Chhau!!!

I am going to feel every single cell separately in my body tomorrow morning, I know it and I am dreading it; but it will have been worth it.

There was a Chhau workshop in the city today; actually has been for the past two days, but thanks to The Hindu’s unconscionably tardy reportage I only knew about it today.

Now, I have only seen Chhau being performed live once. This was at the glorious festival of dance organised by the Sangeet Natak Academy on the theme of Sankhya - numbers zero to ten. Eleven dance choreographies in all, each interpreting a number. Wonderful stuff - some of it downright sublime. The Chhau performance was based on the number three. They used the concept of Trimurti as a platform to explore the number.

Chhau is an extraordinary dance form. It has been awarded status of a classical dance form in India but a lot of it I find is very modern in spirit; in dance terms I perhaps mean ‘contemporary’. What I am trying to say is that in Chhau a lot of the time the body does not ‘represent’, the body ‘becomes’. As against the symbolist and stylised approach of most other classical dance forms, Chhau attempts a sort of fragmented Modernist realism.

This attempt then, at becoming various things, is very demanding on the body. It is superb watch if done with control and involvement, but as I learnt today difficult, bloody difficult.

The workshop was conducted by Chhau exponent Pandit Gopal Dubey. Of course there is only so much you can learn in a day and we were only there to get a taste of what it must be like. But even that was hard on my normally unexerted poor body. Besides, everybody apart from me was a trained dancer, some in more forms than one. There were five others in all and three of them were dance gurus.

There was this one sequence which we learnt as an example - the representation of a wounded deer. The deer has an arrow right through it and it is writhing in pain and fear. The body is contorted in several ways while moving in a large elliptical locus while a hand each is to hold the entry and exit wounds. It was arduous. It was fantastic. I was thinking in my mind while I was doing it-

Koi mere dil se pooche teri teer-e-neemkash ko

Ye khalish kahan se hoti jo jigar ke paar hota

I am somewhat high with exhilaration as you must see, otherwise I wouldn’t be unwisely exerting my very sore shoulders any more tonight to write what I know is a jumble of unconnected facts and exclamations, but what the hell!