Photo credits: India Heritage Desk

Venue: Epicenter
Date: 01 April 2016

Kathak has been a very old legacy in India. Its origin maybe traced to the days of the village bards who would move from one place to another, reciting the tales of gods, kings or far off lands. From this folk art form, how did Kathak become one of the eight classical dances of India is a matter of research. Suffice to say we have a rich inheritance by way of art and culture and whenever there is an opportunity we try to attend these performances. We have been fortunate to witness classical dance performances by Uma Sharma, Geeta Chandran,  Saroja Vaidyanathan, Ranjana Gauhar and Darshana Jhaveri in last couple of years in Delhi NCR.

To move on with times, performers are bringing about new themes and concepts to traditional art forms. Kathak in our opinion has been the most graceful dance form and is a fit subject for these experiments. We recently watched Rachna Yadav present an evening of Kathak at Epicenter Gurgaon. She performed a modern theme depicting the Five Elements: Air, Water, Fire, Earth and Space.

There were different forms of vocal support to match the performances. Along with traditional Bols, she used Ghazals, Bandish, Shloka, Poetry and Mantra as accompaniment with her performance.
The choreography by renowned exponent Aditi Mangaldas was crisp. Rachna Yadav did justice to the pieces with a combination of deft footwork, abhinaya skills and lot of energy. Consequently, she succeeded in holding the attention of the audience. She wore a different costume, each designed by her for every piece, some of which deviated from conventional Kathak attire. This added to the drama created on stage. Each piece was short and the whole performance, all of 70 minutes made a lot of difference to an otherwise mundane week evening.