Dancing Queen

Rajika Puri brings her new work on a “ziddi and masculine” Helen of Troy to Delhi.

Every moment, I am a performer,” says Rajika Puri. Even off-stage, she might add. She has been a Bharatanatyam and Odissi dancer, singer and storyteller for many years — and cannot hide it. As she talks about her latest project, Eleni of Sparta, which she will present at Stein Auditorium, India Habitat Centre, on March 20, Puri’s voice puts on roller skates, skipping, soaring and crashing through emotional altitudes. “What is the greatest epic in the West?” she asks, with operatic flourish, “The only name that comes to my mind is Homer’s Iliad.” “Who is the woman in Iliad? It is Helen of Troy, whom the Greeks called Eleni of Sparta,” she says. As she sinks into the subject, Puri, 68, rises from the chair, her eyes fill with wonder and her fingers point into a distance — she becomes a traveller in 13th century BC Sparta, Greece. “When I say ‘the green valley of Sparta’, I can see it in front of me and the audience can see that I see it. And the river Eurotas that flows through it and goes all the way down to the Gythion port, where they spent their first night after Eleni runs away with Paris,” she says. In similar vein, Puri, among India’s prominent classical performers, talks about the queen who was ziddi and masculine and her own life in dance and drama.

Edited excerpts:
On Eleni
Eleni came from Sparta, which I visited last year. My husband said, ‘You have waited a year-and-a-half waiting to come to Sparta, and I will not stop until I have taken you to her temple.’ I walked with my bad hip, up the hill for miles where there is a shrine. A shrine, not to Eleni’s beauty alone but to her and her husband Menelaus, celebrating their good marriage. In those days, she had the right to go and get married again. She realised she had fallen madly in love with Paris but he was not the same man as her husband, who was equally good looking and a better warrior. She comes back, and Menelaus takes her back. There is no sense of cuckold. The two of them ruled until she was very old.

Popular Culture
Subsequent writers have given us patrilineal and misogynistic interpretation of Eleni’s story. Even in Euripedes’ play, it is suggested that, after the Trojan war in which Paris, his elder brother Hector and their army is defeated, Eleni is going to be stoned. I say, ‘They were not honour killers. This was 13th century BC and Eleni was the ruler.’ She was not the bimbette that Hollywood has depicted; Eleni was ziddi, masculine and powerful.

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Indian element
In Eleni, I have built largely on Odissi, with a bit of Bharatanatyam. The costume starts as trousers and later, I add a fan so that it begins to resemble an Indian design. I have avoided the Greek look and stayed with Indian visuals. The seven segments of the performance includes Oriya songs, a padam and shlokas among others. My hope is that the audience receive Eleni of Sparta with the same fervour that they have for Draupadi, the queen of the Mahabharata.

Early Steps
All my life, I have wanted to be centre stage. There are photographs of me at the age of two in a Bharatanatyam outfit. The thing is, I have always been dark and had pimples. All my friends and fellow dancers were stunning and continue to be so. I didn’t have a tyranny of beauty. Just before my arangetram at Triveni Kala Sangam, my mother told me, “When you dance, you transform.” And I did. I began to learn Odissi much later, in 1972 when I was 26.

A Storyteller is Born
When I am in the moment, I can feel the emotion. As a Bharatanatyam and Odissi dancer, I was restrained. When Julie Taymor (two-times Tony winner, Emmy and Oscar nominee) cast me as the narrator in a work titled The Transposed Heads at Lincoln Centre in 1986, I found a new calling. She said, “Rajika, tell the story with a real British accent as the narrator and then jump on to the stage and become goddess Kali”. She asked me to make my voice roar like thunder and I did.

That’s when I began Western theatre, using my voice as well as body in my performances. Between 1986 and 2003, I was active in Mumbai’s theatre circuit, playing a lot of characters from William Shakespeare, among others. It was around 2003 that I began to develop my dance stories that used performance, narration and music.

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