Well-known dancer Ragini Maharaj performs at Vayam Festival

Due to pandemic and restrictions this year

Mahagami

Gurukul hosted Vayam festival online. It was hosted on social media Facebook and Youtube recently. The two days festival saw

Kathak

and

Odissi compositions

performed by the 2nd generation dancers of the Gurukul. Compositions presented by dancers were taught online; in fact some of these were composed during lockdown.

Every year, artists from the extended family of the

Gurukul

are also invited in Vayam – dancers from the same Guru-parampara and even accompanying musicians. This edition presented Ragini Maharaj, Preetisha Mohapatra and a short production by Chidakash Kalalaya after the Odissi and Kathak performances by Mahagami shishya parivar.

The online version of the festival was organised with an aim to encourage its talented dancers and to celebrate the spirit of dance even in the existing restrictions.

Parwati Dutta

of Mahagami had been artistically active since the beginning of lockdown in mid-March and had designed, curated and initiated a variety of projects and immersions in the past 9 months. Dance immersions were aimed at re-igniting the learners’ minds towards form-making abilities of a dance-movement, creating dance-motifs, metaphors and internalising different aspects of dance. Parwati came up with a range of new compositions – from a sankrit geetam glorifying a flower, to re-looking at taal rupak from the perspective of the sound-form dialogue, a pada by Vidyapati describing Vasant, to a highly imaginative Krishna Tandav (pure dance in Odissi) in which she imagined the divine dance of Krishna during lockdown.

Students got newer insights to think, reflect and respond to the new approaches in learning and living. In the course of this journey of the Mahagami family over a few months, many other dancers, artists, researchers and aspirants kept connecting as participants in online workshops, lectures, seminars of MAHAGAMI. Thus, this year’s Vayam was designed to also showcase these insights, creations and learnings.