An Excellent Adventure in India:
Behind the Scenes with
Kunjban & the Shiv Shakti Dance Party
Many of you reading this newsletter may remember that the Festival had hoped to participate in a summer 2000 trip to India for teachers, led by South Asia Center at University of Washington and sponsored by Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad. By the time we learned that funding for that trip would not be awarded, the Festival had already committed to including an Indian Chhau dance troupe in the 2001 Festival, and had secured grants from state and local arts commissions for several in-school projects and residencies about Indian masks and dance. Not to be deterred, we turned for help to Nathan Kumar Scott, who heads Cry of the Rooster Theatre in Seattle, but also works around the world as a puppeteer, mask-maker, dramatist, director, and performance artist. Nathan speaks fluent Hindi and has good contacts in the region where Purulia Chhau dance is performed, having served as consultant on an NEA-funded research trip to prepare for the Tears of Joy Theater production of his script, The Secret of Singbonga. In short, just the person to help the Festival find a company!
In early July Nathan and I took an overnight train to Ranchi, a city of a million people east and a bit north of Calcutta, in the Chotanagpur region of south Bihar. This area has one of the highest concentrations of adivasis (tribals) in India; others have moved to the region, attracted by the mineral wealth, and the mixing of populations has been so thorough that many people, I was told, now "consider themselves tribal." In Ranchi, one can find at least something of many aspects of contemporary India: cybercafes, elegant restaurants and shopping malls; universities and their students; traffic-choked roads-though choked in the Indian fashion, with machines, men, and animals of every description, each moving at his/her (and one does see "her" out and about) own pace; frequent electricity "brown-outs"; some makeshift housing with open sewers on either side of the footpaths.
We were very graciously looked after in Ranchi by Nathan's friend, Mukund Nayak, who holds a position in the "Song and Drama Division" of the state government of Bihar, but is also one of the foremost composers and performers of Nagpuri music (Nagpuri is the lingua franca of the region, where nine tribal and non-tribal languages are spoken). For our first evening he had arranged a performance for us by his company, Kunjban, which presents several regional styles of music and folk dance, in which all audience members are invited (nay, pressed) to participate. The company also performed a short "social problem" theatre piece (child labor, and the need for children to stay in school, was the focus), the kind that it presents in villages and cities throughout the region. As soon as I heard the company's gloriously melodious music-voice, flute, shenai (oboe-like instrument), harmonium, drums (dhol and nagara)-I said to Nathan, "Chhau dance-fine, fine, but this music has to come, too!"
We spent the rest of our stay in Ranchi traveling back and forth to the villages of Chorida (also spelled Jhalida on maps) and Rerengtard (the approximate spelling in English, the "rd" to suggest the retroflex "r" at the end of the word), east again, just across the border into the Purulia district of West Bengal-only about fifty miles distant, but three hours of travel each way by rudimentary roads. Lots of time for meticulous planning! Since we were visiting outside the Chhau season, which normally runs from January through the Chaitra festival in March/April, we were arranging for special daytime stagings of one or two pieces at a time. Not as much fun as the usual conditions-continuous performances by torchlight, from dusk until dawn-but easier to preview and videotape for fellow North American presenters. And, despite a few downpours, which disrupted taping and made the ground too slick for tricky flips, the monsoon rains held off-good luck for us, bad for the farmers who depend on the rains' regular arrival (and who were inundated in August).
In Chorida we sponsored a performance by the company of Gambhir Singh Munda, one of India's most renowned Chhau dancers, now in his seventies, whose three sons, named for Chhau characters, are all troupe members, famous for their flips. Everyone (school was temporarily dismissed!) gathered to watch two pieces staged at the dancing ground, at the entrance to the village compound. We also met with an award-winning mask maker, Dwijen Sutradhar-one of the hundred-some mask-makers in Chorida who create masks for the thousand-some Chhau dance companies in the Purulia district. As each company replaces the masks for its forty to fifty characters several times during a season, the mask-makers do a good business. In response to our query about any ritual for retiring a mask, Mr. Sutradhar laughed, "No, we just throw them away-and then the kids pick them up and play with them. That's how they start learning to dance."
In Rerengtard, over two days, we taped four pieces, performed at the dancing ground in the center of the village, before a circular pavilion honoring Chhau dancers. There the masks, each of which can weigh as much as twenty pounds, were laid out before the performances: given the weight of this elaborate headgear, and the acrobatic style of dance (lots of running, flipping, and landing on knees), all troupe members are male; they perform the female roles-Durga, Radha, Laxmi-in padded breastplates. (We did, however, also see a nachni performance, a very different style of dance, performed by a woman, accompanied by older men). Entrances and exits, of which there are many in each performance, are made through the crowd, via the village paths. For the piece involving Hanuman, a fifteen-foot pole was simply stuck in a hole in the ground; the dancer shinnied to the top, gyrated as the pole swayed beneath him, then climed down headfirst. The troupe's signature piece, the battle of Durga with the buffalo demon, normally concludes with the goddess posed triumphantly on her lion's back, surrounded by the male deities who have turned to her for help. But, with the ground muddy after two cloudbursts, the dancer slipped several times before managing a shaky ascent-making very clear why Chhau is not usually staged during the rainy season.
During our days in Rerengtard, we were hosted by Manohar Kumar, who now, at age thirty-five, leads Shiv Shakti, the troupe established by his father, Rakhal, a highly respected dancer who had died in January 2000, at the age of ninety. Manohar has assumed leadership of the group, at his comparatively young age, not only because he is his father's son but also because of his commanding talent as a dancer. Manohar made all the arrangements, both for performances and for the generous hospitality that Indians extend to visitors. The one night we (unexpectedly) spent in Rerengtard, he brought charpoys into his front room for us to sleep on and somehow rustled up a grilled chicken to accompany the rice and dal (as the dietary practices were explained to me, when meat is served, then alcohol can be consumed-and Nathan and I, guided by Mukund, were providing rum as a welcome treat!)
On our last day in Rerengtard, we declined, with great reluctance, the opportunity to spend another night in the village, for a ceremonial closing of the dance ground in our honor. Instead, we took Manohar with us, away from his responsibilities for village hospitality, back to the neutral setting of a hotel meeting room in Ranchi, where he, Mukund, and Nathan could settle in for several hours of planning. Ideas flew back and forth in English, Hindi, and Bengali, and the videocamera with playback screen proved an invaluable tool: we could focus in easily and directly on the characters and movement sequences likely to be most accessible for an American youth audience. We also discussed such practical matters as how the musical segments, of great beauty in and of themselves, would not only add variety to the performance but would also give dancers the time they need to change masks and costumes.
We visited Ranchi at a pivotal moment in the region's history, as the fifty-year-long political struggle to establish a new state-Jharkhand-came to a head. Enabling legislation passed a few weeks after our visit, and the new state (along with two others) will be established on November 1, 2000. What better time, then, to introduce American audiences to the unique folk arts of this beautiful area? Please join us in May for the companies' performance-guaranteed to enthrall eye and ear and emotion.
If you've read to the end of this rather long article, you may actually be interested in more information about these performance genres. See Article 2 for topics that will be covered in the Teachers' Guide, which will also feature an extra teaching resource about the Chhau masks, movements, and stories, courtesy of King County Arts Commission Hotel/Motel Tax revenues: slides will accompany the piece (for a modest fee, subject to our finding underwriting support).
In the meantime, to follow news about the establishment and evolution of the new state of Jharkhand, see www.india-today.com/ntoday/extra/remap/jharkhand.html, from the India Today Group Online.