Dancer who’s keeping step with gender roles

It isn’t easy to figure out whether Prabal Gupta is actually a man or a woman when he portrays female characters on stage.

There are some artists who mesmerise on stage through their performances, and then there are some who play the role of the opposite sex with such ease that it leaves the audience speechless. I am talking about one such superbly talented artist, who portrays both Purusha Vesham (male form) and Stree Vesham (female form) with such effortlessness that, as an audience member, one would wonder whether the real artist is actually male or female.

I am saying this because this is exactly what happened to me recently when I saw Prabal Gupta perform at NCPA in Mumbai. Gupta is a highly sought-after performer, choreographer and research scholar, and is a prominent name in the world of Kathakali. He is a disciple of Guru Sri Sadanam Balakrishnan, who is a Central Sangeet Natak Academy awardee and legendary Kathakali exponent and research Scholar. Prabal is so mesmerizing and such a versatile Kathakali Dancer that he can portray both Purusha and Stree Vesham with simplicity and when he takes on the female form, you will never get to know as a viewer that the real performer is a male artist — that is how close to perfection Gupta gets.

Initially, Gupta was trained under Kalamandalam Govindan Kutty and later under Guru Sri Padmanabhan, but he is someone who believes that dance is a lifelong learning process. You can see this belief play out in his real life, too, since in spite of being a world-renowned dancer, he continues to learn under the legendary Guru Natyacharya Sri Sadanam Balakrishnanji.

At NCPA, Gupta presented a very interesting and unique show, ‘Manasa Chitram’. This was an exceptional presentation of a Bengali folk tale on the tribal goddess Manasa in Kathakali and art inspired from the traditional Patachitra paintings of Bengal. Here, Gupta portrayed the folktale as told in the oral traditions of medieval Bengal that involve reciting Pata songs. The story described the conflict between a Shiva devotee, Chand Sadagar, and the goddess Manasa and her struggle to attain the status of divinity. Manasa, the goddess of snakes, is worshipped across religions in Bengal, mainly for the prevention and cure of snakebites.

It was refreshing to see rare and lesser-known stories — such as of the goddess Manasa — coming alive on stage not just through dance, but even through songs and painting. I must admit that art in its holistic way was on display at NCPA, and we all need to say a big thank you to Swapnakolpa Dasgupta, an accomplished Odissi dancer herself and the head of dance programming at NCPA, Mumbai for organising this.

After the fascinating show, I got talking to Gupta and asked him about why he chose an unusual and uncommon subject like snakes and did not pick easy topics like Krishna-Radha, Ram-Sita, etc. To this, the dynamic dancer replied, “I was given the theme of animals by NCPA, and I chose snakes because it is not easy at all to pivot a production on the said animal as it is rarely attempted in dance, and there lay the challenge for me as a dancer. I always like to do something matchless and I do not cherish my own work unless it is tough and challenging, and thus began my tryst with snakes and Manasa Mangal — a folklore from Bengal and Assam — came about.”

For any artist, their upbringing and days of learning do affect their creative thought process and for Gupta, who was born and brought up in Bengal, choosing a Bengali tale was only natural. But what was more exceptional is that he chose to use this extraordinary tale. To make his performance more interesting, he had English subtitles with Sanskrit lyrics, which made people decipher the complex Kathakali mudras and the concomitant Kalasams (the pure nritta passages) that he used in the choreography.

As per the folk tale, Devi Manasa is the snake goddess and, thus, to start the katha, Gupta performed a stuti propitiating the snake goddess as a prelude to ‘Manasa Mangal’. He translated the entire Kavya written in Bengali to English and then got the same translated into Sanskrit by Dr Arudhabharati Swamyji and, to make the dance drama more effective, his teacher and mentor Guru Sri Sadanam Balakrishnanji added the essence of his style to the choreography.

To add a further twist to the production and to enhance its uniqueness, Gupta did a jugalbandi with Patachitra-inspired painting on a canvas by Sri Manjunath Wali. Why this blend of painting and dance, I asked, to which Gupta told me, “Goddess Manasa Mangal is still alive in Bengal through Patachitra, i.e paintings of Devi Manasa on earthen pots. So, to keep it the way the goddess is portrayed even today, having the paintings on stage was a very important part of the performance.”

It is not just this dance drama by Gupta that people have applauded, but, before this, he has performed three other productions the world over, which have gained him great acclaim. These are William Shakespeare’s ‘Lady Macbeth’ presented in New York, ‘Cleopatra’ - an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s ‘Anthony and Cleopatra’ in Kathakali - which premiered during the celebrations for the 25th year of his dancing career, and ‘When Parallels Meet’, a confluence of Odissi and Kathakali with a theme taken from the Mahabharata.

His most sought after research article, “The Art of Kathakali: Then and Now — A Comparative Analogy”, which speaks about soloism in Kathakali, and also “The biological nomenclatures of stree vesham and its aesthetic transformation while performing Kathakali stree vesham by a male” — carried out under eminent research scholar Padmashree Sunil Kothari — are published in various research journals.

All that remains to be said about this artist is that the next time he is in your city or even in your neighboring city, don’t miss his performance for anything in the world, because he is one artist who will truly take your breath away with his extraordinary talent and knowledge in the field of Kathakali.

Sandip Soparrkar is a choreographer