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Journalism of Courage
It was while visiting her friends in Landour, Uttarakhand, that Bharatanatyam exponent Malavika Sarukkai’s new work Beeja- Earth Seed began to take shape as a belief, and soon enough cemented itself as a concept. Near the house that she lived in, Sarrukai encountered a tree with a sign that read, ‘I was once a seed that held its ground’. This is when she wonered about the forest fires in the US and Spain, floods in Texas, the condition of Indian hills, and the “shocking” climate change. So much so that she decided to confront the world through the idiom of Bharatanatyam and question the people of the planet.
At Delhi’s Kamani Auditorium on Wednesday, in a concert presented by HCL Concerts, and Sarukkai’s Chennai-based Kalavaahini, Sarukkai will delve into a fractured world and engage with the audience through Bharatanatyam to talk about the collective responsibility one has towards the environment. She will use the dancing body to start with beauty and metamorphose into menace of the humans through movement.
“Beeja – Earth Seed germinated from the realisation that in my lifetime the planet has been exploited to dangerous levels in the name of economic growth,” says 66-year-old Sarukkai in a statement. “I wanted to center the emotions and wisdom of non-human life, using Bharatanatyam as my language of expression,” she adds.
In the production, she has also made space for the subaltern voices to speak. The deer, the swan, the birds, the trees — they all will have a voice in the production. As for the humans, for this production, Sarukkai has kept them away from the main role.
In an effort to evolve her vocabulary to themes not usually associated with Bharatanatyam, Sarukkai had presented Thari: story of the handloom in 2017, inspired by an article about the Kanjeevaram sari in a newspaper by sociologist Arti Kalra, some years ago. A collaboration with documentary filmmaker Sumantra Ghosal, it was received very well in the Capital.
For Sarukkai, who was born and raised in Mumbai, and began taking Bharatanatyam lessons when she was seven, dance became a refuge from a disturbing world very early on. She trained under Kalyanasundaram Pillai of the Thanjavur school and Rajaratnam of the Vazhuvoor School. She later learnt abhinaya under Kalanidhi Narayanan and Odissi under Kelucharan Mohapatra.
