Beauty Pours Forth With The Greatest of Ease

The dancers of the Nrityagram Dance Ensemble move with such sure-footed ease and softness in the hips, it's easy to forget the monumental discipline that underlies what they do. This was especially so in "Pratima: Reflection," a suite of dances in the ancient Indian dance form odissi, which the group performed Thursday at Strathmore.

Odissi is a demanding art, and to prepare for a performance the dancers drip clarified butter into their eyes as lubrication, because the way they move their eyes is as important as the way they move their feet. Their training -- eight hours a day, six days a week -- at a residential compound outside the Indian city of Bangalore includes jogging at daybreak and core conditioning. In mastering odissi, the women must learn some four dozen positions of the hand, as well as those for the eyebrows, eyelids (yes, the lids), cheeks, fingers and so on.

(Why are only women in the company -- why no men? "Men are welcome" at the compound, said Surupa Sen, Nrityagram's artistic director, speaking to the audience after Thursday's performance. "But men don't last very long.")

The beauty of it is that the dancing reveals none of this effort. Odissi, whose roots stretch back 2,000 years, mimics the postures of Hindu gods in ancient temple sculptures. The idea is to give human form to the serpentine poses and minutely detailed gestures while conveying aspects of the immortals.

There was a place for strength in "Pratima," inspired by the myths of creation -- the dancers could stamp up a rainstorm with their bare feet and excitable ankle bells. But their more ethereal qualities opened the door to a whole world of rich expression. Those well-oiled eyes gleamed with riveting intensity but without harshness, while the fingers might shimmer like flames or describe the transition from bud to flower with a sharp, clear unfolding.

Ballet dancers should study Nrityagram's mute language of gestures, the way the arm movements start at the spine and scoop outward, animated by an inner urgency as distinctive as the motion itself. The dancers' training allowed them to isolate a leg, say, so it could swivel freely in the hip socket, but no movement was truly isolated. Ripples from this coring motion of the leg would echo through the dancers' wrists and fingers.

Dancing that tells a story needs this kind of three-dimensional, full-body communicative power. Just one piece on the program was abstract -- "Chhaya," or image -- but the rest depicted strands of Hindu lore. "Vibhakta" probed the idea of male and female, describing how the two were once harmoniously united in one being. This was the evening's crowning success, because the dancers -- Sen and Bijayini Satpathy, the troupe's stalwarts -- were so exquisitely eloquent, and the concept was so captivating. As Sen sank deep into a crouch, her hands rippling the air, you were struck by how in odissi, the hip joint is used not for lifting -- not for extending the leg up to the sky -- but for deepening, for drawing the body in and down. It's a different focus and a strikingly different metaphor. In so much of Western dance, the line of the leg is up, outward, an arrow pointing into space. Here, the leg curves and sinks. It's sucked in. The infinite is inside.