Embodied Meditations on Mahari Pure Dance
I graze my big toe around my standing foot tracing my ankle and the sides of my foot onto the floor as I embody the Mahari’s Meena-Danda. Eventually, my toe gives way to my heel through the balls of my foot. My knees bend and remain parallel to one another as my I toe-heel my way adding a side-to-side torso movement. The mobile leg crosses the static one pivoting around the heel eventually landing onto the floor. My front leg now bears my weight while the heel of my back foot leaves the ground. My knees move away from one another and my upper body twists on stationary hips. I feel the friction on the other big toe as it repeats the same grazing motion creating invisible winding patterns on the floor. Here, I describe my execution of the Meena-Danda in the dance studios of The Ohio State University in Columbus, which takes me to the studios in Kolkata as I learnt it on the uneven cement floors of my teacher, Pausali Mukherjee’s humble dance class. Meena-Danda holds a special place because it is the first movement sequence I learned out of a canonical choreography from the Odissi repertory. As I walk in the studios here in Columbus in the Meena-Danda, I also connect my practice to that of the Mahari as she performed on the age-old stone floors of the Natamandira (dancing hall) in the Konarak Surya Deul (Sun temple in Konarak). I remember the friction generated between my big toes and the floor of the Natamandira I encountered during my field research in Odisha. The floors in ruins are strewn with stone pebbles that hurt my bare feet as I engage in the heel-toe action. The Mahari once navigated these spaces with her Meena-Danda. The ruins of the Natamandira prevent my otherwise smooth execution of Odissi movement as on the Marley studio floors reminding me of the historical lack in my dancing body that fails to acknowledge the Mahari. The tremors generated in my body due to the frictional resistance created between my toes and the temple ruins interrupts my convenient movement practice in the dance studio. As I try to recreate the sensation of the act of engaging the Meena-Danda again, here and now, in this studio space, I graze my toes harder along the floor, increase the spatial twists, and search for lost origins, although cognizant of the futility of my search with the death of Sashimoni Devi, the last surviving Mahari. Sujata Mohapatra’s Odissi tries to overdetermine the Mahari Meena-Danda through rhythmic injunctions but the Mahari twists persist that I further accentuate in my studio decompositions of my Odissi training. In the folds of the twists in the Meena-Danda remains traces of the Mahari’s sexual potency that, as I discuss below, is completely neutered in the Odissi repertoire.
Embodied Meditations on Mahari Expressional Dance
Sitting on the floor with my legs crossed, I recreate Mohapatra’s Odissi body through my reimagining of the Mahari. My spinal column curves at the base of my neck, my elbows remain close to my body, and I hold the Bansi or the flute with both my hands. A slight contraction of my upper body differentiates between Mohapatra’s majestic and performative Krishna and my reconstituted Mahari’s humble Krishna. While Mohapatra enacts Krishna, the Mahari’s minimal gesticulation and non-presentational aesthetic remains at ease with herself as embodying Krishna. In a split-second transition, I cover my face with the edge of my Sari to portray the aesthetic depiction of shyness; Radha is shy of Krishna’s romantic encounters. Again, as the Mahari, I am Radha and not portraying Radha. As noted in Sashimoni Devi’s gesticulations of Radha, I deflect my neck forward in this process (Given to Dance). This forward deflection is not considered optimal for the ‘refined’ heroine in Odissi. Rather the frontal neck deflection in Odissi shows the movement of the peacock whose motion is considered animalistic and less refined than that of the classical heroine such as Radha. Through this frontal deflection, I question the foundational assumptions of refinement in Odissi that differentiates between the ‘crude’ Mahari and ‘sophisticated’ Odissi in the first place. I combine my creative faculties to embody the erotic union of Krishna and Radha without representing them. There is no audience for Mahari performance as her ritual movement practice reconfigures the locus of the spiritual center within Odissi resting it in her movement. The inanimate deities require her movement to come alive and enable the continual process of creation through the sexual union between the Hindu god and the goddess. The movement combines religious and performative efficacy while transgressing the male spiritual core of Odissi originally found in Jagannath.
The Unedited Version of my PaR Outcome
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh-bwt8tVuw