All dance is a contemplation of the human body in movement, within perceptible coordinates of space and time. Another way of saying this is that all dance is thinking about the body in movement, on stage with music. In Pallavi in Time, Chowk Artistic Director Raka Maitra continues the journey of exploration that she began in Pallavi and Space (Mar 2016).

The points at which the dancer’s body (flesh, muscle and bone) cuts into time is marked, of course, by rhythm—the ping of the beat in a song, or the reverberation of footfalls resonating with heartbeats. A pallavi is a repeated refrain in music. In Raka’s work, it refers to choreographic refrains or elaborations; lines of increasing complex corporeal movements, placements and shifting balance extrapolated from the basic grammar of odissi.

The final result is a sequence of fluid sculptures in a sea of sounds, extending towards abstractions—sans role, sans character, sans story. In the end, there is just pure dance. And pleasure.

You see, it’s really all about rhythm, the beat.
Rhythm punctuates time, beats out possibilities inside the palace of imagination.
In those intervals, between each end and every beginning, lives the heartbeat of the dance.

Choreographer:
Raka Maitra
Dancers:
Sandhya Suresh, Karishma Nair, Namaha Mazoomdar, Meera Gurumurthy
Musicians:
Saranjith, Uma Katju, Lakshman, Vijay Tambe