Animal Fables Need a Lesson in Pacing

Orange County-based dancer and choreographer Ramaa Bharadvaj was inspired to create her newest work while trying to interest her young son in the classical Indian dance tradition. What resulted was “Panchatantra: Animal Fables of India,” adapted from ancient Sanskrit tales and presented by Bharadvaj’s Angahara Ensemble at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa on Sunday.

Six danced and mimed stories to taped music were linked by domestic scenes in which--using the lip-sync method--a mother discussed with her children the moral of a story: Respect the Earth, never be a bully, never act too hastily. Then the entire plot line of each story was narrated in darkness before it was too often laboriously acted and danced out. Narrative surprises never had a chance.

Lugubrious pacing was not helped by the predominance of subtle, obscure mime and the overuse of masks. While sometimes effective, full masks took away the face’s expressive power, one of the primary components of the bharata natyam dance form.

Transgressing all known rules of children’s (and most adults’) attention spans, the program ran three hours, so it was a reduced audience that saw stories that finally sparked in the second half. In “Labdhapranasham,” laughs were generated for the first time by a group of frolicking monkey bumpkins. Wearing clever partial masks, they demonstrated Bharadvaj’s gift for adapting the darting attack and elegant edges of classical steps into animal personas.

The ensemble provided generally strong support for Bharadvaj and her daughter Swetha, who did the most satisfying expressive and technical dancing in the three second act pieces. The company might want to make these the centerpiece for its April 20 date at the Luckman Theater, and desperately seek a story editor for the rest.