Written by the internationally acclaimed writer and composer Craig Christie, the musical will premiere at the MC Showroom, Clifton St, Prahran in Melbourne from November 2nd to November 12th. “You can give them a good script, but obviously it has to come from them.Prepare to be enchanted and enthralled as you enter the mythical world of timeless evil in the eagerly anticipated new Australian musical, VILLAINY. “It’s a subject of long discussion, the sacred and the profane, but I think it comes from the individuality of the dancers themselves,” says the choreographer. Opening will be solo bharata natyam performances from some of Govinda’s star pupils-but don’t make the mistake of thinking that these are sacred dances while the main event is more secular. The Monk and the Courtesan runs at the Scotiabank Dance Centre from Thursday to Saturday (February 19 to 21). It’s just that bharata natyam is on the ground and ballet is in the air, so the beauty of using the two techniques together is that it gives a different blend.” So I do believe that a good, trained body can easily assimilate different dance forms. for many years, just on the strength of his training in Chinese classical dance.
“For example, Chengxin came from the Beijing Academy with hardly any ballet training and was able to join Ballet B.C. “There are similarities, I find, in all forms of movement,” says Govinda, explaining that he’s more interested in what unites cultures than in what divides them. And while Naidu is a bharata natyam specialist, Wei and Jone were originally trained in Chinese classical dance. As a new work rather than an adaptation of traditional dance, The Monk and the Courtesan is a chance for the Quebec-born Govinda to work with the techniques he learned as a young dancer with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal. There’s more being fused here than body and spirit, though.
So it’s about looking beyond the appearance of life and of material things-and about going beyond their face value.” So he’s on his way back home and he hears a voice, and the courtesan-or the goddess, we don’t know-tells him that what he’s seen was real. And when he wakes up, there’s nobody else left there-the courtesan is gone, and everybody else watching is gone. “As he watches the courtesan dance,” Govinda continues, “he enters into a kind of a trance and sees the goddess. But he keeps dreaming about this courtesan, and the dream tells him to go and see her dance.”Īrmed with holy ardour, the monk sets off to end this sacrilege-but what he finds is not what he expected. “It’s a very simple tale about a monk who hears that there’s a courtesan who’s been dressing as the goddess that he worships,” explains Govinda, in an early-morning telephone interview from his Vancouver home. Based on a Buddhist tale from Japan, the trio for Chengxin Wei, Jessica Jone, and Paromita Naidu is an apt metaphor for choreographer Jai Govinda’s fascination with art that fuses the ancient with the contemporary and the sacred with the profane. Still, in the dualistic culture we’ve inherited as North Americans, some people need more convincing-and they’d be well advised to check out The Monk and the Courtesan, the latest production from the Mandala Arts and Culture Society. Based on ancient Hindu temple dances yet firmly rooted in the corporeal, the movement form known as bharata natyam is living proof that flesh and spirit are one.
0 kommentar(er)
