At one moment, her fingers form a lotus, at another; she applies imaginary kohl to outline her eyes. Here she makes a seated traditional pose to denote a patient waiting for her lover or expecting him desperately or immersed into some deep thought. And there, she looks at the mirror to admire her reflection.
French dancer and choreographer Brigitte Chataignier strikes a matrix of expressions, gestures, hand-movements and leg-postures of pure classical Mohiniyattam, only to mesmerise the bemused onlookers. It is indeed intriguing to find a French woman’s fixation for a South Indian nritya, but that is exactly what happened to Brigitte, a good 26 summers ago, when she visited India for the first time with her husband Michael Lestrehan, who picked up Kathakali, another dance style stemming out of the Deccan plateau.
“Both Mohiniyattam and Kathakali are like sisters emerging from the same soil, grown and fostered in similar ambience, and learnt mostly by aspirants hailing from the same province of Kerala. But with time, Indian classical dances like Kathak, Odissi, Bharatnatyam, Mohiniyattam and Kathakali have expanded their reach beyond borders and have become popular in other parts of the world as well. Their intricate beauty, finer nuances, subtle aesthetics and flawless technique certainly call for a work of preservation for the posterity,” Brigitte says.
Having been a serious student of western classical dance back home, Brigitte was formally trained in ballet.
“I was barely five or six years old then and used to go to a small institution that taught me the power and finesse of toe work, and the art of spinning literally on one foot. By the time I was a teenager, say around 14, I decided to completely devote myself to dance,” Brigitte fondly recollects the beginning of her journey.
Later as it was predestined, Brigitte took a wholehearted plunge into contemporary dance and joined another institute to brace her basics. Simultaneously, she perfected her histrionics with mime and grasped the ropes from a school specialist in the genre. She also dabbled in a string of theatrical workshops to hone her acting skills and expressions to gel as an integral part of dance in its entirety. It wasn’t just out of the blue that this nimble-footed nartaki simply fell for Mohiniyattam at first sight. It was on her mind to learn traditional art forms in India ever since she made dance her destiny. But a chance trip to India in 1986 just cemented the ties for her.
“Yes, I did travel to this part of the globe along with my husband, only to get glued to one of its richest and conventional dance forms, out of a vast treasure-trove of other classical genres,” she says.
“I always wanted to link my area of discipline with an ethnic dance form that is strongly rooted to a country’s culture, and India has a wealthy cultural heritage with myriad kinds of codes, customs and indigenous traditions. So, I feel immensely proud to be associated with this particular form of dance that is so spiritual at its core. It is slow but sublime, and offers an oasis of peace and solace to the minds of both the performer as well as the delighted spectators. It is amusing to watch a gracefully attired dancer, bedecked with floral make-up and draped in an elegant sari, perform live on stage from a distance,” she explains.
After Brigitte’s career took a new turn in the late 80s, during which she discovered her love for Mohiniyattam, she studied the dance form for seven successive years in Kerala. Since then, she has been dividing her time between India and France. But she doesn’t wish to spread her wings into too many different things. “I’d like to concentrate on only one subject at a time, otherwise the focus tends to go haywire and gets dispersed,” she reasons.
While it’s natural in her case to make elements of Mohiniyattam seamlessly seep into her contemporary choreography, but Brigitte remains adequately alert while treading line of fusion cautiously, lest it tampers with the true syntax and format of the classical dance style.
Her current tour of India sees her trailing from Kolkata to Delhi and from the capital to Bhopal and Jaipur as the last stop. In 2013, Brigitte will be rendering her kitty of choreographic portraits on the occasion of the Indo-French cultural sojourn — Bojour India in Kolkata and elsewhere. Apart from this, she’ll be collaborating with the prestigious precinct of the Sangeet Natak Akademi in Kerala this November, and come September in France, she would perform a jugalbandi with her revered guru in Mohiniyattam — Padmashree Ksheimavathi.
Brigitte spearheads her company — Compagnie Prana — which she founded in 1995 and floated in the city of Rennes (Britanny, France). Echoing her philosophy in dance, her approach carefully combines tradition with modernity and includes research on the conservation of a cultural heritage. To the uninitiated, this extremely talented and multi-faceted dancer is also deeply involved in her own contemporary dance productions, which include several collaborations with the renowned French poet Zano Bianu, who wrote the text of Ganga.
But what is the project of Ganga all about? “Well, it’s a contemporary work, involving different artistes from across the planet,” she sums up in a nutshell. She has witnessed Ganga in her different moods, noticing the changes her colour, texture, which becomes silky-satin and sometimes rough, at times rippling away like a prancing little girl or gurgling like an angry deluge in some other phase.
Through gesture, voice and breath, Ganga explores the intense femininity of the river in its ever-changing aspects of joy, sensitivity, meditation, mourning and melancholy, thereby opening up and appealing to a desire for space. Where choreography, poetic composition and musical improvisation meet, Ganga, a nomadic, multi-dimensional production, seeks to create an atmosphere and share a ritualistic fervour. The pictorial piece primarily encapsulates a series of dances with a story-telling show, forming its main connecting tassel throughout.
While a chief protagonist will represent the Mother Ganges, the rest will appear as its symbolic emanations or ramifications.
Following an invitation to India by the Embassy of France in New Delhi, Ganga is thus gradually entering a new phase of its creation-process. The programme will be performed in several major Indian cities during the Bonjour India festival scheduled next year.