Maharaj - Leigh Witchel

Conversations with a Legend

Kathak Dance
Pandit Birju Maharaj
Symphony Space
New York, NY
October 6, 2006

by Leigh Witchel
copyright 2006 by Leigh Witchel

We’re used to performances in Western dance. We go to the theater, buy a ticket, the curtain goes up, we watch (intently, one hopes), the curtain goes down, and then we go home, (entertained and enriched, one hopes). Indian dance can be successfully adapted to Western performance expectations; Nrityagram Dance Ensemble has earned its fame doing exactly that. But like jazz, there are dance forms that a conventional performance cannot fully contain. They are improvisatory by nature and aren’t presented to the viewer; they are conversations and dialogues. The audience’s response — and pure chance — dictate what will happen.

At 69, Pandit Birju Maharaj is a legend of Kathak dance; taught by his fathers and uncles, then developing his own style, and finally passing on the art to his disciples, two of whom shared the stage with him. The audience that came to Symphony Space did not just come to watch; they came to celebrate and adore. The evening was planned and unplanned. There were three set dances, two scenes from the life of Krishna and one of Indra, but even those seemed informal. More often the dancers came to the microphone and spoke of aspects of the art of Kathak and then demonstrated with an example of narrative poetry and mime, rhythmic bols — rapid syllabification, or percussive footwork.

Viewing performers for the first time at the end of legendary careers can be perplexing; there’s both a leap of faith and extrapolation needed to imagine them at the summit of their power. Maharaj still is a master of rhythmic agility but his movement is curtailed; the famed spinning chakras of Kathak were only done by his female students Saswati Sen and Mahua Shankar. Even they were not in the same sort of physical condition as the Nrityagram dancers. It’s more obvious than in other classical Indian dance; technique and virtuosity is a hallmark of Kathak.

For the uninitiated it was a long evening. The performance went on for three hours total. Like some other Indian dance performances, the atmosphere was free-form; Sen admonished the audience leaving for an intermission after an hour and a half of performance to please keep it to “only 15 minutes if possible” as if it really were up to us and not the stage manager. But anyone could sense the joy of the evening in the improvisations which poured forth from all the performers. The tabla player, the drummer who is the backbone of a Kathak performance, was not the scheduled player who had accompanied Maharaj for five years. The man, whose name I could not catch in the announcement, had only met Maharaj on that day but was thrilled to perform with him. He played attentive and wide-eyed, following the dancers’ improvisations as a tennis player might follow the volley from the other side of the net.

Sen, the senior of Maharaj’s students, announced that instead of performing an eleven beat composition, she would perform a new one of nine and a half beats. Nine and a half. I asked a friend expert in Indian dance to count the beats after the performance; it wasn’t possible with English numbers, but could be done with bols. It seemed the performance’s length was because Maharaj was enjoying himself so much that he could not stop.

At the end, after the lights were turned up and the audience was filing up the aisles to exit, Sen returned to the bare stage and had the microphone reactivated to thank the audience and say that Maharaj had rarely had an audience so inspiring. At his essence, Maharaj seemed not a performer, but a teacher of generous spirit. “Rhythm is everywhere. God made the first rhythm, that of your heart.” The stage was the school, the performance was the class, the audience his beloved pupils.

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Conversations with a Legend