KRITHIKA RAJAGOPALAN
Krithika Rajagopalan’s art, on exhibit one evening only during the “Nights of the Blue Rider” festival, is unlikely to resemble anything you’ve seen before. It combines music, poetic texts, dramatic story telling, and dance as no single Western form does. Not only that, but the truncated and fractured traditions of mainstream U.S. culture mean that we don’t have a prayer of producing religious art.
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Krithika Rajagopalan (who is the daughter of Hema Rajagopalan, a renowned Chicago-area performer and teacher of Indian dance) is not quite 18. She’s had an American upbringing, and when she talks, she’s an American teenager. But onstage, dancing, she’s the incarnation of a water nymph, an elephant, a Hindu god as a small mischievous boy. This young girl is remarkably beautiful, womanly, and assured, focusing and holding the audience’s attention as if it were natural for a 17-year-old to be stared at by a roomful of strangers.
The look of Indian dance is distinctive. The characteristic position of the body is a squat, legs turned out, back straight–remarkably like a ballet dancer’s plie. The vocabulary of gestures is rigidly defined, but they may be combined and performed in different ways, which is what gives a bharata natyam performance its subtlety and individuality–perhaps because it’s made up of discrete gestures, the dance has a carved, sculptural look. Rajagopalan often paused and held a pose, including a fixed facial expression, for long moments. Her chest rose and fell, her face retained its life despite being so still, and the effect was astounding: she seemed both human and inhuman, a statue come to life, a living god.
