“Lasya Kavya: The World of Alarmel Valli”: A Review

September 9, 2012

My first introduction to Alarmel Valli was through means of a set of three clips on youtube of an interview with her by Anuradha Ananth. I had then not heard of Ms. Valli. Jayashree Bhaskar sent me a link to the first of the three clips. I watched all three and was enchanted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zUzUJGVC9A

Television is such an inane medium, even more so in India than here in the US, that it is always a surprise when something meaningful comes upon the screen after all those letters and logos have stopped their gyrations and the colored shafts of lights fade away. So here were two women, attractive, articulate, literate, intelligent, unscripted, sitting on two plain chairs in front of a well-kept aangun with trees and shrubbery to the right, not in some hideous studio, discussing dance and poetry in cadences I thought I had forgotten: the slow, deliberate English of upper-crust Madras. Every word clearly enunciated. The thoughts laid out with care and precision.

In January I had had occasion to watch Sahana Balasubramanya perform at Duke. Talking to her outside the auditorium after the performance I discovered she was about my daughter’s age, and not just a Bharatanatyam dancer but a mathematician as well. I friended her on facebook, and through her I met Priya Lasya, virtually speaking. Priya tries to keep everyone abreast of all the dance events everywhere, and is a Kuchipudi and Bharatanatyam dancer as well. Priya asked one day if I would write up something on what it was that I, a lay person, loved about dance.

I have adored Kathak all my life, but I was no stranger to other traditions of dance. I have vivid memories as a child in boarding school in Delhi, of watching Sonal Mansingh dance Bharatanatyam at Sapru House next door. She was then still in her teens. And I remember a Mohiniyattam performance in the little outdoor auditorium at Triveni Kala Sangam close by on Raja Todar Mal Lane.

Five years working at Bharat Electronics in Bangalore, and in those years a few trips to my sister’s in Madras, had further widened my exposure to Bharatanatyam. My ear however was tuned to Hindustani music and it is only recently, since I have begun to appreciate Carnatic music better, that I have also come to appreciate Bharatanatyam better.

In March I ordered a DVD of Sujata Mohapatra (“Odissi Dance”) and one of Rajashree Warrier (“Neela Varnam: Bharatanatyam”). They arrived from Kerala in a light green envelope made of coarse handmade paper of the sort that when you look at it says “I’m from India!” and rakes up all sorts of cherished memories. I imagine the verdant landscape, the waterways, the houses with thatched roofs, and places where they package stuff carefully in green handmade paper. If I were Marcel Proust I would here write a whole chapter on light green paper packages from India.

Those are both lovely DVDs, Sujata Mohapatra’s and Rajashree Warrier’s, and I recommend them unreservedly. Especially I will say that Sujata Mohapatra’s Mangalacharan has completely captured my heart, and also her Abhinaya of Krishna Leela in Mishra Peelu set to the poetry of the Oriya poet Banamali . Back twenty five years in St. Louis I watched her guru-sister Sanjukta Panigrahi perform live on stage, and their guru as well, the great Kelucharan Mohapatra himself, but it is only this year that I have come to realize how much I love Odissi.

Priya asked me to write up why I love dance and I wrote her a little essay to describe how I felt watching Sujata Mohapatra dance that Mangalacharan. Because of that little essay (below) I got introduced to a bunch of dance related clips, especially of Bharatanatyam, thanks to my various facebook friends, Jayashree Bhaskar in particular, and that is how I learned of Alarmel Valli.

Sankalp Meshram’s “Lasya Kavya” is the story of Alarmel Valli’s life and dance on DVD. That DVD was the next thing I watched after the three clips of Ms. Valli's interview with Anuradha Ananth. Meshram is both Director and Editor. When I watched the movie for the first time, I had for a moment the feeling that the movie might descend into hagiography. Was Meshram going to try and gild a lily is the question that came to mind. Thankfully that fear was unfounded. It is a DVD I will recommend highly. Here's a link to a preview.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-vB6Ss9pGE

Much of the narration is in Ms. Valli’s own voice. Her voice has a magic of its own, as does her choice of words and thoughts. You find yourself waiting for that moment of search, just a little pause, before she conjures up just the right word from within her. I could listen to her forever. Her voice is a performance in itself. She introduces us to her Mother, to her Gurus, and to the memories of her childhood. There’s even a beautiful clip from her arangetram at the age of nine (nine!). But above all it is her description of what her dance is about and what it has meant to her that is surely the most compelling part of her commentary. She describes how the dancer adapts a “codified language of gestures into a medium of self-expression”. Her description of the creative process applies as well to any endeavor, to science and mathematics as well, and it is very good and instructive to hear her describe it as well as she does.

“I am a woman of my time,” she says, and she undoubtedly is, even though through her medium we experience the wealth of many centuries of a live and continuing tradition in all its magnificence. When I ask myself what it is that I love most about India, and I always ask myself that especially when I see what things have come to, especially the decay of language, for surely Indian newspapers and radio have ceased to make sense, for surely the level of public discourse could fall no lower. And it wasn’t always so. The trash that litters the landscape, the terrible want of everything, the many people who are completely deprived and dispossessed and stripped even of the most basic dignity. And yet, and yet there is no other place like India. And we have to ask what it is, despite all that, which makes India such a special place. And the answer to that surely, above everything else, is: her music and her dance. Her fabric arts. Her foods perhaps. But what else? You tell me.

I know from some of Priya Lasya’s comments that a dancer’s life is not easy. Of course I don’t include in that category artists as distinguished and celebrated as Alarmel Valli or Sujata Mohapatra. But dancers who are often not paid for their performances! Dancers whose basic expenses, travel and lodgings, are not compensated for! It’s criminal! Are there any worthier than these.

Ms. Valli worries that electronic media might usurp the traditional guru-shishya parampara, but I think that electronic media ultimately provides our dancers the means to promote their extraordinary art and to draw the sort of audiences worldwide that other arts could not even dream of. For people like me, far from home, Alarmel Valli’s dance reignites in us the memories of all those things we love and cherish and hold close to our hearts. Please give us more DVDs like Mr. Meshram’s, and the world will lie at your feet. Who would watch anything else if there is magic like this to experience! There are few things I treasure as much as my dance DVDs.

The breathtaking beauty of the human form, the sensuousness, the supple grace, all this and more Ms. Valli brings us. The dance of a girl “at an age when someone of the opposite sex first begins to appear as something other than just a nuisance” that was the piece I loved most of all. Her careful shringar, her teasing of the other person, and her getting teased back. What a treasure this DVD is! There are clips from many of Ms. Valli’s lovely performances spread throughout. She truly is a national treasure, for us all to love and cherish and enjoy. (Written to my facebook page, September 2012)