Indian dancing

EASTERN AND WESTERN DANCE FORMS COMPARED

*. . . the choteographer’s (Fokine’s) role in this ballet is almost negligible, to such an extent that its production could, strictly speaking, have been achieved without his taking part in it. The painter (Benois) would have sufficed to dispose on the stage the vari-coloured masses of danseurs and danseuses dressed in picturesque costumes... .’

Again, writing of the ballet Parade, Lifar observes cryptically: *. . . what is Parade but a Picasso painting in motion?’ Similarly, to our mind, Leslie Hurty’s décor for Hamlet, with its bloody hands and dripping daggers, serves to overshadow Helpmann’s dancing.

As with painting, so with music. Diaghilev, one-time pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, had such a passion for music that he allowed Stravinsky’s score to subjugate Fokine’s choreography, notably in Le Sacre du Printemps and Noces. Similarly, Prokofiev’s score for Le Fils Prodigue made dancing subservient to the music. Thus, instead of the music being made to suit the choreography, it was the latter that had to submit to a “despotic bondage’.

Time does not seem to have altered the tendency to adapt ballet to existing music. ‘Ballet’, declares Haskell, ‘still depends for sixty per cent of its repertoire on the selection and arrangement of already existing music.’

The music for Indian dancing fortunately corresponds to the development of the dance action, so that there is perfect harmony between the dancer and the musician. Thus the sanchari bhava of Bharata Natyam and the Kathak gaths interpret a single phrase of the accompanying melody with exactitude. The arts are made to blend in Indian dancing and the disharmony noticeable in many of the Ballets Russes compositions, wherein choreography is subservient to music and painting, is conspicuous by its absence.

While the history of Western dancing glitters with such names as Camargo, Noverre, Taglioni, Pavlova, Duncan, and Nijinsky, and of course, the maestro Cecchetti, and Diaghilev, the great impresario, Indian dancing has been preserved with reverence in remote corners of the country by craftsmen whose names have mostly perished with them. But their art, tended with loving care, survives. It is above names and personages. Therein is its greatest strength.

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