Mythology re-written

To celebrate World Dance Day, IHC is organising a show titled Rage And Beyond - Irawati’s Gandhari, a solo dance-theatre presentation by Sanjukta Wagh on April 29.

Wagh is a Kathak dancer, trained in Hindustani music and theatre. Her work Rage and Beyond: Irawati’s Gandhari has been conceived in collaboration with sociologist Gita Chadha and has been nominated for the national theatre awards, META in six categories including choreography, direction and costume. Rage and Beyond is not just Wagh’s response to the character of Gandhari as she appears in Iravati Karve’s Yugant, a text that is supposed to be the first contemporary reinterpretations of the Mahabharata by a woman writer in the 1960’s. 

Wagh said, “When I enter in to this text in 2014, I started negotiating with the tremendous ebb and flow that inevitably happens when one tries to embody an archetype, a mythological character that is so deeply  entrenched in the Indian  cultural consciousness. In this rewriting and embodiment of Irawati’s Gandhari, I am trying 

to keep this complexity alive without the need to either essentialise or glorify either author or her character, by not trying to fill in the blanks.”