Usha RK Interviewed by Pujita Krishna
The world over, patrons have always played a very important role in the preservation and the promotion of performing arts. Dance, particularly, being an exorbitant enterprise, since time immemorial, has relied upon the good graces of a benevolent patron.
There are many dancers and practitioners of dance today in the country but benefactors of dance there are few. Usha Radhakrishnan, or popularly known in the dance circles as Usha RK, has been one such benefactor over the last two decades or so. She has over the years organised and hosted several of the country’s best and finest dancers and musicians including heavy weights like MS Subbalakshmi, Hari Prasad Chaurasia, Zakir Hussain, Chitra Vishveshwaran, Kelucharan Mohapatra and others. As she talks about herself, it is clear as daylight that dance has always been the primary motif of her life’s tapestry.
Having trained in Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi during her early years in Mumbai, she etched out a path for herself that veered away from active performance yet remained rooted in the world of dance, encouraged as she was by her parents to research and write on the subject. Subsequently, upon moving to Bangalore in the late 70s, she set out to improve her understanding of dance by training and studying under gurus like Kitappa Pillai and Adyar Lakshman for brief periods of time.
‘How can one write intelligently about dance unless one knows about the different banis, the movements that are typical to that particular school etc?’ She asks rhetorically.
Over a course of time she fashioned a dual role for herself- that of a writer and organiser of classical dance. Her training in dance stood her in good stead when it came to organising performances, since she knew exactly what it was that a dancer would need, such as arranging for flowers for a pushpanjali, or to create the right kind of ambiance for stage. Meanwhile she also honed her skills as reviewer and writer of dance under the stern and exacting eye of S.N. Chandrasekhar, who was a highly respected and feared dance critic for Deccan Herald at the time.
‘I learned a number of things from him like never to compare two dancers and say one was better than the other; or that in a performance it is important to play the talam during a jati, so you know the dancer is on time.’
Around 1996, she moved back to Mumbai where she donned a new hat as that of a producer of shows and events for Zee Television. This new role gave her the opportunity to acquire a totally different set of skills like creating content for popular consumption, producing televised shows with artists like Sunidhi Chauhan, Shubha Mudgal, Shaan and so on. After a couple of years with Zee TV, she shifted gears and worked for Madison Media. In 2006, with this diverse experience in her kitty, she relocated to Bangalore and decided it was time to get back to the ethereal world of classical dance. Only this time, she wanted to do things differently from what she had done before.
‘I had already done festivals and shows before with big names. I wanted to do something different. I felt I needed to give a chance to the younger generation of dancers, give them the much needed platform.’
It was Usha’s idea that every batch of young dancers she had cherry picked to work with be given an artistic challenge each time they performed, where newer ideas and subjects are explored and the dancers themselves are made to work out these choreographies with occasional help, of course.
‘I only give them a framework to work with and rest is their effort- doing the research, sourcing the literature, getting the music composed and so on,’ she explains.
She is currently based out of Delhi. Her latest offering, Divya Treiyam, a conceptual production of six different pieces based on divya pushpam, divya vahana and divya astram danced by six different Bharatanatyam dancers, that was showcased at Ravindra Bharathi last Sunday, has already travelled to cities like Pune, Mumbai and Delhi, where it has received rave reviews. She feels youngsters of today are a hardworking lot and only need a little nudge in the right direction. She chooses her dancers carefully and decides to work with them only after she has seen them at least a couple of times on stage-not very different from casting for a film.
‘I never touch the format of the form itself. I am very unbending when it comes to classicism but the packaging and marketing of the product has to be in tune with the changing times,’ she concludes.
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Disclosure & Disclaimer:
Some excerpts were published in the The Hindu (Click) - April 20th, 2018. Here is the complete interview as forwarded by Usha RK. Interviewed by Pujita Krishna.
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