Pallavi and Space
PUBLISHED February 21st, 2016 03:06 pm
Pallavi & Space is Chowk Artistic Director Raka Maitra’s attempt to create dialogic contact between the abstract space of classical dance and the concrete, interior, space of the National Museum of Singapore Gallery Theatre.
Working well within the conventions of the traditional Indian dance of Odissi, Maitra’s choreography will navigate abstract spaces constructed through rhythmic, melodic and geometric interventions of the form on the performer’s body. The pallavi that emerges is an elaboration of these abstract spaces, nested within the peculiar performance space that is the Gallery Theatre. Dance, essentially, is movement between abstract and concrete space, and time. It may also be, as in the case of Pallavi & Space, the flow between the old and the new.
Too often in classical dance tradition is played out as something of another time and space (the then and there), different and distinct from the time and place we inhabit (the now and here). Locating Pallavi & Space in the Gallery Theatre, in turn located in a museum, serves to blur the dichotomy between tradition and contemporaneity.
Pallavi and Space is happening on 25 & 26 March 2016, 3pm & 8pm at Gallery Theatre, National Museum of Singapore. Tickets are priced at $28 and $25 (Concession) via Peatix.
