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With large church organs looming in the background and a packed crowd of students and teachers in front of him, vocalist Shekhar Kumbhojkar could only smile as he readied the masses for a "magical journey."
Last night, Setnor Auditorium played host to Kathak Gunjan and their world-famous Kathak North Indian dance performance. The collective, comprised of three musicians and two dancers, use their various forms of self-expression to tell a story through performance. A large number of students came to the show for the entertainment and a forced class, but had no clue what they were getting themselves into.
"I had no idea what to expect," said Kaitlin Flaherty, an undecided freshman in The College of Arts and Sciences.
Kathak dance is a classical South Asian style that was conceived in the ancient temples and is typically religious in nature. The music lays the scene, but it is the beautiful dancers who consume the spotlight.
As Ramdas Palsule pounded on his Tabla drum, dancers Kaveri Agashe and Manasi Tapikar blessed the stage, sweeping in from the left. At this point a sitar player, Subhash Dasakkar, started to pluck away at his instrument, taking the audience on a trip.
"A definite cultural exploration, that's the only way to describe it," said Elyse Warren, an undecided freshman in The College of Arts and Sciences.
Audience members began closing their eyes, letting the music, the pitter-patter of bare feet and the ringing of ankle bracelets soothe them into Utopia.
At some point I was sure the incense and hookahs were going to be lit, but to my dismay, there was no such event. Instead, I too closed my eyes and saw myself on a desert. Not the sinister, trippy desert experience of Micky and Mallory crazy's world in "Natural Born Killers," but more of a beautiful desert terrain marked with great pyramids and camel rides.
"The only way to describe the Kathak dance performance is to call it simply magical," said Anne Gold, head of the South Asian Center at Syracuse University.
After a few words from both dancers explaining the complexity of their next set, the group carried into melodic Teen Taal. As told by Agashe, the Kathak dance cannot function without the music providing a pulse for the movements of the dancers. With every slap of the Tabla drum or pluck of the sitar, there was a corresponding dance movement acted out by the two women draped in gold cloth.
"They are amazing," Flaherty said. "I have to admit, I've never seen anything quite like it."
With each new set, the relationship between instrument and dance was clear; they cannot exist without each other. This relationship was intensified with what the dancers referred to as the "language of dance," in which women proceeded to translate ancient South Asian language into dance. What followed was a wave of and free-flowing, poetic "yiggidy yiggidy's" and "yaga yagas" that transformed into furious leg and arms movements, complemented by the thunderous drum and spine tingling sitar picks.
Toward the end of the first segment and into intermission, the group continued to improvise with music and dance, introducing the audience to forms of self-expression never even thought of.
"Honestly, I'm still not sure of what I just witnessed, but I liked it, a lot," Warren said.
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