Rooh: Within Her – Pagrav Dance Company

Our group found this dance-theatre work to be a moving and powerful expression of female bravery and power. The kathak artist and choreographer Urja Desai Thakore used a palette of kathak, martial and folk dance alongside her own singing voice, narrated words and live music, with the musicians (Gurdain Singh Rayatt, Kaviraj Singh, Prathap Ramachandra and Vijay Venkat) on stage with her, immersed in the stories. 

Some of those attending such a performance for the first time found themselves absorbed for the whole hour, so focused on the central performer that they ‘scarcely noticed the men’. One used the word ‘ignited’ for how she felt, and ‘my eyes began to water.’ 

The props and staging appeared simple, yet in the hands of the designer and performer, achieved ‘so much with so little’. The bamboo was a shape-shifter: weapons, a sword, a dead child – ‘you believed the stick was a child’, it ‘made you feel it’; walls, tree trunks. The large sticks produced a shock when they suddenly fell from above. 

The music, at times the heartbeat of the protagonist, itself became an actor in the drama: at one point, three figures, the musicians, with their percussion, caused her to drop her weapons and with the sound beat her down. 

The stories of female power and bravery encompass an ancient Sangam era poem, another from the early twentieth century, the mother goddess and the activists of the Chipko movement of the 1970s, interwoven with personal stories from the artist’s own family.

Thakore is an expressive performer, who conveyed drama and a range of characterisations through the different sequences: the mother, determined to prove that her son hadn’t fled battle, searches through the battlefield for his body, the toil powerfully suggested by the wielding of a stick; the fourteen-year-old girl, full of confidence, who chases off a (male) lion, a tale related in a poem from 1928 (‘Charan Kanya’ by Jhaverchand Meghani). (This bravery, incidentally, is not a myth but a reality – there are reports of such incidents even in our own century, where girls tending cattle can fend off a lion with their sticks.) The music of the flute brings a change of mood and a reminder of divine feminine power with the gentle and detailed sequence portraying dedication to the mother goddess. In the Chipko sequence Thakore’s own body becomes a tree, her actions vividly portraying the cutting of branches. It ‘made me proud to be a woman’. The names of the women at the heart of this rural feminist action – ‘our bodies before our trees’ – are sung.

Interwoven with these dramatised accounts is a personal narrative, with the voices of three generations in Gujarati and English speaking about bravery, different in each generation: the bravery of Nanda, running away to marry ‘out’; the love which is also brave, that provides a child with two mothers; the child/grandchild who asks for explanations and wants to understand. Grandmothers, mothers, aunts, sisters – these stories produced ‘an enjoyable emotional journey a woman goes through in a lifetime’. Some felt they would have liked to understand the Gujarati words; yet this narrative reflected the reality of how languages can gradually be lost through the generations as people move away from their native lands – whilst reinforcing the power of stories being carried through the generations by women.

Introductions to kathak frequently explain that the word katha means ‘story’ and katthaka is a ‘storyteller’, so kathak is storytelling dance. In Rooh kathak is just one of the means used to communicate these stories by and about women. It has been so often men who tell the stories, men who write the histories. Here, we listen to female voices through a skilful combination of movement, music, words, staging and lighting – and, importantly, in a form that is accessible to new audiences.

Thank you for the responses, Nadia Ahmed, Salma Chaudhury, Sonia Chowdhury and Shanté Campbell – Dar Aminah Book Club and Revoluton Arts.

Compiled by Gopa Roy.

Digital Programme pdf