Sacred Love, Profane Love is a project about the Gypsy legend presented in Rovereto by the Teatro Tascabile di Bergamo, a structure that for over twenty years has been actively engaged in oriental theater and dance, exploring possible contaminations with scenic forms belonging to other cultures. The idea underlying the triptych of performances of Sacred Love, Profane Love is to hypothesize a spectacular journey based on the traces of a cultural nomadism that links the tradition of Indian Kathak to Andalusian flamenco. The journey thus starts from the Rajasthan desert and its court dances and ends in the gypsy neighborhoods of southern Andalusia. The connection between Kathak and flamenco is discovered not only by retrieving the accredited thesis that the gypsies emigrated from India to Europe at the time of the Muslim invasion but by attempting an experiment that, by juxtaposing the two live performances, highlights their stylistic resonances and anthropological connections.
The triptych opens with Katha Vachak (The Dance of the Storytellers). The performance is presented by the Kadamb - Centre for Dance & Music of Kumudini Lakhia. Kumudini Lakhia is an elderly lady who today represents an institution in the development of Kathak. A former dancer, she stopped performing when she decided to found the Kadamb Centre in Ahmedabad to train Kathak dancers. With the Kadamb company, she has produced more than 50 shows, presented in India and various parts of the world, personally obtaining important awards, including the Prize awarded by the city of Ahmedabad in '97, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Indian Independence.
Kathak is one of the seven main forms of Indian dance. It is performed to Hindustani music from northern India and is the only dance in the country associated with Muslim culture. The root of the word “kathak,” “katha,” means story, a term that gives the original kathak performers the role of storytellers. Teatro Tascabile notes that Kathak also has a relationship with Ras Lila, a form of popular theater that dealt with the divine love between Krishna and Radha. The danced parts of Ras Lila are a kind of expansion of the mimed gestures of the kathak storytellers. The dancers' performances are accompanied by two types of instruments: the sarangi, a bowed instrument, and the small tabla drums. The sound is also fundamentally derived from the approximately two hundred ghunghru, the bells worn by the dancers around their ankles. Tight dialogues are created between the dancers and the tabla players, articulated on the rhythmic contrast between instruments, singing, and the famous foot variations. These dialogues fall under nritta, pure dance, while the pantomime parts belong to abhinaya, where the dancer focuses no longer on foot movements but on the upper body, particularly the face and eyes.
Renzo Vescovi, director of the Teatro Tascabile di Bergamo, chose Kumudini Lakhia's Kathak after meeting the artist at a demonstrative conference on Kathak held in Madras. Fascinated by this lady of the Indian scene, he followed her to her center in Ahmedabad, where Kathak is taught in its various levels and developments to many students.
Antonio El Pipa, a flamenco dancer bringing the show Duende to Rovereto, comes from Jerez, Spain. Vescovi explains: "Flamenco dancers are distinguished between 'academic' ones whose style is also based on the technique of classical Spanish ballet and bailaores whose way of dancing is closely linked to the gypsy and gypsy legend of flamenco. El Pipa is a pure bailaor, he learned to dance from his grandmother Tia Juana, a legend in Jerez. Duende is derived from a work titled Generaciones, where flamenco embodies the face and style of three generations: that of Tia Juana, Antonio's, and that of a little girl. With El Pipa, flamenco still has the timbre of a dance that seals triumph against adversity, the fight against anti-gypsy culture.”
The third performance of the Sacred Love, Profane Love project is titled Le Orme: it involves the company of Kumudini Lakhia, that of El Pipa, and the Teatro Tascabile di Bergamo - Academy of Scenic Forms. Again Vescovi: "It is a sort of phantom show, designed to make the public discover the affinities between Kathak and flamenco. I would like the spectators to experience a journey of 'recognition', discovering the similarities beyond the costumes, hand movements, ankles, feet."
The show begins with an introduction by Teatro Tascabile on mythical India, a sort of journey through time to recover those true and false archetypes that belong to the collective imagination. Then it attempts a real experience of contamination between flamenco and Kathak, both through musical elaborations between the two cultures and with moments of stylistic crossbreeding, where, for example, Kathak is danced with flamenco boots, while the gypsy dance is performed barefoot. About thirty artists are involved in a non-random "rhythmic raid", deriving from research on the nomadic civilization that certainly deserves to be explored.
