BY RAJ S. RANGARAJAN *
L to R) Regina Ress, Diane Wolkstein, Tamara (from PS 242), and Raouf Mama at CelebrateStory 2007.
Photo courtesy of & ©2007 Philip David Morgan / Cloudstone Productions.
Summer and stories always go together. Whether it is Canada, U.S.A., India or Australia, there is something special about summer. Imaginations run wild and children tend to become creative and sometimes get into raptures in the heat. Adults spin yarns and create magic for the young listeners.
India and Indians in Canada have had a long storytelling tradition with the generic grandma constantly regaling young minds with humour, exaggeration, suspense and adventure, incredibly-talented fairies, winged animals and huge aircraft – all for passing time on a lazy evening.
For more than 50 years – on Saturdays – during the summer, New York City’s children and adults have assembled around Hans Christian Andersen’s statue in Central Park to hear tales told by well-known storytellers and performers such as Victor Borge, Eva LaGallienne and Diane Wolkstein. Hans Christian Andersen was known for his fairy tales and his statue is a well-known Central Park landmark.
This year – the 51st anniversary – it was the turn of Indian performer, Anita Ratnam.
Anita narrated her Dance Katha, Tales from India as part of the celebrations to honour a veteran storyteller of 40 years, Diane Wolkstein who created CelebrateStory: storytelling as entertainment. Anita enacted scenes from the epic Ramayana that were based on “Neo Bharatam” that she created ten years ago as an artistic archetype.
Anita says, she was inspired to create Neo Bharatam after seeing the 1999 science fiction (sci-fi) movie Matrix where Thomas Anderson, played by Keanu Reeves, has the alias ‘Neo.’ In Anita’s case, the search was “to find an original way to protect my work, interpret new nuances, rhythms and moves that defined my style and creativity.”
CelebrateStory is actually a special “thank you” to the City of New York and to the caretakers of Central Park for nourishing not only Diane's Wolkstein’s career but also that of so many other storytellers from New York and elsewhere. Many of the festival tellers – Laura Simms, Regina Ress, Ron Sopyla, Therese Folkes-Plair, Gioia Timpanelli, and Bill Gordh are in fact long-time residents of the New York metropolitan area. This year, special guests included Raouf Mama (from Benin in West Africa), Michael Parent (of Portland, Maine), Dovie Thomason, a Native Indian (of Lakota and Plains Apache heritage) and India’s Anita Ratnam.
Known for her versatile prowess in Bharata Natyam and other dance forms, Anita translated her love of mythology into a new genre of “dancing stories” for an urban audience and “conveyed the stories of her soil in English.”
On her 40th anniversary of performing at Central Park Diane Wolkstein, also was in action. She inaugurated the day with a small sampler of the stories told through her career, including Andersen’s comic tale of “Hans Clodhopper,” followed by “The Glass Mountain” (her retelling of the Brothers Grimm's “Old Rinkrank”), and others.
Diane’s webmaster in New York, Philip David Morgan says, “Diane’s kind of storytelling involves the audience directly, whether by asking listeners what they think might happen next (and why), by inviting them to join in the refrain of a song that may be part of the story, or by making the audience part of the story.
Anita opened with “an invocation of Ganesha, the god of all beginnings, how Ganesha got his head (demonstrated with a cut-out of an elephant’s head) and then I moved on to the Rama story; starting with Vishwamitra, the wise priest counseling his wards Rama and Lakshmana, how the prince was banished to the forest and how his adversary Ravana cut off his sister Soorpanakha’s nose (tall Amazonian-looking woman), of Lakshman-rekha and Hanuman, the monkey god who enlisted help from his friends to locate Sita.”
Anita interspersed the English narration with slokas in Sanskrit and Tamil and with “dance movements and expressive articulation, I could capture the essence of the 40-minute presentation. I tried to make the overall effect prismatic and multicultural, being New York.” In a final act of audience participation, Anita handed over “jalra” sets (two-finger cymbals used for rhythmic accompaniment) to the kids urging them to join in a procession towards the lake.
On a salubrious Sunday afternoon in Central Park with distractions such as cyclists, boat enthusiasts and picnickers vying for attention, the writer inquired, “how did you manage to get the attention of the audience?”
Anita’s response: “It was a wonderful feeling narrating the story with adults and children listening intently; there was a certain silent ambience. Since I had thought out the dress and accompaniments earlier, had rehearsed and practiced voice modulation for the open air event distractions didn’t bother me.”
For a predominantly New York audience not familiar with the epic, to a question, “what kind of allegoric metaphor did you create?” Anita said, “the Neo Bharatam-based moves in a free-flowing style blended with sound, dance and pithy explanations helped me communicate. I now have the space and luxury of innovating as a kind of optic idiom.” Through choreographic motifs of her Neo Bharatam, Anita is known to raise the bar, so to speak, with a dance repertoire that crosses national boundaries.
Complimenting both the beautiful weather and a great turnout, Morgan said of the evening: “...it was simply a large, lavish banquet of story that no one could take in all at once. The most you could do was hear and see all you could, and go home grateful for that.” On Anita’s performance, the webmaster added, despite having to dance on concrete and marble in the New York summertime heat, she held the audience rapt throughout.”
____________
[Raj S. Rangarajan is a New York based freelance writer. He covers trend stories on art, travel, lifestyles, Indian cinema and reviews books, films and plays for media based in New York, California, Toronto and India. He can be reached at raj.rangarajan@gmail.com]
