Performed by prison inmates, the star of the show was Valmiki. However, never did I see a performer who could integrate his conviction of violence and its confusion with its abandonment into non-violence; and a man, hitherto so unquestioning, to fall into a series of existential doubt to the point he starts to fear himself, his detachment, his own genius!
Susmita Dasgupta
On the November 17, 2024, Alokananda Roy’s production of the 100 th and final stage show of Rabindranath Tagore’s dance drama, Valmiki Pratibha, was hosted at the Rabindra Sarobar Stadium, Kolkata. It was a production that even the mighty Bollywood could learn from. It was a production that Bangkok’s Ramakein could be envious of. It was a production that could have the Uzbeks and the Kyrghyz dancers, or the Russian ballerinas pine for perfection.
In short, this was a production that Tagore truly deserved but never got. It was, I think as my parents tell me, as magical as watching Uday Shankar perform on stage.
However, the unique feature of the production was that the performers, both on and off stage, were inmates –
staff and the released prisoners of the Presidency Jail, Kolkata, now called as a correctional home.
In 2000, BD Sharma, IPS, DG Prisons, invited Alokananda Roy to grace a few cultural programmes in the Alipore jail, where she was suddenly inspired to use dance to realign the convicts. Roy is a celebrated dance exponent of the city and the prison became her calling.
Dance was exercise, a discipline at the deployment of the body in time and space, and into a rhythm that used the body’s unspent energies to converge towards the aesthetic unity of a tangible form. In the dance drama, one not only needed to calibrate the body, but also to coordinate with many others to harmonize the individual action into a collective rhythm of the performance. This convergence, or realignment as it is usually called in the parlance of prison reforms, was used to dissolve the unmanaged anxieties which often lead to social anomie, or, crime in this case.
In her own words, she says that she worked with non-dancers, those who never knew what dance was, and even derided as a non-masculine craft. She used this to her advantage as she pumped huge energy into the movements with the detailed precision of a martial artist. And with this, they became the bandits in the band of Ratnakar, who would then become Valmiki, the subject matter of the play, Valmiki Pratibha.
The coordination of movements of the dancers were as well ordered and coordinated as those one gets to witness in the synchronized swimming events at the Olympics. The movements were as precise to include even the finger and toe phalanges. What was more important is that the dance emanated from the song and its rhythm, rather than being a set of movements superimposed on a song, a folly that choreographers often make.
The music was not merely the accompaniment, but held and carved out the melodies and harmonies to lend altogether a new level of meaning to the lyrics. With the costumes and props as detailed as the choreography, and the lighting as graded as the singing and music, the prison inmates and staff had put up a show that could give the arrangements of AR Rahman a run for his money.
And all of this was done by the wardens and superintendents along with the inmates of the prison!
Since the production could delve so deep through its details into Tagore’s genius, the drama brought out the spirit of the play as never before. Valmiki’s is a journey of the anxious and uncollected soul into the surrender to a higher purpose. The higher purpose, yet hidden from the soul, nonetheless waits to be discovered in the certainty of its existence, and, yet, the anxious anticipation and apprehension of its
discovery braced every step of every dancer. Each moment in the composition was raised towards the climax, making the drama a heady experience of rapid movements and elevated rhythm.
The star of the show was of course Valmiki. I have watched Valmiki being played by major music schools of Kolkata in my childhood, when Bengali culture was still at its zenith. However, never did I see a performer who could integrate his conviction of violence and its confusion with its abandonment into non-violence; a man so entrenched in his everyday life so as to be utterly so mindless about his own genius; a man so surprised by himself that he is led into confusion; and a man, hitherto so unquestioning, to fall into a series of existential doubt to the point he starts to fear himself, his detachment, his own genius!
Usually, performers in the role of Valmiki abandon the dance movements and simply walk about the stage to express bafflement and foreboding. But, in this production, Valmiki never for a moment came out of his dance mode even when he was required to only stare ahead in bewilderment. Such was the power of Alokananda Roy’s choreography.
The songs of Valmiki were sung by BD Sharma, each moment of the transition from puzzlement to perplexity, to elation and excitement, and, eventually to content and surrender was expressed in his style diction, voice tonality and pitch. Rarely have these songs been renditioned in the way that Sharma could do.
The of the Vanadevi were sung by the wardens, far surpassing those I hear from leading music schools of the city. However, but most outstanding were the songs sung by the bandits, somewhat crude in diction and coarse in voice, each note composed by Tagore was touched in detail.
The animals were choreographed stunningly once more with detailed costumes. There were many hand movements with handkerchiefs and ribbons, which showed the perfected moves by the dancers.
The showstopper was the curtain call, because even this was choreographed to the hilt; every bow was calculated, every position placed perfectly, and even the dancers who played the animals remained in the state four leggedness and winged avatars, and took their bows by nodding horns and spreading their feathers. The swan and the owl — flapping their wings. When a piece of paper was accidentally dropped, a performer immediately picked it up; this is a colossal mark of the sense of order.