Dance teacher and student, Manasi Mishra, left, is taught steps from the classical Indian Odissi dance in her home by Aloka Kanungo, center, and Shreelina Ghosh, right. Kanungo and Ghosh will perform Saturday at Brody Hall.
Singing softly, three women moved gracefully across burnt red carpet. Their hands rolled across their bodies, moving to the next mudra, or hand position, and they twisted their torsos as they turned in a circle.
Shreelina Ghosh, Aloka Kanungo and Manasi Mishra each had a slight smile tugging at their lips as they practiced Saberc Pallavi, an Indian classical Odissi dance, in Mishra’s Okemos home Wednesday as a part of a learning workshop.
Ghosh, a rhetoric and writing graduate student, is teaching the workshop alongside Kanungo, her own guru, or teacher, from India. The two have worked with each other for almost 20 years.
It took Ghosh two years of physical training, beginning when she was 4 years old, before she learned the dance.
However, students of varying knowledge and skill are getting a crash-course in Odissi during the week-long workshop. The workshop began Monday, and the handful of participants will be performing at 7:30 p.m. Saturday in the Brody Hall.
“It’s about making people aware of our tradition,” Ghosh said.
In bigger cities with larger Indian populations, such as New York or Chicago, Odissi is more well known, she said.
“Very few people know about it here,” she said.
Odissi is a traditional Indian dance, dating back about 2,000 years when it was derived from the inscriptions on the walls of a temple in Orissa, India, Kanungo said.
During the 17th century, Odissi faded from prominence when political unrest limited the amount women and citizens could dance. The dance, which is one of several classical Indian dances, was reconstructed in the late 1950s, after India gained independence from British rule, Kanungo said.
Traveling worldwide teaching her craft, Kanungo is a leading Odissi dancer, scholar, teacher and choreographer from Calcutta. She began teaching a few students in 1987, and now focuses on a group of about 60 talented and dedicated students, most of whom reside in India, she said.
After running through the Nirtta, a rhythmic and ornamental-based dance during the Wednesday session, Kanungo rested on the couch while instructing her students. Counting to four, Kanungo began to clap her hands and resumed singing while the two women went through parts of the dance again.
“One-two, one-two-three,” Ghosh counted for herself and Mishra.
The women practiced a step pattern, their bare feet making a soft stomping sound on the carpet.
“Very good,” Kanungo said.
Mishra is an Indian dance teacher herself, with about five students in the Lansing and Detroit areas.
A native of Orissa, she has been dancing for 25 years, nine of which have been in the United States. Last week, Mishra said she performed at the Union during the welcome reception for Indian Students and Scholars.
She signed up for the workshop so she could learn more of the graceful postures and poses typical of Odissi, she said.
The music the women will dance to during Saturday’s finale is Odissi music — made up of the drum-like instrument pakhawaj, flutes, cymbals and sitars, Kanungo said.
During the performance, dancers wear silver jewelry and specific kinds of aharya, or adornments, she said.
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Their expressions, limbs and makeup all contribute to the dance’s feeling.
The women wear silk saris, belts and a round headpiece, which holds a flower, Kanungo said.
Streaks of the makeup around the women’s bindi symbolize the rays of the sun, she said.
Another form of Odissi, Nirtya, is a kind of miming or storytelling. Dancers use their eyes, hands and face to interpret the Hindu texts printed on temple walls, Kanungo said.
The postures the dancers are replicating are seen as those of Lord Jagannath, known in the region as lord of the universe, she said.
“He is the one we are thinking of while we are dancing,” Kanungo said.
Even involuntary actions — including color changes in the face and sweating — contribute to the story, she said.
“You get into feeling (the dance) so much you really feel it,” she said.
