Shortened Version Reinterprets the ‘Mahabharata’ : Dance: Two local Indian performers have simplified the epic to focus on two of the heroic tale’s pivotal characters.

With Peter Brook’s film adaptation of the “Mahabharata” circulating in local movie houses, local audiences are again familiarizing themselves with the lives of Krishna, Arjuna and Yudhishthira, among a host of other characters, not to mention the great apocalyptic battle at Kurukshetra.

For the three-hour movie, Brook adapted his nine-hour stage version of the great Indian epic, seen in Los Angeles in 1987. But even at nine hours, he had had to simplify and condense the sprawling, 100,000 lines of the original.

So it is not surprising that faced with even shorter running time that the movie, Indian dancers Anjani Ambegaokar and Viji Prakash have made the only sensible decision for their Los Angeles Festival performances of the “Mahabharata.”

They’ve opted to narrow their focus to two pivotal roles for their performances Sunday and Monday at the Wadsworth Theater, UCLA.

Moreover, they will present the epic as a typical Indian dance concert: The musicians will sit on stage, the dancers--Ambegaokar and Prakash, plus 13 of their advanced students--will be dressed in costumes appropriate to the two different styles of dance movement and the stage will be essentially bare, although a backdrop will be used in the battle sequences. Lighting will be used to provide dramatic effects.

“You cannot do the entire ‘Mahabharata,’ ” Prakash says. “It’s too big. It’s too beautiful. You can never do justice to the epic in one evening.”

Prakash will dance the role of Arjuna, one of the godlike heroes who receives the “Bhagavad-Gita” (Song of God)--a discourse on the nature of reality--from Lord Krishna at the start of the final battle.

Ambegaokar will dance Karna, one of the warriors who fights against Arjuna and his brothers, the Pandavas, without knowing--until toward the end--that he actually is their half-brother.

“We both felt that, being two strong performers, we needed two strong characters,” Ambegaokar says. “Karna is a very important part of ‘Mahabharata.’ There are some of us who say, if there were no Karna, we would not have a ‘Mahabharata.’ ”

A parable of the fall from innocence into evil and corruption, the 2,000-year-old epic combines poetry, myth, religion and fable as it depicts the conflict between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, who are rival cousins.

“The Kauravas symbolize evil and the Pandavas symbolize good,” Prakash says.

But Ambegaokar regards Karna as the epic’s underdog.

“He was not a cruel person,” Ambegaokar says. “He was the greatest giver in the world. Everyone, including his mother, took advantage of his goodness. . . .

“I like to show somebody who was not given justice in life,” she adds.

For Prakash, Arjuna is a “valorous, dashing hero” and the epic is about “the triumph of good over evil.

“But good and evil themselves are two such controversial terms,” she cautions. “These are two different forces within us. A lot of times I feel like a Pandava and I feel like a Kaurava. And that’s what the epic does for you.”

Says Ambegaokar: “No one character is good all the time. . . . There are so many teachings you can learn through the ‘Mahabharata.’ ”

For all the epic’s emphasis upon dharma (cosmic order and right conduct), all the rules of dharma break down during the final 18-day battle. “Everything is codeless,” Prakash says. “You fight, you cheat, you lie. . . . There are so many wrong things that were done, and I think that’s what the ‘Mahabharata’ shows us.

“There are many ways to deviate from (the road) but essentially you come back to the truth.”

According to Ambegaokar, the “Mahabharata” actually “is not a religious book to Hindus.

“ ‘Bhagavad-Gita’ is,” she says. “We are told not to keep ‘Mahabharata’ in the house because it’s basically a family feud. It’s family fighting against family. You don’t keep something like that. It doesn’t bring in blessings.”

With dancers drawn from their respective schools, the two will trace the major events of the epic from the births of the men through their rivalries to the death of Karna on the battlefield.

Beyond that, the two will play multiple roles, switching from character to character within a single dance, as is customary in dance forms each is expert at--Kathak, a northern Indian dance style for Ambegaokar, and Bharata Natyam, a southern Indian form, for Prakash.

“They are solo dance forms in which we switch and take on different characters,” Prakash says. “That’s the freedom and the beauty that the dance forms afford.”

For example, Ambegaokar will play both Karna and his mother Kunti, who also is the mother of the five Pandavas, when she meets her grown son for the first time and reveals his true identity.

Similarly, Prakash will be both Arjuna and Krishna in the “Bhagavad-Gita” sequence.

The collaboration will bring together distinctly different dance styles that are rarely performed together. As a result, both musicians and dancers will be faced with unique problems.

“Both traditions are very classical,” Ambegaokar says, “both are based on Hindu mythology. So thematically, they share stories. But when it comes to the technique of both the dance forms and the music, there is a vast difference.

“We follow the north Indian or Hindustani music. They follow the Karnatic Indian music forms. There are some common ragas that almost overlap or just with a slight adjustment they can be worked out. Same thing with the rhythms . . . Those smaller adjustments can be worked out to make sure we maintain the whole tradition. But the musicians are going to be quite challenged, too, because they have their own feelings about what the performance should be.”

Beyond the music, each dance form has unique stylized hand movements and poses and each involves a different degree of spontaneity, speed and type of footwork.

Prakash remains optimistic. “Everything we’re doing is new,” she says. “But I think we’ll be successful because dance and music have no boundaries.”