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Leaving Room

I had the chance to watch a very well-known Bharatnatyam dancer while on a work trip. It just so happened she was performing the night I was there and there was plenty of time to get to the theatre after work. This was the first time I had seen her perform but was familiar with her reputation. To say that she was dazzling is an understatement but what left me feel unsatisfied in the end was her choice to breathe new life into a very traditional art form. For someone whose first introduction to the dance came from watching friends perform at their Arangetrams, my expectations were quite different from the modern show that unfolded on stage. 

There were passages there were her brilliance shone and yet before you could fully immerse in it, she would have moved on to more modern interpretive moves that broke the spell. I understand that western audiences might prefer they way she choreographed the dance but folks like me missed out. On the way out of the auditorium a couple of young ladies (most likely university students) were chatting about how they had seen her perform back home and how different that experience had been. They had presumably come for an encore and were disappointed. For a few minutes, I bonded with them on this sentiment. We concluded that she had to do the "showy" stuff while abroad to be relevant to the folks who came to watch her. One of the two women was a dancer herself, a relative novice but far more educated on the subject than me. She had a much longer catalog of things that missed the mark.

On the way back home, I was thinking about this immensely talented dancer who had dedicated her whole life to the art. Even that was not enough to please everyone - and we are not talking about experts and connoisseurs - this is just regular folks with merely passing familiarity with her subject. It helped put in context the mountain of feedback I received on some work product recently. It was a bit overwhelming but it was easy enough to take action on most of it and I did. This woman is way too talented for that - she has a searingly clear vision about dance, she would not be here but for that. 

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