Aditi Mangaldas is among the world’s best dancers. A gift to all who love beautiful movement and philosophical quests: the search for wisdom and joy. Without the body, you go nowhere and hence dance is one great vehicle. Trained in Kathak, or rather excelling in it, she has incorporated modern dance and its themes to create wonder.
Aditi’s ‘Lost in the Forest’ expanded further on her oft discussed questions about human existence, where we are and where we are going, where everything is uncharted. In her ‘Uncharted Seas’, her theme was Krishnamurti’s thoughts.
‘We look for fixed points, but there are none, either in ourselves or outside in the universe. To live without these fixed points is our challenge.’ J Krishnamurti
Aditi Mangaldas, slender and gorgeous, albeit 65, danced her thoughts at the NCPA. Dance is an amazing ephemeral medium, where a human defies gravity. Gravity binds us, ruling what we will not and, indeed, cannot do. Her dances are successful fusions based on kathak. Fusion is very hard to manage successfully and gracefully as ‘it often seeks to amalgamate disparate styles and moods’. Aditi has grown up with the art-related elders of our time, (who patronised and protected culture in the early days after ‘47). And so, she dances about our strange reality, an often fearful existence as we know so much and no more and walk through thick, green undergrowth and dark forests: thus far and no further. Standing alone looking out at the heavy, forbidding trees, she looks at other life: deer prancing shyly, snakes sliding and birds fluttering as the sun rises again every morning.
We too wonder: Now what was our existence really about? We ask quietly or loudly, where we are headed. If anywhere! What lies beyond this, beyond our perception? What lies secretly and we will never know? For Hindu believers, the answer is often: Be still and know you are reality. Is this a search accompanied by others or outside us or perhaps we simply need to be still and know that we are god? Or perhaps no search, no movement, no thought at all is necessary.
Then Aditi reiterates Krishnamurti’s statement that you find when you no longer seek and asks if we can exist and search without movement, in stillness. Even in silence, our mind may not be still, but simply fixate on other things. People near death talk of tunnels of light, of knowing things, feeling voices, and hearing thoughts. Are these ‘the corridors of light’ that Aditi wonders about? Like an artist submerged in movement knows, there is neither time nor space nor you nor me, just a timeless now, and there are no borders to our feelings, our being.
The process is very important; the exploration, the exaltation, the disappointments, through which a piece develops - Aditi Mangaldas
All life is me Earlier she asked if this will be revealed in silence, ‘like the soft sound of dew falling upon a leaf in a dream or will it perhaps be in thunder and lightning? Like the noise of creation itself’? She quoted Rumi: ‘My heart is on fire, in my madness I roam the desert. The flames of my passion devour the wind and the sky’, and led us into the scary jungle of existence and slowly out of it.
Many mystics say the dance, the music and all life is me, that yes, the moon and stars are all in me. Others add: Stop the search and truth itself will come in search of you. What is this truth? That you and I and the dance of existence are one? That we are our brother’s keeper, each other’s dance partner?
Aditi studied under Shrimati Kumudini Lakhia and Shri Birju Maharaj. She has studied and trained again (and faster!) in Kathak’s swift turns and footwork and created anew. With gorgeous costumes in silvery green, forest colours, night hues, and with sharp movements, she recreates human emotions, wonder, energy, exhaustion at nightfall and renewal again and again. Loved stories are loved for a reason. They tell tales of adventures and downfalls and we know what happened and are happy to see it again. So, these dances and tales of humanity’s wonder and quests are always happy events.
Tiny and slender, she still fills the stage by herself. She knows Kathak so well that she can use it for building future forms, current concerns, and humanity’s experiences. Her foundation is strong enough to play with and produce fusion, bringing various moods, past stories, and today’s searches, which she depicts grandly and lovingly and with so much vulnerability on stages across the world.