They plucked out flowers out of thin air, called stars and commanded them to twinkle. They summoned oceans and made them dance, made rain without a single cloud.
These were no dancers, these were conjurors.

So if dance is poetry in motion, what is poetry interpreted through dance?

I watched Kolkata-based dancer Vandana Hazra and her troupe perform today and while I didn’t exactly find an answer to the above question, I came away dazzled.

I’m not very familiar with Rabindranath Tagore’s work, or Bharatnatyam, or Chau for that matter, but I know magic when I see it and what I saw on stage today was *it*. Now I know that dancers are supposed to own the space around them but these ones? They left no space. Every inch of that stage was filled with flowers, forests, stars, rain, rivers…and all of it created in seconds out of gestures and thin air. A delicate flick of a wrist made a raindrop, fingers unfurled into blossoming flowers; arms melted into fluid wavelets and waists into riverbends.

It was like watching a poem come to life.

Most pieces began with Vandana translating the poems into English for the mostly non-Bengali audience. The musicians would then take it up and Vandana would either perform solo, or with one other dancer. The performances were mostly Bharatnatyam but the poems which contained characters in conflict, had a combination of Bharatnatyam and Chau.

And it was in these pieces that the difference between the two forms was most stark – Bharatnatyam is all grace and delicacy and form, and Chau is all movement and energy and balance. The choreography was aptly done, in that, all the strong moving characters like rivers and storms were executed in Chau, and all the softer, earthier characters were in Bharatnatyam (that Chau dancer floated around on stage like she had never heard of that silly little thing called gravity, or bones for that matter!).

It was amazing to see how two distinct forms of expression could come together so flawlessly on one stage, but maybe that was the whole show was about - blurring the boundaries between poetry, music, dance, and magic.