What visions have I seen!

Rasa Unmasked
Sutra Dance Theatre
KLPac Pentas 1
11 April 2009.

Dance works about the rasas have a tendency towards tedium because of their grocery list nature. You know you must witness at some point all nine dominant emotions and so you resign yourself to ticking them off one by one. Rasa Unmasked, Sutra Dance Theatre’s new take on the concept in collaboration with Sydney-based Lingalayam Dance Company and composer Alex Dea, largely avoided this predictability by employing structural diversity and sheer visual extravagance. The ensemble of four to six dancers dealt with compassion, laughter, fear and serenity. Disgust and valour were solos. Love, appropriately enough, was performed as a duet, as was wonder. The entire cast was engaged to portray anger in battle. All this against a background of rainbow lighting and an enormous aerial set piece (that looked to me like nothing so much as a leafy sea dragon) designed by Sivarajah Natarajan.

Rasa Unmasked rather reminded me of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Perhaps it was when Guna entered sporting a Puckish floral garland. Perhaps it was how the main characters of hero and heroine, played by Ramli Ibrahim and Australian collaborator Anandavalli Sivanathan, were escorted on and off by the ensemble as if they were in jewelled carriages pulled by fairy creatures. Or perhaps it was the flowing chitonesque tunics worn by the women, that evoked classical antiquity.

As with A Midsummer Night’s Dream – in which Titania and Oberon may be the fairy king and queen but Puck the attendant gets the best lines — in Rasa Unmasked some of the most memorable moments go to the ensemble. The scene in which the group discovers the elements of dance builds gradually but mathematically, in concert with its commanding TA-DEI vocal theme. In the love scene, the ensemble enters to create a multi-level group shape that politely but effectively euphemises the idea of sex (or, as the program notes put it, “the perfect but elusive union where the spirit and body are one”). Later, the three jesters portraying laughter wrap one of their number in the organic stage set and swing him, like a child in a bed-sheet, with audible and palpable glee. And in the penultimate scene, bathed in a gorgeous turquoise light, the ensemble form a kecak-like mandala shapes with arms entwined, leaning towards and stretching against each other, before separating to perform their own individual puja of yoga poses. The scene has a lovely atmosphere that conjures dim memories from the collective unconscious.

January Low, unsurprisingly, shines in this production, though she manages to do so in surprising ways. During the compassion scene, January and two other dancers appear with scarves over their heads. They repeatedly expose their faces, then retreat behind their veils, in attitudes of supplication and defeat. Later, Anandavalli enters to scatter largess to the lepers, but it is January’s graceful arms of entreaty and the exact angle at which her proud head droops that convince us of the  tone of the scene. And the first dancer to receive alms from Anandavalli’s hand (I had lost track of who it was under those scarves) executed such a perfectly servile hopping scuttle of gratitude on her way offstage, that I was absolutely delighted.

If Rasa Unmasked set out to evoke the nine different emotions in the hearts of its audience, then I think only the compassion scene hit close to the mark. Not only does it show us the heroine feeling compassion, but it also shows us the object of her emotion, the pitiful shrouded lepers who provoke her reaction, and who in turn provoke compassion in the audience. Otherwise, while Rasa Unmasked is occasionallyaesthetically pleasing, and there are indeed moments of wonder, we feel that we are witnessing the enactment of certain emotions, like watching characters in a dream, rather than feeling those emotions ourselves. Or, as Puck would say, “you have but slumbered here, while these visions did appear.”