speeds to trace the trajectory of these poses from point A to point B. Eventually we proceeded to integrate "Abhinaya' - the emotive vocabularies - in the later shots.And I was pleasantly surprised to see that the camera was able to capture these emotions even when the body blurs in those few seconds. Based on the feedback from my 1.5"x2" camera LCD we went back and repeated the same steps till we got satisfactory results.

 There is really nothing new about integrating multiple frames in a single photographic frame. Eadweard Muybridge started doing this in mid 19th century. And these days its pretty easy to combine images and slap them with a "Motion Blur" filter in photoshop. However, if the point of the image is to make an artistic composition of a movement and emotional trajectory, I seriously doubt the usefulness of Photoshop. These are my first serious attempts in photographing movement vocabularies in Bharatanatyam in real time and I hope to do more of these sessions with accomplished artists in the next few years.

Can I capture the stories narrated through space and time with a single shutter exposure....we'll see!!

Shot with Nikon D700 and overhead halogen spot lights. No strobes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Old-School" in Chennai

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Thanks to our good friend and gracious host Malini Srinivasan, I had the unique opportunity of photographing her Guru - world renowned Bharathanatyam exponent and academician Prof.C.V. Chandrasekhar - at his home in Chennai while he was reviewing his choreographed composition with Malini.

Here I was in a tight 11'x11' room sticking out like a sore thumb right in the middle of an intense  one-to-one dance instruction. My subjects were performers in the truest sense -  they could just completely ignore me while focusing on their art and let me do my thing. Even though I had to shoot against the light without any reflectors, I just couldnt go too wrong with them !