Today's class killed me to say the least, having had to walk the 1 hour 15 minutes to get there, an hour and a half of hard work was just a tad exhausting! As per usual the room was filled with "eik, do, teen, char, panch, che, saath, aath" for about half an hour. Our Guru told us today that we should be able to do 16 avartan of the fastest speed of tatkaar. Clearly I have some work to do...
We then continued to do a thaat, which I am convinced is going to take me another 10 years minimum to master! There's this really complicated (well complicated to me anyhow) hand movement, which when done by my Guru looks beautiful and effortless, done by me however I think it's probably closer to the cliché screw-in-the-light-bulb move. Thaat is not one of my favourite pieces in Kathak, mainly because I just can't master it, today's session had my Guru screaming "SIDE ASA! TO THE SIDE" to which my mind was saying "umm wait, what's a side? D:" suffice to say Kathak involves a lot of mental concentration as well as physical. Next up was an amad, now I have to say I love this amad, perhaps partially because I can actually do it! I also quite like going through pieces I learnt a while ago over and over again because it's just the best way to perfect something that was mediocre before.
Natarwali ka tukra makes an appearance in class every few weeks or so, which is no bad thing considering it's so physically demanding! In our gharana (Lucknow) there is part of the third variation of the tukra that involves sitting on the floor and I'm rather impressed with myself that I managed to do the sitting part in two speeds today! Yay! Although I can't claim that I don't at this point still look like a jack-in-in-box, but I'm working on it! This was followed by laybandh... about 4 times. As much as laybandh has me looking longingly at my water bottle, I still get really annoyed with myself when I go wrong! I mean having performed it around three times now, you'd think it would come automatically, but no. I guess doing it 4 times was probably a good thing but shhhh I never said that. We may have done something after laybandh that I've forgotten ( it is an hour and a half class after all) but we eventually moved on to the dha-ge-dha-ge-dhin footwork, I have no idea if this exists in other gharanas. I really like the footwork, there's an almost therapeutic rhythm to it but it's so much harder to do it slowly than it is to do it fast!
As much as Kathak class always has me collapsing in a heap when I get home, there are always funny moments that make me laugh! Today had one of my fellow kathak prisoners dancing with the wall because she was being shown a section of the amad that involves moving backwards, which was then followed by a hilarious demonstration of what would have happened had she gone any further by another dancer, so it's all in good fun! The class always takes a lot out of us all, which I think in some ways is quite a funny unifying factor because we're all collapsing on the floor with water in one hand whilst the other hand unties ghungroo at the end of the class, today was clearly a hard class because my Guru tried to drink water from a bottle with its' lid still on, which for some reason I found hilarious.
I also had to get some new ghungroo tied because mine are falling apart, so I took them today along with my old ones which meant I had 480 bells in my bag on the walk there! My Guru has started them for me and I am now to do the rest, so I must be getting on with that soon! Perhaps I'll blog about it...
I shall leave you this evening with a famous quote from the famous Rumi...
“Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free.”
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