She Sways to Conquer

How chance and destiny conspired to produce a dancer of fame. Meet Padma Shri Ileana Citaresti.

WHEN ROSA AND SEVERINO Citaristi chose an unusual name for their daughter8212;Ileana, the Roman-ian nymph of the forest8212;little did they realise that the girl would choose a life they couldn8217;t ever have dreamt of. Last week, Bhubaneswar-based Odissi ex-ponent Ileana Citaristi became the first dancer of foreign origin to receive the Padma Shri. 8220;This award is an outcome of my adventure with life,8221; she said, a day before she got the award.

Citaristi8217;s idiom is a fu-sion of classical Odissi and Chhau, a martial arts dance form from Mayurbhanj district in Orissa . For the past 25 years, Citaristi has been a teacher, choreographer and the creative force behind the five-year-old annual festival of films on performing arts in Cuttack.

She has also choreographed for Aparna Sen8217;s Yugant for which she won the Na-tional Award, M.F. Husain8217;s Meenaxi, and Gautam Ghose8217;s Abar Aranye. Born into a pious Italian family in Bergamo, Italy, her father was a par-liamentarian and two of her un-cles were clerics. Young Ileana was a rebel. 8220;I wept for weeks when my father stopped me from going to ballet classes. I was 11, but I had resolved to be a dancer,8221; she recalls.

Eight years later, when she moved to Milano to go to college, Citaristi joined a theatre troupe. 8220;It was too late to go back to dance. I was into the student movement, and theatre was the best way to express my ideology,8221; says Citaresti. But she later landed in Venice to study ori-ental philosophy and experimental theatre. Citaristi8217;s first brush with Indian dance was at a Kathakali workshop in Venice. She was researching body language and a few hours of Kathakali revealed more to her than her entire research had. 8220;I was thrilled to find this dance had a grammar that codified every expression of the body and mind.8221; Citaristi asked the performer to teach her, and he invited her to Kerala.

In 1978, Citaristi arrived at Srikrishnapuram, Ker-ala, where she learnt Kathakali for three years. Sensing her desire to explore the nuances of Indian classical dance, her Kathakali guru asked her to meet Odissi maestro Kelucharan Mohapatra in Cuttack. 8220;Meeting the master was the turning point of my life, I decided to be with him forever. I soon forgot all about politics, theatre and my country. The beauty of Odissi and the simplicity of the people of the land hooked me,8221; she says. Later, much to the guru8217;s chagrin, Citaristi learnt Chhau, a physically demanding folk dance form, worlds apart from the subtle exuberance of Odissi. Now, Citaristi hosts an annual martial arts dance festi-val at the Dhauli hills near Bhubaneswar.

Citaristi is nostalgic about her hometown in Italy, but she dreams of dying in India. 8220;The little medieval town on the hills appears in my dreams and I still miss its smells and colours, but I owe everything to India,8221; she says. And, not surprisingly perhaps, she says she is a staunch supporter of Sonia Gandhi.