31
ART CHRONICLE:
The Dramas of Uday Shan-Kar
THERE
is a qualitative gap betwecn the dancing of Shan-Kar and
contemporary exponents of occidental ballet-forms that cannot be
limited solely to what the Hindu is able to project as one of the great
aristocratic personalities of our time. There are elements in the nature of
India and its art that, after 2000 years, permit him to produce a com-
pletely grounded unity in an age commonly characterized by misfits and
expressionistic jumblcs.
Every Hindu art-form has reIterated a delight in bodily exuberance;
the Greek is cold and introverted by comparison. Buddhism tried to
restore quiet, and for a moment the cathedral-caverns of Ellora and
Ajanta loomed with an almost Egyptian austerity, but it was not long
before the rocks wcre noisy again with voluptuous human shapes that
spilled out of portals, walls, and capitals. A thousand years later the
Moguls fixed the subjugated Hindu spirit into a stiff Persian arabesque,
but even their fierce severity could not hold it permanently still.
A first glimpse of India suggests confusion; a closer association dis-
closesan order and discipline not at first apparent; there is a blocking-out
of big masses, and lines that coordinate into a rhythmic unity. This is
the aesthetic foundation that the Hindus spread wherever they con-
quered, into Burma, the Indies, even the far-off kingdom of the Khmers.
And it relives today in those co~ntries that had been taught so well,
through the dance-forms of Java and Cambodia, and its most expressive
heritage, the wonderful music-dramas of Bali.
Shan-Kar, aside from his prowess as a dancer, has brought to his
art a completely sophisticated intelligence (he started his career as a
student of painting in Paris) and an inexhaustible zeal for research and
analysis. He retires from the stage this year and will found a school for
the study of Hit:ldu culture at Benares. His vast ~tore of knowledge-
the long history of Indian art-crops out through his dances and he
presents the whole history of his nation's culture. There is the savage
jungle folk-art (Bhill Dance), varying forms of the Buddhist and Hindu
as they developed through the centuries, and last, in the cruel Sword-
dance, the very gesture, pose, and spacing of the Mogul miniatures. The
mere turn of a finger, the bending of a wrist, will lead the line back
from infinity to the center of the radiating masses. The conscious
harmonizing of every anatomical segment right out to the tips of the
fingers, the facial expression, the glances, the weird neck motion that
apes the striking cobra, combine with a controlled coordination that is
tellingly abstract. And finally, in the Shiva-Parvati Nrittya Dwandva,
we are confronted through rhythmic suggestion with the awful illusion
of six-armed Siva dancing.
