Aunusthan, Pagrav Dance Company
Pagrav Dance Company in Aunusthan © Simon Richardson
Kathak is a form of Indian Classical Dance, and likely the oldest dance form I’ll be reviewing this year - it can trace its origins to 400BCE! Normally used to tell stories, Pagrav Dance Company Artistic Director Urja Desai Thakore has created a work that celebrates the dance style in and of itself.
The choreography featured the main building blocks of Kathak: dizzying spins, precisely moved heads and hands, and foot tapping. Lots and lots of foot tapping. Wearing a strap of bells on each ankle, the dancer’s feet were instruments in their own right, an additional layer to the quartet of traditional Indian instruments being played on either side of the stage. There was no room for mistakes here — we’d hear it. It was like a barefooted tap performance.
While their feet padded the floor in waves of intensity (the piece finished with nothing but the increasing tapping of their feet, an impressive climax that highlighted the deceiving difficulty of the movement), the upper body had a gracefulness about it. Like a swan, it was calm while feet batted away underneath. Heads smoothly moved from side to side and hands worked through a series of positions, sometimes at impressive pace like the quick-change model that went viral a few years ago. Furthermore, their arms were rarely fully extended, an interesting break from the western dance expectation to always lean into a movement as much as you can. It was incredibly subtle, except for the huge moments of whip-fast, dizzying spins each section built up to.
Pagrav Dance Company in Aunusthan © Simon Richardson
It was an intense hour of dance (their stamina was incredible), although ‘Aunusthan’ never truly developed from its starting point and consequently struggled to continuously hold my attention. The gentle score (by Alap Desai and Atul Desai) didn’t help here, lacking significant dynamic changes to springboard the choreography off into new directions.
The work is a larger version of a piece for four dancers which has been touring rural parts of the country as part of The Place’s ‘Rural Touring Dance Initiative’, a scheme to bring dance to rarely visited towns. I’m so pleased that Pagrav, a leader in Kathak performance in the UK, has taken part in this programme, so that people across the UK have the opportunity to experience the full spectrum of the wonderful world of dance.
★★★★
Aunusthan by Pagrav Dance Company
The Place, London / 16 November 2024
Press ticket
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