Lady Macbeth does Bharatanatyam

MUMBAI: In the last production of Macbeth in Mumbai, director Alyque Padamsee turned Lady Macbeth into a tantric sorceress and chieftain of witches. (The result was less than magical.) This week, another play attempts a dramatic interpretation of one of Shakespeare's most intriguing characters. Directed by Vikram Iyengar, Crossings: Exploring The Facets Of Lady Macbeth , tackles the character using dance.Fouractors and dancers (Anubha Fatehpuria, Dana Roy, Debashree Bhattacharya andJayati Chakraborty) play Lady Macbeth, using Kathak, Bharatanatyam and Manipuriand passages spoken by characters from across the play. Naya Theatre's NageenTanvir provides the background music. "We tried to flesh out Lady Macbeth'scharacter and also see how classical dance can respond to a text that's so wellknown and well experimented with," says Iyengar.A Kathak dancer,Iyengar runs Ranan Performance Collective, a repertory of dancers and theatreactors in Kolkata. He first considered exploring Lady Macbeth through danceafter watching a solo performance of Lady Macbeth's character by a Chinese operaartist ten years ago in Germany. "I didn't understand the language and I don'tknow codes of opera," he says. "But what she was doing was perfectly clear. Theemotions were very clear. I thought, is it not possible to look at our owntraditional forms from a fresh perspective?"One of the majorchallenges was to make the dance integral to the performance. Iyengar didn'twant the play to go the way of dramas in which dance is an embellishment, avisual element that does nothing for the story. "A lot of classical dancebecomes representational," he explains. "If you're going to use dance toillustrate text, then I might as well read the text. That has been my argumentagainst literal dance."The play, which is being performed in Mumbaifor the first time, has been through successive revisions to achieve this endsince rehearsals began in 2003."We had three dancers responding toit," Iyengar says. "What is the mood through movement? What is the emotionalcontent? What are the metaphors we can draw from?" In the process, the dancersand Iyengar added references to Indian mythological figures Putana and Shakti,who they felt shared similarities with Lady Macbeth. For instance, the playdraws a parallel between Lady Macbeth, who beseeches spirits to aid hermurderous purpose by removing all trace of feminine compassion when she says,"Come to my woman's breast and take my milk for gall," and Putana, a demon totries to feed Krishna poisoned milk. "Shakti can be divine on one hand, and onthe other she can cut people's heads off," Iyengar says. "You have a nurturingShakti and a destructive Shakti. Lady Macbeth has both."Iyengar alsotried to make the dance "ugly". "For example, the idea of shringar is that it'san act of beauty," he explains. "If you look at the text of Macbeth, there arepassages about disguising the face. So we began to look at shringar as hidingthe face. That changes the entire feel of gestures and dance moves." At the sametime, Iyengar had to make sure not to lose sight of the text. "The text has tolead you," he says. "The dance cannot lead you, as the visual skeleton of theplay lies in text."