Chandigarh, March 11:- STEPS, under the aegis of Department of Tourism today organized a Dance Theatre piece- “Fana’a Ranjha Revisited”, performed by renowned dancer Navtej Johar at St. Stephens School Auditorium, Sector 45 .
Bharatanatyam based “Fana’a: Ranjha Revisited” performance by Navtej Johar,Anil Panchal, the accompanying Sufi music by Madan Gopal Singh and Carnatic composition by Govindrajan Elangoyan –was marvelous. People of different age group had thronged all the way to watch the splendid performance of Navtej Johar who is a Bharatnatayam dancer cum choreographer cum yoga exponent.
The performance went on very well. Among the audience, most were the ones who were inclined to dance,music and theatre.Fana’a: Ranjha Revisited is collaboration between Navtej Singh Johar and Sufi singer and composer Madan Gopal Singh. The dance-theater piece seamlessly fused two archetypical narratives from North and South India: the predominant Sufi love legend from the Punjab, Heer Ranjha interspersed with Kutrala Kuravanji, a genre of dance-drama from Tamil Nadu in which a gypsy foretells the heroine, Vasantvalli, of her destined
union with lord Siva. Operatic in nature, Fana’a freely intermixes and juxtaposes the two texts without a fixed flow of narrative, fixed characters or characterizations. Hence, Ranjha becomes Siva, becomes Vasantvalli, becomes Heer, becomes the gypsy, the sakhi, the mendicant, and so on; each identity willingly immersing itself in the other, surrendering its skin to discover another. Drawing on plural dance vocabularies -Bharatanatyam, Chhau, yoga, modern dance and physical theater, the choreographic treatment remains very contemporary.
The work – physical, sensual, spiritual – centers on Ranjha: a harbinger of continuity, who is continuously changing through his response to the land, the sound and the sensuous core of life. Fascinated by his own impermanence, Ranjha thus becomes the bard of a million masquerades, crossing cultural,spiritual, and existential spaces with ease, acquiring both impermanence and omnipresence.
Fana’a: Ranjha Revisited has also been performed at The World Performing Arts Festival, Lahore, the Bozar India
Festival at Brussels, Belgium, Inaugural of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Frankfurt, Germany.