Authentic Indian Work Will Pay Homage to Poet Meera Bai : Dance: Santa Ana-based foundation will present a three-hour version of the 16th-Century figure’s life.

Are you ready for some real Indian music and dance? Last week, we saw the pseudo-Indian 19th-Century confusions of “La Bayadere,” danced by American Ballet Theatre at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

This week, public television stations broadcast Peter Brook’s austere, stripped-down six-hour version of the Indian epic “The Mahabharata,” using an international cast and putting a definite Western spin on the work.

Now the Santa Ana-based Shree Haridaasa Tharangini Foundation will present a three-hour dance-drama version of the life of the 16th-Century Indian poet and saint Meera Bai at the Long Beach Convention Center on Saturday.

The program was conceived and coordinated by Los Angeles dancer Viji Prakash, who said Meera Bai “has been a tremendous influence on my life.”

“I grew up listening to her songs and compositions,” Prakash said in a recent interview.

“There is such a simplicity and sincerity about them. All (Indian) dancers and musicians sing and dance her bhajans, or poems which were written as an offering to the god Krishna,” she said. “Generally, these are done as a means of social upliftment . . . to create that feeling of oneness.”

Meera Bai was a Rajput princess who devoted her life to Krishna, leaving behind some 400 songs of ecstatic praise of the god. Her life was not easy, however, with such one-pointed devotion evoking suspicion and ridicule.

“Her life is sheltered in a lot of mystery and legend,” Prakash said. “The time when she lived was when the Hindus and the Moguls were fighting and even the Rajputs were fighting among themselves.”

Ordered by her husband to kill herself, Meera was about to throw herself into a river, when, according to the story, Krishna intervened and saved her. After various pilgrimages to cities sacred to the god, Meera Bai simply vanished.

“We don’t know what happened to her,” Prakash said. “In our story, Meera passed away in (the city of) Dwarka in the temple of Ranchor.”

As in a program sponsored by the foundation last year, the program will incorporate distinct dance idioms, in this case Bharata Natyam, the classic style of the South; Kathak, the style of the North, and Odissi, a temple-sculpture-derived style of east India.

“It’s important to break down the barriers between the forms,” said Prakash. “We have to see beyond the north and the south. There’s a universality in all these arts forms.”

The life of the Indian Saint Meera Bai will be danced Saturday at 6:30 p.m. at the Long Beach Convention Center, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach. Dancers will include Viji Prakash, Chitresh Das and Nandita Behera. Musicians will include Shubho Shankar, Lakshmi Shankar and Jahnavi Jayaprakash. Tickets: $10 to $20. Information: (213) 436-3661.