Bhukham - Circus of Earth and Sky

The Arts Magazine 1 Sep 2002English

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A luminous fairy and a Gordian knot, Isha Sharvani pilots across the stage, hanging and writhing on a swinging rope. With legs split like a pair of compass, she stabs and raids the air - reaching for the sky. Pint-sized Tao Issaro, on the other hand, flexes his primodial mane, leaps onto a lingam-like wooden pole and threads around it with bare limbs, as if bred on steroids, an earthy live-wire.

Mum and guru Daksha Seth confesses to raising her prodigious 17-year-old Isha and 11-year-old Tao on a special diet of home-made dhal and a daily dose of training. Dance is family affair and professional trade for the irrepressible choreographer, who also reins in husband and Australian musician, Devissaro, to develop her artistic creations in their forest home in Trivandrum.

Like Chandraleka - her radical predecessor in contemporary dance - Daksha is equally reputed and repudiated in conservative India for her unholy phalanx of body arts, encompassing classical kathak, chhau, kalaripayattu, mallakhamb, yoga and gymnastics.

Virtuosity in these traditional dance and martial forms is requisite in her company, which includes the brilliant and lithe male dancers, Anil Kumar and Rajesh Raveedran. The troupe is able to move with a distinctive quality - so gloriously taut and mercurial - that they easily put their contemporary western counterparts to shame.

Their Singapore debut last year with Sapargati - Way of the Serpent had left such a sting that the Singapore Arts Festival has hastily invited them to return with their millennium creation, Bhukham - Circus of Earth and Sky, a “celebration of the human spirit, of man’s quest into the unknown, the desire to explore what lies beyond the horizon, to open up new vistas in human experience”.

Unlike the purer Sapargati, however, vision in Bhukham is eclipsed by ambition.

The 75-minute show opens promisingly with a drumming scene to catapult astro-physics and aerial bodies into motion. A two-member live band serves up acoustic rock, guitar riffs, Australian aboriginal music and live vocals. Aliens and astronauts glide and twitch onstage in quaint outfits. A weak voice-over vexes: ‘Does life exist elsewhere?’

Daksha’s key folly lies in furnishing her physical art with technology. Machines are not her thing, but she tries to play meister. Placed in the festival beside sleek multimedia giants like Charlerois Danses and Dumb Type, Bhukham looks gauche and naïve.

We embark on an un-hip Indian sci-fi odyssey, replete with cheesy video projections of comets and constellations and pseudo-professorial slogans such as “Action and Reaction” and “Gravitational Attraction”. Daksha herself makes gratuitous solo gambits while her dancers exit for costume-changes. A five-member company proves too small a task force this time round.

But their body gestalt remains formidable and inventive, even irreverent. The purist, however, would dismiss Bhukham as a mere flesh circus of human anatomy contorted into tantric shapes and kama-sutra poses. Is it an Indian reading of Cirque du Soleil? Is it indeed a kathak version of River Dance that closes the show?

Daksha Seth continues to rivet us by unearthing unorthodox possibilities – despite the mishap this time with Bhukham.