inDANCE – Dancing Outside the BOX

Reviewed by Paula Citron

To celebrate his company’s 10th anniversary, dancer/choreographer Hari Krishnan presented Dancing Outside the BOX, a retrospective of his works that included two Toronto premieres. The show featured an outstanding multi-ethnic ensemble of 21 dancers and musicians.

Krishnan trained in South Asian bharatanatyam. As a scholar, he is an acknowledged expert in the devadasi tradition – the once highly regarded temple dancers who fell into disrepute as courtesans. Krishnan is also known for abstracting bharatanatyam dance forms into a new contemporary hybrid. All of these styles appeared on his very eclectic but highly enjoyable program.

At one end of the spectrum, there was Krishnan’s own solo The Frog Princess in pure bharatanatyam style. At the other was his abstract quartet inverse for non-Indian dancers. In between we had the hybrid BOX, mea culpa, Bollywood Hopscotch and the multimedia Purnima/Full Moon.

A very special treat was Uma, from the stri-vesham or female impersonator tradition, performed with great tongue-in-cheek by England’s Kali Chandrasegram.

I’m Paula Citron, arts reviewer for THE NEW CLASSICAL 96.3 FM.

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Dancing Outside the BOX
inDANCE
Choreographed by Hari Krishnan
Performed by a 21-member ensemble of dancers and musicians
Fleck Dance Theatre, Mar. 18 to 20, 2010
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