He plucks religion out of Ramayana

Tonight, Sikh Bharatanatyam dancer Navtej Singh Johar fuses classical dance with yoga in a performance that revolves, not around characters in the Ramayana, but objects mentioned in the epic

Tonight's performance at the NCPA is likely to be a peculiar one, with Bharatanatyam exponent and choreographer Navtej Singh Johar ditching characters central to the Ramayana, and focusing on inanimate objects that find a place in Valmiki's epic poem.



"It's an effort to showcase how objects can engage or stimulate the body," says Johar about Dravya Kaya, the last in a three-part dance series, Purush, that focuses on male prodigies in Indian classical dance. Dravya (object) Kaya (body) will explore four archetypal objects from the Ramayana: the Kodanda (Ram's bow), the Lakshman Rekha (the boundary that Sita was asked not to cross), the Valakala Vastra (the bark clothing that Sita wore when leaving for vanvaas) and the rocks that the ape army used to build the bridge to Lanka.

Johar, one of the few Sikh male Bharatanatyam dancers, is known for work that manages to straddle the traditional with the avant-garde. But what he is in the mood to do tonight is to shedu00a0 the symbolism and mythological references that these props are naturally associated with, and use them as mere material objects.
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"It's an attempt to resist layering them with profound meaning because they are deep and beautiful by themselves and don't need further embellishment," says Johar, who has trained at Kalakshetra in Chennai, with Leela Samson in Delhi and at the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. "Ramayana is a beautifully told story. This is my way of reclaiming it without letting any religious rights interfere with it."

Johar, who is trained in Patanjali Yoga at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram in Chennai, will combine classical dance with yoga. "The object is to tell the story," says Johar. "For that, I have used the vocabularies of dance and yoga, allowing them to loosely intermingle."

At: Experimental Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Nariman Point. 6.30 pm. Call: 66223724. Tickets priced at Rs 200 and Rs 300, available at the box office.