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Reflections on the creation on BHAKTIPlayhouse Drama: 4 – 7 November 2010 The possibility of creating a work like BHAKTI, was a gift offered to all of us involved in the process and the final performances. As a choreographer, I have been fascinated by the way in which we are able to combine, fuse and allow to clash, many of the dance styles and forms available to us. For a group of contemporary dancers with a strong African contemporary dance background to be confronted with 4 highly skilled classical Indian dancers (in both Bharatha Natyam and Kathak) was a wonderfully fluid meeting of styles and forms. Given that this work was also about embracing the development of dancers, the choreographic process I chose to follow was one of collaboration. What emerged was a deeply respectful process of working that resulted in a dance theatre work that began to really challenge the way in which all of us value different dance languages; and opened up the possibilities of how we can create dance theatre work with such varying starting points. One of the delights of this collaboration was the grace of working with musicians who sat in on our rehearsal process and created a score that went with the work. We were able to join together the maskanda guitar of Madala Kunene, the tabla drums of Vishen Kemraj with the flute and djembe drums of Mandla Matsha. At the heart of BHAKTI was my deep respect for the writings of the Sufi poet Rumi and his expressed sacred spinning to enter into communion with the divine – something that the whirling dervishes dance to all the time. My growing style of creating dance theatre is about offering a ‘total experience’ to the audience and so the desire to layer the work with spoken texts and with visual images. This brought to the collaboration the participation of both Karen Logan (a Durban based film maker) and Iain ewok Robinson – a spoken word poet who was up for the challenge of taking Rumi’s verse and turning it into “Rumi-rhymes’” and working it into yet another layer of the work. BHAKTI received a standing ovation each night and this is perhaps testament to how the work moved people. In the end the work was also, for us, an act of devotion – bhakti. ~ Lliane Loots ~  Bhakti 2010 at The Playhouse Drama Picture by: Val Adamson  Bhakti 2010 at The Playhouse Drama Picture by: Val Adamson |
