O.C. DANCE REVIEW : Das Dedicates Brea Program in Memory of Ravi Shankar’s Son

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 renowned Indian composer and sitar player 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 befitting 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 story-telling 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.

* OBITUARY: Family releases details of Shakar’s death. F3