Kathmandu:

The Nepali audience was lucky to have the opportunity to watch a great personality from the world of Indian performing art on stage.

As a part of 57th Republic Day celebrations, the embassy of India in association with Indian Council of Cultural Relations presented a classical Kathak dance performance by Shovana Narayan at the BICC on January 23.

Indian ambassador to Nepal Shiv Shanker Mukherjee remarked, “Shovana Narayan is one of the few artistes who has gone beyond the level of technical expertise in search of truth, beauty and spiritualism in her dance.”

The sound of Omkar from the conch accompanied by other musical instruments like tabla, sitar, and pakahwaj created an atmosphere of piety at the auditorium. And the show began with four staging a dance offering to lord Shiva, who is also considered as the lord of cosmic dance, or Natraj.

Then entered the most innovative and spontaneous Kathak dancer of India, Shovana Narayan. She danced and talked about the rhythmic patterns of her movements and the symbolic representations she was presenting at the same time. “The dancers communicate not only with their movements, gestures, expressions and words, but also with sounds,” she said. She produced the sound of the trotting of horses with the fast rhythmic movements of her feet.

Taking Nepal as the land of Shiva in the form of Pashupatinath and Vishnu, her next presentation combined the symbolic representation of Hari and Haran meaning Lord Shiva and Vishnu together.

The imagination of her next performance was the clouds, thunder, lightning, and rain and the heroine dancing in the rain, which she performed with beauty, charm, elegance, and sophistication. Equally graceful was her depiction of the gait of different animals like elephant, snake, or peacock.

Keeping with the tradition of Bhawa, the story, she enacted, all through the medium of dance, Draupadi Chir Haran, a scene from the great epic Mahabharata, and the grief of Yashodhara, wife of Gautam Buddha, after he left home without telling her.

As the audience sat enthralled, Narayan was able to sway them to her tempo with her narratives and her movements.