Mithyā and Myth-Making Through Classical Dance

Abhinaya’s Indian Core took the stage on the Thursday night of 26 March. Presenting Mithyā, their Spring ’26 production, they promised an evening of illusions. The team was prepared: during the wait in the queue, the audience were handed papers containing links to the Amar Chitra Katha stories to be performed for the evening. They promised a ‘layered experience’, and a layered experience it was. 

Starting the show with a piece called Dyutha Māyā, Mithyā transported its audiences to Hastinapur’s courts. They depicted the narrative of Cheer Haran – an episode in the epic of Mahabharata, where the Pandavas bet and lost Draupadi in a rigged game of dice and Dushasana publicly tried to disrobe her. The piece was a compelling combination of dance and precise enactment, where every throw of the imaginary dice was an instrument of palpable greed and desire. Draupadi, played by Nikita Kurumella (UG ’29), was dressed completely in white. As she twirled, frantic and helpless under Duryodhana's (Sarayu Vishwanathan (UG ’29)) cruelty, the long stream of white cloth kept unraveling on stage, a testament to her devotion to Lord Krishna. Devasheesh Saxena (UG '28), playing Dushasana pulled and tugged incessantly, body moving to and fro with the rhythm, and he eventually collapsed on the floor. The dancers’ expressions unmasked characters from thousands of years ago, building an atmosphere of malice, humiliation and subjugation with contorted eyebrows and victorious smirks. Mithyā opened the evening with striking force.

Between each act, comic strips with the next story to be depicted were narrated and projected on a white curtain. This evoked an old-school charm of mythology comics and movies of a bygone era. However, these narrations were sometimes long and so detailed that they risked telling rather than showing. Audience attention started to waver during the narrations – I often saw people checking their phones during these.

Despite the many interludes of structured narration, Mithyā was also a night of breaking form – there was an effort to interpret mythology and perform it in newer ways. Kacha (Lakshman Vinayak (UG ’28)), son of a deva guru who learns the secrets of resurrections from the asura guru Shukracharya, and Devayani (Gauri Unnikrishnan (UG ’28)), Shukracharya’s daughter, took their tragic love story to the stage for the second piece. However, the audience was not required to take the story with solemnity – the creators acknowledged the seeming frivolity of this particular story which had bursting stomachs, a teetering, jesty romance and characters being revived multiple times. To the contrary, the music expressed the absurdity of the narrative and the dance was bold in bringing out the comic nature of the story, especially with the asuras clad in all black who jumped about on stage, almost playful.

There was a recurring engagement with gender fluidity as a concept in two of the performance’s pieces. In the narrative of the Ardhanarishwara, Shiva and Parvati’s bodies merged into Ardhanarishwara, a unity of masculine and feminine energies. The choreography for a piece depicting this was a contrast between the soft, graceful pallavi of Parvati performed by Tanush Bhatnagar (UG ’29) and the rage and wrath of the shiva tandava by Anusmita Chauduri (UG ’ 28), culminating in the last moment of an entangled union of the two forms. In Beyond Forms, King Syudumna is cursed to alternate forms as a man and a woman. On Pandit Birju Maharaj’s kathak composition Thunga Thunga, Manasi Mehta (UG ’29) and Bidisha Maharjan (UG ’29) the dancers for Syudumna and Ila (the female he transitions into) switched forms, taking turns dancing with their lover Buddh, as one. They carried this out like clockwork, with smooth transitions, highlighting fluidity and continuity.

Halfway through these acts, however, one could notice the audience thinning. While Mithyā was an intimate experience without a very large crowd to begin with, the sparse numbers and midway departures felt more than just a Thursday night phenomenon.  Despite this, Mithyā continued towards the conclusion unperturbed. 

The closing one-woman act, Ulūpī, opened with a stunning image: the dancer, Ananya Venkataraman (UG '28), on her knees, bent over backwards as a serpentine princess, drawing audible gasps from the audience. Arjuna, the male protagonist of the story, was symbolised only as a blue light, showcasing the Nāga princess as dominating the narrative. Through sharp and controlled movements, Ulūpī expressed love, tension, desire and ultimately freedom, owning the stage with authority.

The lighting and spotlights worked especially well in Beyond Forms and Ulūpī, effectively highlighting transitioning characters, creating a focused, siloed effect. But a lot of the time, the lighting focused too narrowly, leaving the dancers in shadows. In such expressive storytelling, this prevented the audience from registering all minute expressions that were central in creating the mythological mood of the show. There were some patchy transitions in music in between the acts, which did not hinder the experience of the show, but broke the immersive impact that the team had created. 

“A show like this deserves a larger crowd!” is the last thing I hear from someone behind me as I leave the whitebox, and I daresay I agree. As I saw the crowd thinning, the moment felt uncomfortably close to a recent claim – that no one cares about forms like opera and ballet anymore. Since the shortcomings of the night’s show were sparse and mostly logistical and technical, the dwindling turnout at Mithyā can be read like this; as a distance and indifference to classical dance, but one look at the stage and it was clear that Mithyā was more than cared for. Elaborately crafted choreographies, carefully measured movements and expressions and the rapt attention of those who stayed; there was dedication and finesse in creating and experiencing Mithyā. (Edited by Teista Dwivedi.)