Dance Reviews : A Spiritual Lesson for a Lost Friend

Arching over all the technical accomplishment and flash of Chitresh Das’ Kathak dance concert Saturday at Brea Olinda High School was grief over the death of Shubho Shankar, son of Ravi Shankar, who had succumbed to pneumonia four days earlier at the age of 50. Shubho Shankar, a composer and musician himself, was a resident of Garden Grove.

Das and his musicians dedicated the program, which was sponsored by the Pasadena-based Music Circle, to Shubho, with whom they had appeared. Harihar Rao, founder of the Music Circle with the elder Shankar in 1973, opened the concert with verses about the immortality of the soul from the “Bhagavad Gita.”

But it was Das, in illustrating spontaneity--one of the key elements of this North Indian dance style--who provided an impromptu spiritual lesson benefiting the younger Shankar.

After an engaging enactment of the god Krishna’s boyhood triumph over the sea-serpent lord, Das abruptly decided to add another story segment, possibly to the discomfort of his musicians.

Turning to Christopher Ris, his sarod player, he said, “I’m giving Chris a hard time (but) that’s the way it is with a classical art form.” Kathak, after all, began as a storytelling dance form.

The added story was of Krishna stealing the clothes of his consort Radha and her friends while they bathed in a river, and they, naked and humble, having to entreat him for their return.

Perhaps it was only some Westerners in the audience who marveled at the depth of spiritual meaning Das drew from the story. “When you go to the Lord,” he said, “you have to give up everything. . . . That’s the lesson.” The earlier verses from the “Gita” came to mind.

With subtle and fluid facial expressions, as well as deft postures and movements, Das then enacted all the characters of the story.

Elsewhere he demonstrated the brilliantly percussive rhythmic sequences characteristic of this dance style, especially in canonic segments with tabla player Swapan Chaudhuri, who himself offered a dazzlingly intricate and rapid if, so he said, curtailed solo.

Ris provided strong support, underpinning the child Krishna’s ball-tossing games, for instance, with especially buoyant playing.

Unfortunately, the lustrous voice of Mala Ganguly on this occasion went underutilized.

Lewitzky Troupe Opens Season

Answers and resolutions that may have seemed possible in 1986, when Bella Lewitzky choreographed “Facets,” today look impossibly beyond our grasp. But if a happy ending appears a fantasy now, perhaps an acceptable trade-off is perceiving even more deeply the emotional abyss the choreographer has opened at our feet.

“Facets” was seen Thursday at the Japan America Theatre on a three-part program that began the Lewitzky Dance Company’s new season and continued the retrospective of her work.

The piece is structured in a segueing sequence of two duets and a trio and ends with all seven dancers in a kind of communal solidarity. Emotionally, it devolves from heaven to hell and attempts to regain--if not paradise--at least an earthly equivalent.

Nancy Lanier and Walter Kennedy lyrically fulfilled the supportive, ecstatic, symmetrical duties of the first couple. As the second couple, already wary of one another, the superbly controlled Lori McWilliams and John Pennington skid down the scale of trust to explore, test, oppose yet accommodate each other.

No such treaty, however, was possible for Diane Vivona, Roger Gonzalez Hibner and Ken Talley, the powerfully street-smart trio whose stalking confrontations and pitilessness raised horrific social and personal issues.

Although the others returned to share their movement motifs, there was no persuasive pivot to justify a transformation from fear to joy. The happy values appeared merely tacked on, and not even composer Larry Attaway’s skillful recapitulation of earlier gamelan motifs, supported now by deeper harmonies, could justify the regeneration.

Lewitzky’s evergreen formal inventiveness could be seen in “Suite Satie” (1980), which consists of a sequence of sections that keep adding a new dancer virtually to the end, which adds two.

Built upon an ebb and flow of closed and open sculptural forms, melting gestures turning solid, and explorations of torque and momentum, the work rises in a cool arc to mirror the nostalgic ruminations of Satie’s “Trois Gymnopedies.” Then before it gets too predictable that way, Lewitzky abruptly calls the symmetrical games off (with Vivona’s entrance) and raises the ante by incorporating some broken gestures to match a few of his more offbeat piano pieces.

How she managed to make whole cloth of all of this by the conclusion remained one of her pleasant mysteries.

The program ended with the five-part “Pas de Bach,” a witty 1977 sendup of the cliches of academic ballet and the formal mannerisms of the court culture that inspired it.