Festival of male dancers returns with 19 classical artistes

Garud is among the featured artists at ‘”Shivaarghya”, a festival of male dancers that is returning for its sixth edition on March 1 at Ganesa Natyalaya, Qutub Institutional Area, New Delhi. The festival that runs from 2 pm to 8 pm and is open to all. This year, 19 dancers from across the country will perform across six classical traditions: Bharatanatyam, Kathak, Odissi, Kuchipudi, Sattriya and Neo-Classical.

Conceived by the late Saroja Vaidyanathan, the festival is now curated by her daughter-in-law, Rama Vaidyanathan, who heads Ganesa Natyalaya. “This festival brings together artists from across the country to celebrate the living traditions of Indian classical dance,” she says. Rama adds that the focus on male dancers was never about exclusion, it was about correcting an imbalance. “My mother-in-law felt that the inclusion of male dancers in festivals did not reflect the same ratio, even though there are equal numbers of male dancers as female dancers. She wanted to make a statement that it is important to cherish and to see the male dancing body just as a dancing body, which is genderless,” adds Rama.

Aditya Garud.

Garud sees visibility as crucial. “The minority in classical dance is male dancers,” he says. “Festivals like this show that we are here, we exist.” His presentation will reflect his artistic philosophy of being rooted in tradition yet responsive to the present. The first half is a traditional Kathak repertoire set to a 12-beat taal, a choreography of his guru Mayur Vaidya. The second is Sampradaya, a piece of Abhinaya inspired by the Varkari tradition of Maharashtra. Originally conceived as a group piece, this is the first time he will be doing it in solo.

If Garud’s journey began in late adolescence, S Vasudevan’s began at four. Now 45, he trained simultaneously in Bharatanatyam and Carnatic classical music. His guru Vyjayanthimala Bali insisted that a dancer should first be a singer. A regular at the festival since its inception, Vasudevan values the focus that the festival brings to male dancers. For this edition, he will perform the production titled Shivandari, which is drawn from two verses of Adi Shankaracharya’s Saundarya Lahari. The verse is in Ragamalika.

Partha Pratim Hazarika, 32, grew up learning Sattriya in Narayanpur, Assam, in a family devoted to the Sattriya tradition. Sattriya is a classical dance form that was practiced for 500 years exclusively by male monks inside Satras, the Vaishnavite monasteries. For him, it was never a career choice; it was just life. He later studied Economics in Guwahati and acting at the National School of Drama, where he had to unlearn some of his dancer’s instincts. “As a dancer, you are trained in muscle memory and external postures, but as an actor, you must experience an inner life.” This is his first time performing at “Shivaarghya”. He will be performing a traditional composition by Madhavadeva, called Jhumura Nach. The song for the composition is called Mohana Bhavata – a devotional song describing Krishna playing his flute in Vrindavan while the Gopis listen.

The rest of the lineup include Bharatanatyam performers Anand Satchidanand, Athul Balu PP, Shreyas Nair, among others; Kathak features Gaurav Shridhar, Ravi Yadav and Sushant Gaurav; Odissi brings Rudra Prasad Swain from Bhubaneswar; Kuchipudi will feature Suryanarayana Rao P from Bengaluru, and Neo-Classical features Shubhojit Khush Das from Kolkata.